This one's not about immigration, I swear

For those of you with an excess of prayers, positive energy, compassion, and a few minutes on your hands, can I suggest aiming whatever you’ve got at Russia and Pakistan for a moment or two? Pakistan is suffering the deadliest flooding in eighty years and Russia is plagued by forest fires. As if forest fires spreading across the country weren’t frightening enough, consider what those fires are spreading toward. Apparently, Chernobyl could burn. If the fires reach Chernobyl, all the nuclear material that has been absorbed into the surrounding woods will be turned into smoke and blown around Russia and the world.

Why would I ask you to think and pray for those suffering in far off parts of the world rather than demanding your positive thoughts for myself? Well, I am awesome that way, but also, I am significantly less miserable this week. I got assigned to a new case! It is sure to cause some friction with my office mate this week as she has been increasingly depressed by having spent the last two years on this same construction case I’ve been on since I started, and it has been an unspoken rule in my department that we won’t be assigned to new cases until we finish the statement of claim for the case we’re working on.

So what changed? How’d I get lucky? This spring, I told UW’s Career Services office that my firm was hiring and around 20 people applied. When applicants asked to Skype with me about life at the firm and in Cairo, I gave up a couple hours of my weekends to do so and when asked by HR or senior associates about different quirks of American writing samples, cover letters, etc. I shared what I knew. It wasn’t really that much of a time sacrifice on my part and I was happy to give other UW grads a shot at gainful employment in a still-crappy job market and maybe help out the firm in the process if someone actually worked out.

I had my last HR-related meeting on Tuesday night and on Wednesday afternoon, I was told I would be going to a client meeting the next morning with a senior associate and the principal partner. I was absolutely terrified but my friend told me I’d be surprised after having worked on this very complicated construction case for eight months how much I’d understand. It turned out to be true and I really did get everything that was talked about at the meeting. I hope I get to stay on the case because it is so refreshingly straightforward compared to my usual day to day work and because it is a big honor to be put on something different before my current task wraps up.

So I am pretty excited. I’ve started looking forward to work now that it has shifted from doc review to actual drafting and the addition of a new case, if they do indeed keep me on it, can only boost my confidence and further convince me I’m capable of doing legal work.

In other news, Whisky is now all caught up on his shots. After 2.5 hours of waiting and 5 minutes in the doctor’s clutches, he has his rabies vaccine. He is also proving to be quite the guy magnet. In addition to attracting every child within barking distance while out on our walks, he also gets the attention of several groups of Egyptian men, hanging out outside buildings and in parking lots either for work or recreation. Today his unbearable cuteness pulled over a really good looking real-estate broker (in Egypt this usually just means a guy with a cell phone who knows other guys with cell phones who call each other when they know of an open apartment and exchange favors and commission fees and bilk foreigners out of a full month’s rent in exchange for finding something one could find by walking around the neighborhood). This guy was well-built, had nice green eyes, which is unusual here, was well-dressed, obviously not lazy as I ran into him out in the heat at 10am, spoke English, and was good with the dog.

I had already been out in the mucky August air and the muddy (air conditioning drip plus street dirt), garbage strewn street (the garbage men who clean the streets and scoop up the piles of trash people leave on the corners of sidewalks don’t work on Friday so Saturday morning is the grossest time to be outside) and was sweaty, hair pulled back but falling out of my ponytail in humidity-compelled frizzy chunks, drips of sweat literally sliding down from my temples to my jaw, and dirty-footed in my flip flops that my wet, grimy dog keeps stepping and sitting on when he wants to take a break. I was in shorts long enough to cover my knees but not quite long enough to be stylish capris, a dirty tank top because today was set to be laundry day, and a collared short-sleeve shirt somewhere between green and grey. And did I mention I was sweaty?

When good looking guys stop me on the street to ask me out I am suspicious. When good looking guys stop me on the street in my dog walking clothes before my shower after infrequent dipping in mud and trash I am very suspicious. I need to talk about this more with my Egyptian friends but either he asked me out because he wants to have sex and in the minds of Egyptian men, foreign women = sex, Egyptian women = marriage, or he asked me out to try to sell me real estate. Either way, if you yourself are good looking, educated and employed, you don’t ask someone out who looks as gross as I did this morning within 10 seconds of meeting them because you liked their personality when you saw them dragging their unwilling dog out of a puddle of air conditioning slime. You do it because you want something.

Maybe I am judging this guy (and all Egyptian guys I’ve met so far) and myself, too harshly, but it is definitely one of the pitfalls of living in a culture where gender relationships and sex are viewed so completely differently than in my own. Getting hit on by a polite, good looking guy should be flattering but instead I am left a bit bitter, thinking he is more likely a creep who watches too much imported porn and thinks all American women are (or aspire to be) Lisa Sparxxx.

Sorry for the two blog posts today. I am stuck at home waiting for the guy to come fix my air conditioning…which means I am stuck in my UN-air conditioned home waiting for the guy to come fix my air conditioning. Watching a lot of TV, playing fetch for 30 seconds at a time since the dog can’t make more than one or two trips to catch the toy until he is too hot and has to lie down, and trying to clean my apartment with my mind. Going about as well as you’d expect.