Category Archives: Open Letters

Oct 21 2011
2 Comments
Humorous, Open Letters, Three minute read

What My Doodles Say About You

Note the random bunny

Dear Arabic teacher,

You’ve probably noticed that I spend an inordinate amount of time in your class doodling. This doodling occurs either during discussion, while we’re watching something, or while you’re talking. It does not occur while I am talking.

My doodles are usually a hodge podge of abstract shapes composed of curved lines, straight lines, circles, triangles, and dots that are inspired by natural matter. I also occasionally draw words spelled out in big pattern-filled block letters, or fields of teddy bear heads, with the odd rabbit, lion, fox, or raccoon head thrown in there. On a handful of occasions, I’ve resorted to drawing grotesque human heads as well as what might have been horse heads. These phenomena will be explained shortly.

Now that we’ve discussed the types and nature of the doodles, I would like to tell you more about what these mean in relation to your class and more specifically, my presence in said class. The mere fact I am doodling does not mean I am not paying attention. Indeed, drawing little designs on the side of my paper often helps me focus. That being said, this is probably not what’s happening in your class.

Depending on my hunger and current level of lack of sleep, my doodles might mean that I am barely listening to what’s going on and, if called on, will flail until the class rescues me out of embarrassment. On other days, I am completely aware of what is going on and just waiting the opportune moment to astonish the class with my insight. On yet other days, the discussion itself might be laughably ridiculous in either scope or tone and all I want to do is yell, “You clowns! Look at yourselves!” But instead I’ll boldly continue doodling.

A good rule of thumb is that the more complex the doodle, the less attention I am paying in your class. A simple teddy bear head may mean I just needed some cheering up and so quickly drew a friendly friend on my paper to lift my spirits. However, experimentation with different kinds of teddy bear faces, animal faces, or especially human faces means I’ve floating in another realm altogether and am not paying attention in the slightest.

So, is this a problem? Does my doodling constitute a threat to my progress as an Arabic student? Well, yes and no. The doodling itself is not the issue, but is only a symptom of a wider phenomenon that I would like to call “not caring.” Should the doodling be eradicated, it would likely be replaced with staring out of windows, and/or tearing up little pieces of paper. So what is the solution? As I stated earlier, I do not doodle when I’m talking, an action that requires my full attention. If there were some way for me to remain talking the entire class, or at least 75 percent of the class with the rest of the time being spent in preparation to speak, I think we would see a radical reduction in the frequency and quality of the doodles, something that would hopefully indicate a parallel increase in the rate of my Arabic learning.

I’m free on the weekends to talk about your teaching strategy centered on catering to my completely reasonable needs. Please get in touch with my secretary.

Best,

Emily

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Sep 28 2011
6 Comments
Best blog posts, Humorous, Open Letters, Two minute read

An Open Letter to the Youth Who Said He Loved Me

Who’s that girl?

Dear Motorbike-Riding Youth:

First of all, I would like to thank you for shouting “I love you” at me while I was minding my own business on the side of a narrow road in the mid afternoon autumnal heat. For a moment I had forgotten that I was a foreign woman, and you, having clearly never seen a foreigner or a woman before, were so overcome with true love that it inspired an immediate reaction from you that thankfully reminded me of my feminine, alien, identity. Moreover, I am no stranger to similar feelings of passion, especially for pedestrians, and so I completely sympathize with your socially inappropriate utterance.

However, if you would allow me to critique one aspect of your harassment strategy, I would simply like to point out that your outburst of passion occurred just seconds before you passed me as we were going the same direction. This means that you had only seen the back of my person at the moment you realized you had fallen for me. I, of course, am no Scrooge, and would be the last person to deny the possibility of love at first sight. That being said, in common usage first sight usually indicates some sort of eye contact or facial recognition, which then (if successful) progresses onto the collar bone and shoulder region or whatever pleases the parties involved. In contrast, you were brave enough to display your ardor heedless of what might have appeared on the other side.

I heard your zealous declaration first and then saw you zoom past me, as you continued on into the great wide world of Cairo. Before you turned out of sight, however, you must have realized your mistake. You doubted whether you could you actually love me without seeing my face, my features remaining unknown for eternity. Worse yet, what if I was wholly different than expected? Suppose I were actually an Egyptian man wearing a wig and Chacos? What if I had one large walrus tusk and a furry lip? A unibrow and scaly skin? Three eyes, a peg leg, and tentacles for a nose?

You realized quickly that you could not live with this uncertainty, and so turned around while continuing to move forward, all at once holding onto the past, plowing into the future, and throwing yourself into danger. Once you looked back, you saw that I was a foreign woman, just as you had hoped. It no longer mattered whether or not my features could be considered attractive, since they were non-Egyptian and female. You were content with knowing your love had been real, even if the interaction was all too brief. My advice to you for next time is to be careful of who you fall for, since you never know what they might look like.

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Sep 11 2011
4 Comments
Best blog posts, Fiction, Humorous, Open Letters, Three minute read

I’m Cute and Furry!

I live on Cairo’s streets! Love me!

Hello there! It’s me, your friendly neighborhood Cairo street ferret! You just caught me bounding along effortlessly.

Wasn’t that adorable?  Don’t you just want to die because of how cute I am! Did you see the way my body forms perfect mini-arches with the street as I’m springing along? Weren’t you reminded of the scalloped dye cuts that your mom used when she went through that scrapbooking phase? Some people have described my cutesy antics as magical, ineffable, and transcendental. For me, it’s just my normal life. Do you know what it’s like when people are inspired by even your most ordinary actions? Is anyone moved to tears or laughter at the preparation of your morning coffee? No? Well, this might be something we ferrets alone can understand.

When I saw you leave Cairo Jazz Club, I thought I’d make an appearance so you could know there is something beautiful left in the world. I was just over there by that pile of trash doing dainty ferret things when I sensed a smoky soul in need of a lift and then hop! bounce! There I was! And then I was gone! You don’t have to tell me how much you enjoyed seeing my amiable face and bizarrely flexible body. I’ve heard every praise known to man and ferret, so anything you say will be meaningless anyways. I’m glad to do this merely as a service for those a little bit more burden-laden than the rest of us in this city.

I know you Arabic students have a hard life, trying to make it off of a stipend that only supports a humiliatingly upper-middle class lifestyle, the exorbitantly expensive restaurants, country clubs, and apartments embarrassingly out of reach. You have to deal with nightly homework in a subject you specifically came to Egypt to study. If that isn’t enough, you have class a ridiculous four days a week, and only fourteen weeks of vacation out of the year long fellowship. So I get it.

You and I are not so different. I live off of street trash and car fumes. In fact, after the Ferret Council of 1974, street ferrets decided to evolve and can now digest most forms of Styrofoam and need car exhaust in order to survive. It gives us increased flexibility and fur sootiness. I, like you, also smoke people’s cigarette butts whenever I can find them. If I’m really lucky, I inhale the second hand smoke directly from someone’s mouth. That’s only happened once before and I don’t think the man himself understood why he was laying on the ground smoking a cigarette with a street ferret tickling his whiskers, but it was a pleasant, and maybe once in a lifetime, experience for both of us. I also live my life prancing around the streets of Cairo, my slinky-like body structure allowing me to be run over or stepped on without any damage whatsoever to my person, even though my pride is always hurt. The ferret rage comes afterwards, and sometimes I crawl into the hoods of parked cars and tinker with their engines just to show them. It’s eerie how much satisfaction I get from watching things burn. But that’s what this city does to you.

So…I’m getting bored with this conversation. You Arabic student types aren’t exactly skilled conversationalists, are you? Anyways, I’m glad I could brighten your night a little bit and I hope life gets easier for you. Really, I do. I hope someone finds you and decides to pay you for just being who you are and nothing else, since that’s what everyone deserves. If I’ve learned anything from Cairo’s streets, it’s that everyone is special.

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Sep 04 2011
5 Comments
Anecdotes, Fiction, Humorous, Open Letters, Three minute read

Message From the Ants: You Are Powerless Against Us

TRY TO STOP US!

Though we love our new apartment, one of its only flaws is the continual potential for an ant infestation.  The potential was realized this afternoon, when I heard a scream in the roommate’s room. Concerned, I rushed in and happened upon my roommate being held down by a giant masked ant with a knife at her throat. “Man,” I chuckled, “this infestation is both exceedingly ugly and worse than I thought.”

But really, there was a literal river of ants flowing from the balcony door, around the corner, and into a crack in the wall. I’m not great with numbers, but there must have been at least one or two, maybe millions, or something like thousands of ants endlessly streaming into the wall, carrying an unknown substance to their queen for her to feast on. Powerless to stop the flood, we left the apartment and discovered upon our return that they had vanished, only one or two unpopular ones left behind. As we commented on how bizarre the experience was, I found a tiny note in the corner of the room near the ants’ escape crack. It was typed out very clearly and left little to the imagination, except for picturing the tiny ant computer. Here is the note, as it was written but slightly larger and edited for profanity.

Dear pathetic human scum,

I assume by now you’ve noticed we have no regard whatsoever for your existence. It matters very little to us the arbitrary barriers you have placed on our earth, or the packaging in which you wrap our food. You cannot keep us out. We are tiny and there are millions of us. You are large, pasty, gangly, and one. You can’t even crawl up the sides of tile wall or build tunnels into the earth. Did you really think your two opposable thumbs would be a match for us? The thought is laughable. Between us, we have billions of limbs. In one hour, we could make a statue of President Obama  the height of the Empire State building out of our severed limbs and then dismantle it. You could write three emails.

Do you know how many possible entrances there are in your room alone? What about just the area surrounding your bed? Thousands. There are thousands of ways for us to invade in the middle of the night, swarming across your face, tickling your nostrils until you wake up and begin screaming. As you thrash about clumsily you might take some of us, but you can’t actually believe this will affect anything. You might be bigger than us, but our combined weight is a number your puny brain is incapable of comprehending both because of its size and because it is rendered in kilos, so I’m not even going to waste my ant breathe. The trick we performed earlier was meant to send a message: you are weak and powerless. Your degrees mean nothing to us. Bam! We’re there. We’re a river. We’re a thick, writhing mass that makes the carpet look alive. Boom! We’re gone. You have no idea what happened. You’re in the dark. You’re drooling, clueless, as you will remain.

We are in the walls. We are in the ceiling. We have this entire place surrounded and if we ever have the cause to investigate a sugar or pie situation, there will be no mercy. We will throng and our queen will feast. Bring chemicals if you must, just know that where one falls three rise to take his place, each a little crazier than the last.

Best regards,

Patrix “7 leg” O’Norkle, ant representative and part-time gym attendee (credit: MB)

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Sep 03 2011
4 Comments
Open Letters, Three minute read

Dear Future Tenant: Nothing You Do is Original

Oh sweet damp and dusty nights to come

One day, future tenant, all this will be yours. The house plant, the wobbly table, the bizarre equipment in the corner of the balcony that may have been used for torture….it will all be yours, to keep and to hold forever until your lease runs out after a year.

I remember when I was like you, wide eyed with wonder as day by day I discovered the rich variety of ants in our apartment and the necessity to keep everything as sterile as a freshly boiled set of vampire teeth. I, too, chuckled as I realized that none of the lamps in the apartment were equipped with light bulbs and ruined the Italian coffee maker by putting the top part on the stove, causing it to produce water permanently scented with burnt rubber.

The bathroom was a stranger to me as well, especially the shower square with its curtain that you must encase yourself in like a sausage while watching as water still shoots onto the floor despite your best intentions. And yes, I recall the nook, that precious nook in the corner of the first bedroom where I would while away the hours drawing both straight and curvy lines and think about to whom I could send them to as a time-released prank.Those were some of my better years. The ashtray of my mind was not yet full and I saw with youth’s vigor and hope.

And the balcony. Yes, I remember that balcony very well. I had dreams of buying a soccer ball and juggling on it without pants. Sometimes I walked to the edge of the balcony and looked out over the empty street, bad pop music sounding from a distance. It was my world. It will never really be your world, since it was mine first.

And of course, the bizarre bed contraption in the corner. I can see it in my mind’s eye and on this webpage very well. When I first laid eyes upon it I thought it a dilapidated piece of junk, good for nothing except soccer ball storage or unwanted guest accommodation. Upon closer inspection, I found it was something much more special, as if God himself had sent it to us, His final touch on creation and the 2nd greatest gift to mankind. Yes, future lessee, you will be the proud temporary owner of this bedswing, perhaps the only one in the entire world. And yes, the mattresses will be continually damp and half their mass is an accumulation of dust and previous tenants’ skin cells absorbed into them over the years.

But don’t let that take away from the experience of lying on the bedswing, moving slowly yet haphazardly both forward and side to side. As you absorb the view of the roof’s underbelly, perhaps you could imagine the man (or woman) that created this thing and why they did so. Were their beds too dry and dust-free inside? Did they want to reinvent the waterbed with chains, nails, and wood? Were they trying to make a cabinet and didn’t read the instructions correctly? Did they wear glasses? Love their mother?

I’ll let you think those thoughts for yourself, though I’m sure I’ve already thought of all of them since I was here first. I am not the original tenant. Nor am I the owner. But make no mistake, this apartment will always remember me, since I’m going to build a larger and even more bizarre device that will leave the generations to come wondering what happened to that girl and where did she get enough peanut butter to fuel a rocket launch. Just you wait.

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