Tag Archives: humor

Nov 25 2011
2 Comments
Humorous, Open Letters, Two minute read

A Very Ex-Pat Thanksgiving

What have you DONE?!

Dear attendees of last night’s Thanksgiving celebration,

You ought to be ashamed of yourselves. Never have I seen such a despicable sight on this green earth. Normal Arabic students and friends were transformed into beasts of insatiable greed in front of my very eyes. The mutilated carcasses of the helpless birds alone speak for the gluttony that transpired last night, not to mention the photographic evidence of post-poultry dance moves that were ill-advised if not downright dangerous.

First of all, have you any idea of the ridiculous amounts of food that each and every one of you consumed? Not only that, but many of you had the audacity to complain about being too full even while shoveling more chunks of pecan pie down your gullets. Shame on you. Do you think I felt anything even close to pity when I saw you later on the couch with your tongue lolling out of your mouth and your eyes glazed over? Of course not.

Second of all, for all of those who cooked or baked or sautéed or peeled or mashed or otherwise did anything to help prepare the feast that was later set upon by the guests as a plague of locusts to the harvest, what business did you have in creating anything so delicious? Don’t you know that the human heart is weak, and that by making mouthwatering, delectable dishes, you were setting a trap for the already revolution-enfeebled souls present at the party? Had there only been sleeves of saltine crackers and unfiltered water, I have no doubt we would have witnessed similar hedonism, since these Thanksgiving-ers had all the self-control of a starving herd of goats.

And do I even need to mention the general spirit of gratitude that pervaded the atmosphere with a ripe odor not unlike rotting fruit? The sickly sweetness of good feelings and camaraderie were downright inappropriate, especially since many of us there were hoping to continue focusing on the negative aspects of the political, economic, and social situations in America, Europe, the Middle East as a whole. People kept saying they were thankful for things even when it was abundantly clear that there is no hope and everything is going to hell in a hand basket.

Last but certainly not least, I would just like to say that the generosity of the hostesses was completely inappropriate. Had I seen a herd of Arabophiles like these heading for my doorstep, I would have bolted the doors and called the cops as well as reported them to Homeland Security before lighting the fire under my cauldron of oil and getting ready to heave ho. The willingness with which you opened up your home and allowed it to be destroyed in a craze of excess clearly points to some kind of mental illness, for which I hope you will be treated very soon.

I hope to never see anything so disturbing again, and I’m thankful for the fact that Thanksgiving is only once a year.

Your disgusted colleague,

Emily

P.S. But really the party was great. The food and the company were both a sheer pleasure to enjoy.

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Nov 23 2011
4 Comments
Anecdotes, Stories, Three minute read

On Your Mark. Get Set. Fear!

Milk: Gotta Have It for Coffee

Cairo, Egypt.

Tuesday, November 22, 2011: A million man protest is scheduled for 4 o’clock pm. During our classes and breaks we watch tv and discuss what is going on or eavesdrop to other’s conversations. Life, for the most part, continues as normal. At 1 pm, the director of our program knocks on the classroom door. This is unusual.

She pokes her head in and calmly states that there is a city-wide curfew beginning at 3 pm, that classes were ending early, and that everyone should go home after stopping by the grocery store and stocking up on ramen noodles.

Did I freak out? No. Did I leave more quickly than usual, make an urgent phone call to my roommate, and then speed walk to find a taxi after not taking time to say goodbye to my fellow students? Yes.

All I could think about was getting to the grocery store. I was almost out of coffee. And milk, we needed milk. I could probably buy a few cartons of milk, and then ration them if I needed to. Yes. I need milk. How could I drink coffee without milk? What if there’s no milk? I have to get milk.

This sick internal dialogue was accompanied by terrifying images of ravaged supermarkets, bare shelves poking out everywhere and not a drop of milk to be had for the roaming groups of latecomers who pick over the off brand mayonnaises and weird canned meats others have left behind. I simply knew we would get to the store and find there was no milk left, the shelves on which it was usually stocked completely empty, only the dust revealing that anything had ever been there. And then what would I do? In order to calm myself down, I made a contingency plan: “ I might have to drink coffee without milk and that’s fine.” But it didn’t feel fine. It felt awful.

We took a taxi home and didn’t even stop by our apartment before heading to the corner store to get the necessities. Unlike the wasted aisles in my day-terror, the store seemed quite normal. I didn’t have to elbow any portly twelve year olds to get the last roll of Choco-Biscuits, and there were no flocks of mothers screaming at each other and their children while fighting over the last bag of rice. I bought two cartons of milk  (the long-lasting kind), and refrained from buying another. I was just so relieved it was there. I began to suspect the other people didn’t know about the curfew. They weren’t going to have any milk later on if they didn’t get smart. They also might be arrested for violating curfew.

We, on the other hand, went home and unpacked our groceries and prepared for a movie marathon complete with coffee and choco-biscuits. Curious, I checked the news to see what it said about the curfew. Interestingly enough, it said nothing.

I poked around a little more, searching in English and Arabic Western and Egyptian news sources, and found zilch. And then I went to the Twitter and searched “curfew.” Bingo. I discovered a slew of tweets deriding the curfew and alternatively begging others not to spread ridiculous rumors or mocking them for doing so.

Thus we found the curfew was, in fact, not real. I was glad I’d resisted buying 3 cartons of milk because then I would have really felt foolish. The lesson? Be careful about spreading rumors, including this one.

P.S. I am not one of the American students that was arrested. I’m not writing this from jail. They were all dudes anyways.

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Nov 18 2011
5 Comments
Anecdotes, Travelling, Two minute read

Desert Madness: S’more Edition

Illicit s’more innovation

Desert madness manifests itself in many ways. Some bury themselves neck deep in the sand and drool. Others lose the ability to internally narrate. In our cozy group of four, however, desert madness took the form of wild and, at times irresponsible innovation in the s’more field, urged on in particular by one go-getter we’ll call Stew.

Stew is an active young man of about 22, and though I had only met him briefly before our trip, by the end of it I knew two important things about Stew: he’s hungry, and he never settles for second best. Whereas I always leap at the chance to settle, Stew refuses to even look at the second tier of life.

This is a man that used to drink multi-thousand calorie protein shakes before bed in high school in order to put on weight. Wait! Can you hear that? It’s the gooey sound of millions of dieting men and women exploding from rage. Eighty percent of his conversation revolved around things he had once eaten, liked to eat, or was planning on eating very soon. While listening to his culinary fantasies, one was also drawn into his passion and shown an eatable world of which only geniuses and madmen could conceive.

Since we are real, red-blooded Americans, each night we would crack open a couple bags of marshmallows, Hershey’s chocolate, and graham crackers and get our s’more on. The first night passed quite lamely, featuring the usual discussion about how we like to roast our mallows: charred or golden brown and melted all the way through, etc. And just when I had accepted this level of normality, Stew remembered there was an unopened jar of peanut butter sitting on the sand. He hatched a plan, and then the magic began.

The next three nights were a kaleidoscope of different, almost unimaginable combinations of peanut butter, chocolate, marshmallow, twinkies, jam, and both roasted and unroasted banana.

Stew would be silent, and then burst out with a statement like, “What if wrapped this twinkie in foil with chocolate and peanut butter and then roasted it? You know what? Yes! I’m going to do it. Yes.” Never have I seen such a go-getter. There was no delay between the formation of his food wishes and their realization. In one night he ate nigh on 10 twinkies, all prepared different ways. It was a wonder and a blessing to behold. Were I a business person, I would hire Stew for any job that I had, especially if it involved him walking around without his shirt on or grabbing pushups on the go, two things he also excelled at

I once even heard him utter the words: “I’m going to impregnate this marshmallow with chocolate and then roast it.” This is the kind of literary and functional innovation that has made America great. Thank you, Stew. You make me proud to be an American.

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Nov 16 2011
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Best blog posts, Humorous, Three minute read, Travelling

Get Out of My Desert

We found it first.

(My trip to the incredibly beautiful White Desert continued, with more details and complaints.)

Civilization either exiles you to the desert or it wastes your sanity until you seek the desert as a refuge. For me, the desert was the latter: an escape from the mouth breathers and the metro pushers, the exhaust sniffing and the car evasion that scents my daily Cairo existence.

In the White Desert, rolling over the dunes and scrabbly rockscapes in the Jeep, I felt like not only had I escaped from it all, but “it all” was actually fake. Cairo, along with the entire world and its issues, was only a dream that paled in comparison to the stark reality of desert life and the landscapes formed by nothing but geological upheavals over the past couple of millennia.

Occasionally I would sink into reveries and imagine myself as the first person to have ever walked on this rock, or touched this grain of sand, or fallen down on this boulder. These thoughts, however, were likely folly. We were not alone. Other “people” had somehow found out about the White Desert. Was it the fact it’s a national park? That it’s discussed in detail in the Lonely Planet guidebook? That there’s a separate guidebook for the Western Desert of Egypt that outlines the nooks and crannies of the White Desert? The real reason will probably never be known, but the fact remains that though we spent much of the time by ourselves during our desert escapade, we did come across an unfortunate amount of intruders.

In theory, these humans were normal, fine people. Yet I despised them nevertheless. First of all, upon spotting another group in the desert, the air becomes electrified with tourist tension. I resent the other with a passion approaching my love for mushy, hot cereal. The other group is a reminder that my experience is not singular, that others have seen these things and taken better pictures than me. It’s kindergarten all over again: “Kids, you need to know one thing. You’re not special. There are 7 billion people on this planet. Your main purpose in life will be to serve as a statistic for marketing purposes. Half of you will divorce.”

Second of all, eco-tourists are filthy creatures that create waste, both natural and artificial. Despite encouragement from many reputable sources, including Lonely Planet, many tourists do not even attempt to burn their toilet paper after doing their despicable duty. Friends, let me tell you this: toilet paper does not stay buried in the desert for long. Like your shameful secret of eating 3 bags of peanut butter M&Ms before bed every night, it will be blubber to the surface. There’s nothing more unpleasant than realizing what you thought was a pristine campsite is littered with the unspeakable trash of inconsiderate patrons.

So, if you must disturb my desert, please remain quite shameful about your bodily functions and do everything in your power to prevent others from knowing that you have ever done anything so embarrassing.

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Nov 04 2011
4 Comments
Anecdotes, Humorous, One minute read

Say No to the Egg Sandwich

Note: it did not look this good

I have recently tired of my daily falafel sandwich, and have taken to eating the mediocre and overpriced sandwiches from the cafeteria on campus. The main interesting feature about them is that they are cold, whereas the falafel sandwich was hot. This provides me with the variety that spices my life. It doesn’t matter which one you pick, they all essentially taste the same and the meatless ones all cost the same.

Unfortunately, one of these sandwiches provided me with an experience that left me with a valuable lesson and the answer to one of the more important questions of life, that question being:

Should I eat this thing that looks like an egg sandwich the day before I’m going camping?

The answer is no. You should not eat that thing that looks like an egg sandwich the day before you go camping. Here is a non-exhaustive list of reasons why:

1. Regardless of where you are in the world, mayonnaise is essentially a petri dish, a fertile and suitable growing environment for all kinds of bacteria.

2. Even in the states, egg salad is at least 50% mayonnaise. Overseas, this percentage jumps to 70-80%.

3. People seem to believe that an egg sandwich, as a finished product, can be left anywhere for an unlimited amount of time and will not go bad: the backseat in a hot car, on the picnic blanket in the sun, or outside the cafeteria in Cairo. This is patently not true

4. The incredibly mushy texture of the sandwich indicates that the contents of said treat have been pressed together for no small length of time. To someone slightly less hungry with a firmer grasp of common sense, this would be what is referred to as a “bad sign.”

5. The bizarre sweet flavor of the sandwich, and the fact that even after consuming it I wasn’t sure whether or not it had egg in it, also indicate that it was either spoiled or never fit for human consumption in the first place.

At any rate, as a result of said “egg” sandwich, I’ve been subject to one of the most thorough purification treatments I’ve ever had, something rich European ladies would pay thousands for I’m sure.

And the best part of all is that I feel better enough now to go camping! Wish me luck and see you on Tuesday, probably!

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