Category Archives: Lists

Jan 30 2012
8 Comments
Lists, Modern Life, Two minute read

7 Indicators of a Great Start to the Semester

No pen=no doodle. 😩

1. You forget the pen you were sure you recalled and proceed to not record anything for the entire day except for when you borrow that one guy’s pencil. You even regret doing that because the lead is really light and a pain to write with but you remember that beggars can’t be choosers.

2. You spend a large amount of class time debating whether the classrooms feel most like a coffin, grave, cistern, or well. You decide that the grave motif resonates the most because of how you feel about the course itself and the room’s stark lack of natural light, but ultimately you throw out all your choices and settle on describing it as a morgue: stale and lifeless.

3. After staring at the wall for most of your first class, you rush downstairs when it ends to go to the bathroom/escape. Later on you see the teacher from that class who asks you whether anything is wrong. The prospect of taking classes for the next 4 months in the morgue makes you want to curl up and die but there’s nothing she can do so you keep your mouth shut.

4. On your way into the university, you look at the bottle of water you just purchased and wish it were whiskey. You close your eyes and wish for it to turn into whiskey. When you open them, it is still water, which you drink because you hope will cure your massive headache.

5. Having shivered most of the day, you exit your unheated classroom building and find that the air of the city in which you reside has been rendered brown and unbreathable from dust kicked up by the massive gusts of wind. This would make great stuff for a song about witches coming down chimneys, you think to  yourself.

6. The best part of the day was when you learned that your first class might be 15 minutes shorter than originally scheduled. The worst part of the day was when you had to sit through the entire hour and thirty minutes because they hadn’t decided on a time length yet.

7. You’re looking forward to the fact that the only girl’s bathroom is about a 1.5 minute walk away, which will be good for breaks from class over the next four months. If you time it right, you might be able to miss hours of class.

It’s going to be a wonderful semester!

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Dec 25 2011
2 Comments
Humorous, Lists, Three minute read

For a Very Special Christmas

This is actually a man covered in pine branches. Now that’s special.

As the years drift by, it gets harder and harder to bring back that Christmas feeling you had as a child. The special aura surrounding the holiday, fueled in part by parentally encouraged delusions of a certain chubby man and his mysterious night journey, begins to fade.

Gone are the days when parents had no flaws, school consisted of Christmas parties for an entire month, and the entire world glowed with happiness because of the presents you were going to get. As we reach adulthood (and I know it’s a stretch to call myself an adult), we see the other side of the coin: the glow is actually just white hot Christmas rage, the Santa Bill needs to be paid personally, and family must be tended to.

How can you bring back the incandescent Christmas days of old, when today seemed like a day apart from all others, a day to look forward to, a day worthy of a countdown, a day of expectation and joy that ended in the ashes of wrapping paper scraps. Here are some tips and suggestions that can make this Christmas the best one of all.

Ways to Make this Christmas Special:

1. Play “family member hides.” Everyone votes on the family member they like the least, and then that family member has to hide for the rest of the day while the others search for him or her at their leisure.

2. Give the youngest members of your family bb guns, making sure they know there are no restrictions on where to use them.

3. After the Christmas feast, sit down with your loved ones and point out one another’s flaws.

4. Everyone loves singing! Give everyone a 3-5 minute solo to prepare and then go sing them at the mall in front of the movie ticket lines.

5. If you haven’t seen them already, rent the first two Alvin and the Chipmunks movies before going and watching the third one in theatres during a daytime showing. Nothing spells Christmas cheer like shameless exploitation of formerly beloved characters set to the tune of wailing toddlers.

6. Instead of fussing over a big meal, let everyone choose their own microwave dinner and heat it up themselves. Then watch television in silence!

7. Indoor bonfire, using the tree as fodder.

8. Hire someone wearing a Santa suit to come and take everyone’s presents away from them after they’ve finished unwrapping them.

9. Have a real-time response to Christmas gifts from people who aren’t in the immediate vicinity. Call ‘em up right away and tell them how you really feel about the Jar Jar Binks soap dispenser you got!

10. Go door to door preaching against capitalism. Have younger family members wail in order to remind people of child labor in sweat shops.

11. Encourage the little cousins to try to get onto the roof of the house, climb a tree, or fit into cupboards.

12. “Accidentally” misplace the remote control.

13. As you sit around the crackling fire with your family or friends, laughing about times gone by, bring up a deep seated grudge from years ago.

14. Instead of complaining about gifts you didn’t receive, speak with dripping sarcasm and spit vitriol while insisting nothing is wrong.

15. Give used toothbrushes as stocking stuffers.

Merry Christmas!!!

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Dec 04 2011
15 Comments
Best blog posts, Humorous, Lists, Three minute read, Wedding

Dear Sister: Prepare for Defeat

Only one will win

My triplet sister is getting married at the end of next June, and my other triplet and I are co-chairing the maid of honor. Neither of my sisters realizes that this kind of sharing is impossible. There can be only one maid of honor. The other one is just “nice sister.” Therefore, I’m viewing the entire affair as a competition to see who can be the best maid of honor, where the greatest contestant will win the title at the end of the wedding and strip the other contender of all honors. It will be a heartwarming ceremony for all who attend, especially the victorious bridesmaid.

By way of good sportsmanship, I have drawn up a list of the reasons I will make a formidable challenger in this competition. May the best sister prevail.

1. I have literally nothing else to do once I get back from Egypt in May. While my opponent is busy reviewing flash cards, I’ll be yelling at the caterers and handling all phone, email, and material communication regarding the wedding for the bride. My level of availability is unbeatable.

2. As a special service to the bride-to-be, I will be live-blogging and live-tweeting the entire wedding. People usually pay thousands for this kind of coverage, a fee I’m willing to forgo, and the publicity could even result in our entire family or just me becoming famous. No one else is willing to invade my family’s privacy as much as I am.

3. Having spent roughly 6 years studying Arabic, or should I say preparing for my sister’s wedding, I am ready to use these language skills during the ceremony in a number of ways. I could deliver of my speech completely in formal Arabic, recite a few verses from the Qur’an and/or the Arabic Bible at any point during the service in conservative Oklahoma, or translate the wedding invitations and bulletins into Arabic. My Arabic skills know no comparison (to anyone in our family and friend circle).

4. I am willing to put myself into extreme amounts of personal discomfort in order to help my sister through the wedding process; I can thrive on trivial amounts of sleep and peanut butter for months at a time provided there is an unlimited supply of Nescafe Gold. I will punish myself for my sister’s happiness.

5. As a public speaker of average talents with a great passion for being the center of attention, I promise to limit the length of my speech to 20 minutes, no more than half of which will be in Arabic. Furthermore, I pledge to put on fake accents throughout the speech, including the two I can do okay—Slavic and British—and a host of others of which I know only a phrase or two. My other sister’s speech will not be nearly as memorable.

6. Since I attended a secular school for my undergraduate degree, I have more experience in both drinking as well as getting my groove on in public and private spaces. To that end, I will make sure that everyone knows there will be no alcohol at the wedding and that they’d do best to get smashed beforehand. I will also be in charge of keeping a good vibe going on the dance floor. No wedding in Oklahoma has seen hedonism like this.

After seeing these qualifications, I wouldn’t be completely surprised if my other sister doesn’t drop out of the competition. If she’s foolish enough to remain, I look forward to the thrill of a drawn-out competition that will slowly tear our family apart.

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Oct 12 2011
2 Comments
Anecdotes, Humorous, Lists, One minute read

We are a Bunch of Nerds

the resident nerds of tahrir

Next semester, we students of CASA have the opportunity to take courses that are not solely focused on language and have academic content as well. Moreover, we get the chance to suggest courses ourselves. Since we are all a bunch of nerds, there has been a flowering of emails suggesting all kinds of courses that we could take…subjects you couldn’t even imagine, like a course focused on the fantastic animals described in pre -17th century Arabic travel literature.  This is the stuff of nerd paradise.

I have decided to hop onto the feverish academic bandwagon and offer a few course titles myself, so without further ado, may I present to you

CASA Spring 2010: Course Suggestions

1. Inequality Manifest: Spoiled American Students and Their Experience in Egypt

2. Pant Usage in Post-Colonial Egypt and the Tailoring of a Transformation

3. Applied Poetics: Arabic Poetry’s Place(s) in Your Daily Life

4. Advanced Reality Grasping: Calling a Spade a Spade

5. The Effect of Unicornic rule on Imaginary Arabic Literature

6. Fountains on the AUC Tahrir Campus: Why?

7. American Arabic Students and the Contemporary Blog Post

8. Cairo: Fragrant and Musical, or Stinky and Noisy?

9. Hadith and Blogging: What the Prophet Said

10. Intermediate Time Machine Installation and Usage

11. Arabic Grammar Nerds: Their Function as a Social Phenomenon

12. CASA Students: the Relationship between an Unhappy Home Life and the Rate of Expatriation

13. Improvisation: Telling People Why You Study Arabic

14. Arabic: What Do the Squiggly Lines Mean?

15. 15th Century Egyptian Embalming Techniques: a Practicum

16. Advanced Media: Building Effective Emotional Barriers to Bad News

17. Your Parents and Medieval Islamic History: How to Make Them Care

18. The Healing Qualities and Mystical Powers of Advanced Arabic Rhetoric

19. Vowels: Accessory, Amenity, or Need?

20. Horseback Riding, Power Lifting, and Calligraphy

21. Pharoanic Hygienic Standards: a Practicum

22. The Futility of Love: Arabic Literature Expressing Hopelessness and Loss

23. Arabic Media: How to Fold Newspapers into Planes and Hats

I, along with the rest of CASA,  look forward to an academically enriching semester and one that will no doubt be extremely useful in all our personal, professional, and facebook  lives.

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Oct 04 2011
4 Comments
Lists, Two minute read

Sue Me, Foodies

peanut butter is just as good

I would like to not apologize in advance for the fact that what follows strays significantly from the stated purpose of this blog. As the editor in chief and reader of this blog, I have overridden the discrepancy and made a dispensation for the topic. Furthermore, I stand prepared to be heavily criticized for these beliefs, especially by that interesting group of humans known as “foodies,” a term that is almost as laughable as “soup.”

The foodies might say I am boorish, uncouth, or pedestrian in my tastes, but I believe in something nobler than paragraph long menu descriptions. Do I love food? I don’t know. But I eat it, and I have found that often my satisfaction with these experiences has little to do with what I’m consuming, and everything to do with everything else. Thus, without further ado, I present some of my humbly correct opinions on food and the partaking of it:

If it’s good enough to be eaten once, it’s good enough to be eaten every day.

The more predictable meals are, the better. This applies, of course, to a meal’s existence and set time.

Temperature is more important than taste.

Anything can qualify as a meal as long as it fills you up. Thus a meal could feasibly consist of consist of a spoonful of peanut butter, some chocolate chips, plain cooked rice, and a Ritz cracker.

Coffee should be taken either with something crunchy or with chocolate, and it should be taken either in a café with friends or while reading something at home.

The finished product of a meal or dish as well as individual ingredients are equal candidates for consumption, without shame.

One should not have to wait for others if there is a chance of food or drink losing its optimal temperature.

It is acceptable to pick out one’s favorite parts of a dish with one’s fingers, as well as take at least one bite from the serving dish before beginning what is on one’s own plate. And the center of the brownies can be cut out if you don’t want any crust.

All noises of food consumption are reprehensible and must be concealed. Once the food enters the mouth it should no longer be heard or seen.

Texture is also more important than taste.

Spoons are the preferred eating utensil for all kinds of food.

A good meal is the happy phenomenon of when your innermost food desires are satisfied at the right time, at the right temperature, and with the right people.

Eating with company is nice unless you want to eat alone, and then other people should go away.

If you’ll notice, nothing was said about the quality or taste of food. This is not because these things don’t matter, but because (in my correct opinion) they are secondary issues. Bring on the angry foodie rampage.

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