I am suffering from a terrible case of vacation poisoning.
Lest anyone think that this is an actual gastrointestinal disorder or that "vacation" is also the latin name of some sort of amoebic parasite, let me put your mind at ease: I am talking about the pit-of-the-stomach anxiety that comes from having to go back to work after two nearly back to back vacations at resort towns on the Red Sea.
My brother arrived in Cairo about four weeks ago and we immediately left on a six day trip to the Sinai Peninsula town of Dahab for some SCUBA diving and relaxing. Thomas was coming from a month in Brazil and had the kind of tan you'd expect from such an adventure. I on the other hand was the exact color of his butt.
My week in Dahab and the following weekend in the far snootier resort town of Sharm el Sheikh as given me a toasty glow but my brain now rejects the mundane tasks I'm assigned like work as if I am now allergic to office-induced boredom. I keep pretending my pen is a hand grenade and energetically pull off the cap again and again.
We are now reviewing the comments we wrote as we went through our correspondence review. We are reviewing our review. Which, although it is less boring, as promised, is only marginally less boring when I think we were all hoping for significantly less boring. Another highlight of my day was correcting punctuation. You know how tables and graphs often have a line or two beneath them listing the source of the data? I was correcting those mini-paragraphs for extra spaces, missing commas and the occasional hyphen. Good thing I got that expensive law degree.
Keeping my life interesting are the people in my office, and of course my brother.
Thomas has picked up three volunteer jobs with three different refugee aid organizations here in Cairo while he waits (ahem...on a mattress on my bedroom floor...indefinitely) for the Sudanese "elections" to peacefully resolve. Unfortunately, for the elections to conclude, they have to actually begin, which they seem to be having trouble doing. Voting for Bashir (since the primary opposition candidate withdrew two weeks ago) was extended for two days because by the day the elections were suppose to end, they had not even begun yet in some areas. It is possible that the US is supporting these "elections" and that the Southern candidate withdrew as part of a deal with Khartoum to get the promised referendum for Southern independence on the ballot next year and uphold the terms of the 2005 ceasefire. But it is also more than possible that the Sudanese people are not in on the deal and conditions could be too unstable for Thomas to safely go to Sudan.
In other news, my German coworker accidentally adopted an owl yesterday. The boys in her supermarket found it on the street, a helpless lost baby, and took it in to show off to customers and generally parade around as an oddity. They weren't taking care of it though and it seemed distressed and frightened so my coworker took it away from them but now she is stuck with an owl. A FREAKING BABY OWL!!! She tried to feed it small pieces of veal last night but it seemed more interested in pecking at her thumbs. Do baby owls eat living food? Do their mothers descend to their nexts with squiggling baby mice? Or thumbs?
