Tales from the Arabian Nights, Part 5: Egypt

I arrived at the Cairo airport at night. Crap! Cairo was just as freezing as Lebanon, at least at night. I had been hoping to be greeted by warm, beach-like weather that would magically evaporate my sickness away, but no such luck, even in a desert country! Staring out the cab window, I was shocked by the size and sprawl of the city. The highway we drove through was very wide, and we passed lots of tall buildings and huge billboards and huge everything else. For a moment, I felt like I was driving through Houston, Texas because everything was so huge and sprawled out, but then we passed by several huge glittery mosques and it brought me back to reality. This was Cairo, and it was huge! Or at least it seemed so as I sped through it in a cab from the airport to Hotel Havana. The taxi driver had come from the hotel to pick me up. He spoke fairly fluent English and had the radio tuned to a station playing American music- '80s classics to be more specific. Bon Jovi to be more specific. “I love Bon Jovi,” said Ahmed, the driver. “Me too!” I said. “It's my life,” he rejoindered. I nodded, smiling, thinking he meant something like Bon Jovi was the soundtrack to his life, the music that defined the prime of his life. A minute later, I got smart and realized he was talking about the song “It's My Life (it's now or never!)”.

Once at the hotel, I walked through the corridor along one of the upper floors, wondering what my travel companions would be like. I turned a corner and ran into two strangers- both with blond hair and glasses, a guy and a girl. Suddenly, I felt like Alice of Lewis Carroll's classic tale, after she ate the mushrooms. Had I grown, or had the halls and everything in it shrunk? It turns out, these short strangers were David's friends, two of the people I'd be traveling with for the next 8 days. Introductions were made, and then they showed me into our hotel room where I met David. I put down my suitcase at the foot of my bed and exclaimed over the comparative luxury of this hotel room. I threw myself on the bed and lay with my arms behind my head, and sighed with pleasure. It was nice to not be completely alone in such a big, foreign city like Cairo, and my travel companions seemed like a bunch of good-natured people. It was weird: as I lay there on the bed with my gaze toward the ceiling, I felt like Eric was sitting there on the bed next to mine. They were different, but shared just enough of the same traits to make it certain that they were brothers, especially in the way they spoke. What must it be like for people to meet me and Sarah separately? It must be mind-warping...Anyway, after sharing some stories, we hit the sack early because we wanted to start out super-early tomorrow, my first day in Cairo.

***The next day***

What can I say? I saw the Sphinx! I touched real Egyptian hieroglyphs! I climbed the Great Pyramid! And it was great! Actually, the climb up the inside of the pyramid was arduous, and I was hit with a wave of nausea at the top from dehydration. So at the moment, while we slowly made our way up the narrow, claustrophobia-inducing, railroad track-like path, hunching over for minutes at one point and sweating in the humid, stifling space, it didn't feel that great and I was wishing I was in far better shape. But, on the way back down, I was able to enjoy the iconic moment a lot more and when I got out into the light and the fresh, open air, I felt a rush from the climb, and all I could think was “Woah...I just climbed the Great Pyramid!” Finally, something to check off that damned List. 

"Get outta my ass!"

"Get outta my picture!"

David, one of my traveling buddies

It's the Borrowers!

These are not from a museum!

Two triangles

We had dinner that evening on an anchored restaurant-ship on the Nile. The view on the way down to the ship was pretty, the two lions sitting on their haunches at the end of the bridge, the subtle tones of the sunset, and the reflections on the slow-moving waters of the famed river. We crossed the walkway along the river and saw some strange sights that may go forever unexplained. To our left were dozens of park benches, and each one had a young couple perched on it and acting all couply- which in a Muslim nation like Egypt means nothing more than sitting close and holding hands. One couple though was stretching the boundaries and feeding each other potato chips. Only, when the guy held the chip up to the girl's lips, she completely ignored it and trained her huge mascara-lined eyes on the four of us instead, giving us the most seductive, cat-like look, her pointed eyebrows raised from under her headscarf as if to say “come hither”, her tongue sticking out ever so slightly and lolling about, anticipating the chip that dangled patiently between her boyfriend's/husband's fingers, but her cat eyes still glued seductively on us. 

WTF?

And then a few steps later, another girl in a long skirt and headscarf gave us the same seductive “come hither” stare- though her guy wasn't trying to feed her potato chips- and I did a double take because under the scarf her face, I swear, looked like the face of a man. Again, we'll never understand the real reasons for this flash mob-like charade, but there was something off about this entire walk to the restaurant-ship on the Nile. As I shared with the group later, during the dinner, I thought the entire scene with all the couples on the benches, the seducers, and the cross-dresser was a charade set up to freak out us foreigners, to inject a bit of surrealism into our tourism experience in Egypt. Just a theory! The dinner was amazing, especially the seasoned fried potatoes- the best I've ever had. And we got a basket of that Egyptian bread that looks like a giant version of those air bubbles you get sometimes on pizzas. It's like flatbread, but blown up like a balloon so that the inside is hollow. 

Tales from the Arabian Nights, Part 4: Saying Goodbyes

The day before I left Lebanon for Egypt, I went around the city revisiting people I'd met just days ago at random shops and restaurants. This could be a clever way of getting to know the city as well as the people who dwell in it, but really, I just wanted to thank them for their hospitality and kindness toward me, a complete stranger. I visited the crystal jewelry shop lady with voluminous wavy black hair, bedecked in gaudy jewelry and bold makeup. She showed me the reindeer she had made completely out of crystal gems strung cleverly together, I browsed through her little shop and bought a couple more things, and we chatted in French over extremely strong (must've been Turkish) coffee and Lebanese pastries. I lingered there a bit too long, said goodbye, and rushed out to catch a cab (not a moped this time) to Gemayzeh where I told the young owner of the Godfather restaurant all about my time in his country which he rarely got to enjoy himself, and promised him a souvenir from Egypt, or at least more stories. I stayed there overlong too, and by the time I said goodbye and rushed out, it was getting uncomfortably close to my departure time, and I wasn't sure if I had enough time to visit the wonderful couple who owned the artisan crafts shop along the Corniche. I hailed a cab and made my way down to the waterfront. Luckily, there wasn't much traffic along the road we were taking, so I got there in a few minutes (Beirut is such a tiny place I now realize). I wandered into their shop, the floor still scattered with real, crisp leaves, and they greeted me like an old friend. I told them all the things I'd seen in their country, about the water in the Jeita Grotto which was the color of that blue-greenish color in the painting that hung on that wall, but ever clearer, even more pure. 

The husband showed me a small teacup with only the dark, sludgy dregs of coffee left, the inner rim stained with a most interesting pattern. The cup had belonged to a customer, and the husband told me that the customer would receive news from Italy, pointing to a particular dark smudge that resembled a lady's high heel hanging off the inner rim's patterned chain. The “Italian shoe” he called it. It took me a minute to realize that he meant it resembled Italy, which looks like a shoe on the map. Cool! I thought. Another instance- like the rock sculptures in the Jeita Grotto- of forms in nature that accidentally resembled something man-made, though there had been no human conscience directing its formation. The wife started giving me a tour of their shop, and at the back of the shop, I gasped because a ginormous wave had just rushed up to the height of their store and seemed close enough to touch. She let me out the glass backdoor, and I stepped onto the platform and approached the ledge, awed by the enormity and ferociousness of the waves. What made the sea so angry? The tides rolled in like a stampede of white stallions and crashed thunderously against the boulders, white seafoam exploding spectacularly outward and upward, rising several feet high at times. My god, what a rush! The exploding waves blotted my camera with blizzard-like spots as I tried to capture them in action. I put down my camera and looked out to sea. Away from the shore, the waves appeared a lot calmer, an endless sheet of ice-blue. Gray sky stuffed with puffy white clouds like sheep in dire need of a good grooming matched the sullen, angry mood of the waves pounding at my feet. 

To me, a short-stay tourist from the West, who'd recently lived a few months in the Islamic country of Kurdistan, Lebanon was a phenomenon, a wonderful blend of the West and the Arab world, like the perfect blend of coffee and cream. What I loved most about Lebanon: one, they go all out for Christmas; two, the people are so open and friendly and welcoming and they (quite unlike Egyptians, as I discovered later) demand nothing in return for their kindness; three, they speak fluent English and/or French along with Arabic, and so the chance that I could communicate with a random person off the street was fairly great; and four, seize the day, seize the moment! This is the mindset of the Lebanese people. War? Bombs? No problem, we'll just rebuild everything the next day and party all night! Of course, with this great carpe diem attitude comes one of their greatest weaknesses- absolute materialism and superficiality. They love to party and look good while they party, and even when they are not partying they like to look good, and when they're completely past that partying age, they just like to look good. Period. Or as the Brits say: “Full stop.” 

Tales from the Arabian Nights, Part 3: The Pillsbury Doughboy Taxi Driver

The taxi drivers in Beirut are an interesting sector of Lebanese society. Most of the taxi drivers don't seem to speak much English or French, just Arabic. I had some great ones like Hazh who was like a grandfather to me. But I've also had some sleazy-ish ones who ask for friendship and then ask for an innocent coffee date, and I don't really want to guess what was on their mind when they asked for these things and then started driving into an area where people came to “make sex”. Lover's Point jutting out into the raging, deep space-like Mediterranean Sea. 

The worst one, though, was the one who tried to get me to hit his hand with a paddle. I refused of course, and was weirded out, sure, but I chose to stay in the cab and ignore his excessive honking and angry blabbering as well as his annoying habit of honking at all the pretty young girls as he drove by and ignoring the others who actually needed taxis. But after he drove around for nearly 40 minutes and dropped off everyone else until only I was left, I was getting seriously annoyed, especially when he asked me a second time to beat his pale, doughy hand with the damn paddle. I refused again and told him that that was enough ("halas" is such a useful phrase in the Mideast), so he put the paddle back into the side pocket of his door and continued to drive and shout and mutter and honk. My nerves were seriously exacerbated, but I figured I'd just bear it until we reached my desired destination- the ABC shopping mall that was supposed to be beautifully decorated for the holidays and crowded with shoppers.

It was when he pulled out the paddle for the 3rd time and asked me again to beat his hand with it, that I finally decided enough was enough, pushed the door open and jetted out into the night, slamming the door shut behind his fat, protesting head. Seething, I marched down the street past the gridlock traffic, having no idea if I was even going in the right direction; I just wanted to get the fuck away from this mad paddle-wielding doughboy. I stopped to ask two trustworthy-looking girls for directions, but then suddenly I heard him coming up behind me demanding his money. The nerve! The doughboy had left his taxi in the middle of traffic to chase after me and demand money for driving me around in his cab for nearly an hour and pleading for pleasure beatings? The nerve, the nerve! I turned around to face him and cursed at him very loudly. After cursing him out, I marched away down the street until I saw a cab with a decent-looking driver and a young clean-cut looking male passenger inside it in shotgun. “ABC Ashrafiyeh?” I asked, giving him my destination. To my great relief, he nodded and so I jumped into the back seat, shut the door, and turned back to see if the doughboy was still following me. Nope, no such luck. I wished he had been because then I would have taken that paddle and beat him over the head with it. I turned back to face the front and realized that the two guys in front were staring at me like “what's your story lady?” So I told them the entire ordeal, and they shook their heads in disbelief.

Names and backgrounds were exchanged, and I suddenly felt very grateful for their company and wished I could stay with them in the cab for the rest of the night where it was warm and safe and the people were kind and decent and not crazy. The passenger was a 29-year-old native who had lived in Kuwait for several years, had gone to school there, and now worked at a bank (or so he said- that comment is for my fellow agents) in Beirut. Near the mall, he offered to walk me to the entrance because the traffic was voluminous and it would be faster to just get out and walk the rest of the way, so we paid the driver, thanked him and got out. I studied the face of the banker by store-light and headlights as we walked side-by-side in the overall darkness. He had large, dark, serious eyes and a serious face but the most important thing was that he looked 100% sane and walked without a paddle and only a harmless, serious-looking briefcase.  As we walked, he told me about his job and sort of made a point that he lived alone in his apartment which we were approaching. I was feeling needy and a bit lonely at the moment after my harry experience with the Doughboy, and this part of me desperately wanted to accept his unspoken invitation, stranger though he was. We reached the crossroad where his apartment stood to one side and the mall to the other, but despite the millisecond's hesitation, I merely thanked him heartfeltly, wished him a Merry Christmas, and walked away down the street toward the brightly-lit entrance of the mall.

I think I rely too much on fate. If things are meant to happen, they will happen and there's no need to make any artificial moves or conscious efforts to interrupt the natural flow of events. Water over rocks, like the stalagmites inside Jeita Grotto. Fate be damned, I should start taking things into my own hands. “Nothing is written in the stars,” as the Elephant princess says in Wicked. Really? So there was nothing written in the stars about how I would encounter a mad paddle-wielding doughboy taxi driver in Beirut in the winter of 2008? Really nothing? Well, I guess I just got lucky then. I ought to thank my lucky stars.

Tales from the Arabian Nights, Part 2: Water

The next day (or was it the third day? I had delicious sushi-like eggplant rolls at a fancy French restaurant on Gemayzeh which was worth noting, sometime between Music Hall and Jeita), I decided to play the tourist game and visit some actual tourist sites in Lebanon. 

Let me tell you, I had huge plans to visit all the major sites in this country, from Beiteddine to Byblos to the Cedars and everything in between. What I didn't count on was falling sick, yet again! I was so angry at my weak immune system, which seems to have gone haywire ever since I came to the Middle East. Plus, it is freezing in Lebanon at this time of year, which I didn't count on, and for which I was not dressed enough, so it was kinda my fault for not wearing that extra layer, but I still decided to stew against my stupid immune system for not fighting the good fight with all the antibodies it must have stored up in the last two months. Anyway enough strange talk about stewing against sicknesses. 

Before I fell sick, I was able to visit at least a few of the touristy sites here, mainly the Jeita Grotto, the Harissa, and a Hall of Fame museum on the way to the Grotto. And I had an excellent grandfatherly taxi driver named Hazh to accompany me throughout the entire day trip. I was really touched when he went back to his car to pull out an umbrella when it started raining, and held it over my head to protect me from the light drizzle. He was like the grandfather I never had (both of mine, as well as one grandmother died before I was born).

It was Hazh's idea to take me to the Hall of Fame- a very cool idea for a museum. I saw realistic dummies of all these famous figures from the Arabic author Naguib Mahfouz and Van Gogh to world political figures like Clinton (first name Bill) and Bush and Kofi Annan and the Iraqi Minister of Media and Communications and Saddam Hussein, as well as some Arabic musicians and even my friend Einstein was there, looking rather frazzled.

And also the tallest, shortest, and fattest man in the world. The Clinton dummy kept saying over and over again, “I did not have sex with...[that chick in the black beret whom I totally fucked on more than one occasion]”, and the Bush dummy was doing that side-to-side shifty eye thing that Dubya does in real life (perhaps they''ve added a ducking motion by now). The shortest man was less than 2 feet tall and married a regular-sized woman and bore many children, apparently. And according to the tour guide, Einstein was known for taking like 2 showers a year...is that really true? I know he was known for never wearing socks, but the shower thing? And gee, I don't think I could ever marry a 1.5-foot man and have babies with him, so that was pretty crazy to find out.

...................

Water is deceptively simple. After the Hall of Fame, I visited the Jeita Grotto* next- a cave divided into an upper and lower section. The Upper Grotto was just pure limestone- thousands of masses of limestone in surprisingly complex shapes for something that was carved by water alone. While meandering slowly through the cave, so dim and humid, I saw a frog on a lilypad, a little girl in the act of waking, a 3-fingered hand that reminded me of Rodin's “Hand of God” which I'd seen three summers ago in Paris, and dozens of other sculptures, some more amorphous than others, all carved out by water dripping from the cracks in the cave's ceiling over thousands of years. To be precise, each centimeter of rock took 120 years to get carved out. Water, left to its own devices (and given lots of time) works in mysterious ways. 

It must have been really amazing for the discoverer of the grotto: To have move a regular pile of stones and discovered a hole; to have crawled through the hole, and found piles and piles of limestone in strange and beautiful shapes- stacks of rock that could easily be seen as just massive, unordered piles of rubble if not for the element of human imagination. I thought: how boring it must be to work as one of the guards stationed at various points of the cave's man-made path. But after one of them showed me the frog and the hand, I saw the more romantic aspect of his job- he sat here day after day for more than two years, giving shape and definition to these amorphous stacks, carvings, stalactites, stalagmites, and glittering limestone curtains, until he knew this particular patch of rock like the back of his hand (this analogy is used, assuming the back of one's hand is well-studied). It was a slower sort of discovery- like the way water shapes limestone- but full of surprises and secrets that he could then reveal to the odd tourist, like me. 

Towards the end of the path, I looked down the rail and saw at the bottom of the sheer drop a giant eye of the purest blue-green tint. Later, I would take a far-too-short boat ride across this pristine lake located in the Lower Grotto of the cave. The water was cool to the touch, and clear enough to see the sand at the bottom at the shallow ends. The ceiling hung low here and there with sharp dinosaur-teeth stalactites sticking out dangerously so that you had to duck quickly to avoid an undesirable skull-stabbing if your boatman was not a particularly careful driver and didn't do to much to warn you. The boat ride ended far sooner than I would have liked, and in minutes, I found myself once again standing at the entrance of the cave, shivering from the cold and watching the fine rain drizzle down lightly from under my red hood. Water was really deceptively simple.

And terrifying

z

Cold and austere

Pigeon Rock- natural rock formations set in the Mediterranean Sea along the waterfront.

*Unfortunately, cameras were not allowed in Jeita Grotto. I had to settle for mass-produced postcards, which granted, are probably of far better quality than any picture I would have taken in there.

Tales from the Arabian Nights, Part 1: Venturing Out of the Bomb Shelter

The night of my arrival in Beirut, Lebanon, I ventured into the Music Hall to check out the Lebanese “entertainment culture”. It's really lucky that I arrived in time to experience a Beirut weekend. Before I tell you about Music Hall, though, I want to tell you what it is like to be living for 4 months in Iraqi Kurdistan, and then suddenly finding myself walking through a street in Beirut, Lebanon after a couple short plane rides: frankly, it's like emerging from a bomb shelter to discover that the world is actually 50 years into the future, a la “Blast From the Past”, starring Brendan Frasier and Alicia Silverstone. As I walked wide-eyed through a street teeming with cars and people, though it was dark out, I was shocked by the sight of so many women dressed so scantily, elegantly, and fashionably. No demure covering to speak of around here! Nor neon-bright, tacky outfits, Santa dresses, or bumblebee outfits. Only short, stylish dresses, trendy jeans, checkered scarves, and fashion boots. And they all had beautiful, flowing dark brown hair and perfectly made-up faces. Geez, was this for real? I was positively dizzy from sensory overload. Don't laugh, but I actually took a picture of the entrance of a Hallmark store. It was so beautifully decorated for Christmas and the products inside were so adorable and beautiful and of such good quality! Sigh...I really spoiled myself silly during my stay in this country, but it was all totally and utterly worth it. You could say, I picked up the mindset of the Lebanese people (why save when you can spend?) with admirable ease and efficiency during my short stay there. And it all started with Music Hall...

Not really, but what a great transition that would have been! Before Music Hall, I spent the day walking through the city, whiled away time at a coffee shop (!) called De Prague, learned the difference between Iranian and Turkish rugs (one has geometrical designs, the other floral), and watched the tempestuous waves of the Mediterranean Sea seething and crashing against the rocks. I chatted for a long while with the young, friendly couple who owned an artisan crafts shop along the Corniche (the waterfront along the Mediterranean). They had lived in Seoul for six years during the '90s boom years, working for the Lebanese embassy there. They told me a funny story about how their son wouldn't stop crying one night, though they couldn't figure out for the life of them why. Finally after hours of trying everything they could think of, they called downstairs in the dead of night and asked for help from the Korean hotel receptionist, and figured out that all he wanted was rice. Only he was saying it in Korean- not in Arabic or French or even English. It was a story that was both funny and telling. The couple had moved back to Lebanon to raise their sons in a linguistically saner environment. (Only three languages to learn, not four.)

Later, I wandered through Gemayzeh street before it became a crazy party scene, and chatted with the youthful owner of a godfather-themed Italian restaurant there called Corleone Trattoria. He had become owner and manager of the successful business at the youthful age of 21 through sheer hard work. He was proud of his accomplishments, yet regretted not being able to enjoy his youth. He never had time to go out for dinners and drinks and parties like his peers because of his work. And yet, his restaurant was a beautiful success, set right in the heart of the Beirut party scene. This was not an unusual tale in Beirut, I realized later. Many Beirut-ers spend all their time working just to survive in their expensive city. Others work and spend, work and spend, and don't even try to save. It may be that they don't save for the future because their future might be bombed any day. The Lebanese live for the present and party like there's no tomorrow because, in fact, there may be no tomorrow.

I left Gemayzeh street eventually, and wandered through the beautiful downtown where stands a gorgeous mosque commissioned by the late Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. I toured the tent-memorial of Hariri, whiled away more time at the Apple Store there, flipping through artsy mac covers, whiled away even more time at the Virgin Records bookstore where I read through JK Rowlings latest book, The Tales of Beedle the Bard, and then finally made my way to Music Hall around 1 am, when the streets were still lit up and lively with weekend revelers. 

Though I was dressed ultra-casually in blue jeans and a hoodie  under my red coat and sneakers, I had no trouble getting into the concert hall because the party had started awhile ago,  maybe a couple hours ago, and they could tell I was a tourist. It was dark inside, and I remember red lights and then a huge audience seating area in front of the bar set in the back, as in a theatre. And a big stage below with a Reggatone band jamming away on it. It was very crowded with people dressed to the nines, all the women in elegant party dresses. People were seated in groups in red, semi-circular booths, eating fancy food, but others were on their feet dancing Lebo-style with their hands in the air to the music coming from the stage. This is what went on at Music Hall, every weekend. It's like a casual concert that you don't need tickets for in advance, that shows a dozen bands each night of a variety of music genres, accompanied by neon-bright roaming stage-lights; where people dine and drink and dance the night away. In between bands, they play recorded music and people dance to that too. House music is very popular, but they play and show all kinds- even a girl who did a remix of Stevie Wonder. The best part was at the end when an old man in his 60's with long silver hair came out with a stick and started dancing a jig of sorts and spinning his stick around like a ninja stick. This was Tony Hanna, a Lebanese musician beloved by his people, young and old, a symbolic figure, and clearly a crowd favorite. 

I didn't leave until around 3 or 4 that night, but there were still taxis around and cops stationed at street corners so it didn't feel weird or scary. Before going back into the Royal Garden hotel, I grabbed a cheese pizza from the pizza cart across the street that is open 24/7, and stood at the window of my 4th floor hotel room munching on it and watching the scene below. It was nothing interesting, but just the fact that there was something going on, that there was life on the streets at this hour of the night was enough to captivate my sorely-deprived senses. 

40% of the Lebanese population is Christian

Rafik Hariri's tent-memorial set in the shadows of the beautifully-lit mosque set in Downtown Beirut, commissioned by the late Prime Minister himself. He was assassinated in 2005 by a truck-bomb that blew up his entire motorcade. A cab driver drove me past the location of the bombing. "Hariri, BOOM!" he explained concisely.

The older crowd generally praised Hariri for the bottom-up post-war reconstruction of Beirut, while the younger crowd complained that he had sold half their nation to rich Saudis and brought Lebanon neck-deep into debt.

The cedar tree is the national symbol of Lebanon, growing abundantly in their snow-capped mountains.

Hariri's tomb. The white flowers are changed every few days. The wheel-shaped objects hanging on the walls and also covered with the same white flowers are a tribute from each of his children and grandchildren.

Hariri's bodyguards who were also killed in the 2005 truck-bomb assassination.

Music blared from speakers all the while; the flag of Lebanon marked with dozens and dozens of signatures.

I sat outside on the stoops of the mosque playing with my camera.

Ornate towers with octagonal balconies jutting up from the mosque.

Pretty lanterns

Music Hall

I climbed the Saint Nicholas Steps on Gemayzeh Street, beautifully lit for the holidays, lined with bars and restaurants, packed to the max on Saturday nights.

Along the Corniche (Waterfront) at sunset.

Un-posted Entries

I was looking through my old journal entries and discovered that I had never posted a bunch of entries I had written about my winter trip to Lebanon and Egypt. Here they are, with pictures. Verbose as always.

Where did Moses Go?

Epiphany:


There doesn't seem to be a well-formed concept of afterlife in the Jewish religion . How strange! I always assumed that a well-defined Heaven was one of the things that the three major monotheistic religions- and many others besides- had in common. 

Balls a-Flying

Almost four years ago, during my college years, I tried my hand at juggling with damaging failure. Eventually, I got tired of picking up balls from the grass, and so I cursed gravity and dropped the hobby instead.

Nearly four years later, this past June, the night before the first group of us teachers left Iraq for good, Tom put his juggling balls in my care. Oh the irony. What possessed me to keep them remains mysterious...perhaps something akin to nostalgia...but I kept them.

Then one day, about a month ago, I picked them up from their dust-gathering place in the bricked corner of my Freak Tent room in Philly, and I started juggling again. First one ball, then two, then I tried my hand at three.

I was as atrocious as ever, but this time I was a more perceptive learner. I learned how to throw, how not to throw, and most importantly, I paced myself. When I made it to 3 tosses in a row, then to 5, I congratulated myself and set a new goal of 6. A couple weeks passed in this fashion, my record number of tosses in a row never exceeding 8.

Then, sometime last week I hit the double digits- a record 12 tosses in a row! A couple days ago, when I hit a major stride and made it all the way to my age (25), I nearly choked my roomie Melissa with my exuberant hugging.

Today, I reached another important landmark, 42. I juggled the answer to the universal question! (The question itself remains mysterious.) I nearly crushed Sarah with my exuberant pummeling. Juggling turns me violent, it would seem.