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| Woohoo!! I finally have a phone! Write me if you want the number at. (I don't want to repeat my last mistake)
By the way, even though I whine about UPS, its a good job and I'm not quitting.
School is shaping up, slowly. I turned in this paper and my prof really liked it. Tell me if you do.
Forgotten Trash
On the eastern side of Cairo, past a busy highway, after the mosque, left of the police station is an old street. The street has been repaired and repaved scores of times by many teams of halfhearted workers. It is like a worn down pair of pants that has more patches than original fabric. The sidewalk is sporadically finished and unfinished with varying degrees of workmanship and different materials throughout. Deep pits, and exposed plumbing pockmark the full length of the street that is only about one hundred feet long. Trash is spread evenly everywhere except for a few places where, for whatever reason, were more convenient places to litter and piles built up. The street is just wide enough for a car to park on either side and still allow room for third to squeeze between minus one side mirror. Dirty ancient villas sit on each side of the ruined street. Occasional cars will bump through the street and the churn up dirt from it while adding to the pollution plaguing the whole city. The air is mostly stagnant and full of sand but occasionally a gust of wind from the nearby market brings the nauseous reek of rotten vegetables. The neighborhood looks like a monochrome film from the twenties. Infinite shades of brown dust paint everything in site.
As the sun begins to set, a withered hag is seen stepping painfully down this broken street. The narrow street echoes the sound of her feet clapping against the die-cut plastic slippers she is wearing. Her feet have thick calluses and deep cracks like the street she is walking on. She is squat and round, but too petit to be called fat. Wrapped around her head is thin rag that tightly holds most of her unwashed hair, but a few sickly wisps of jet-black hair string out of the scarf. Her face is offensively ugly. Fat, white, pimples cover her nose. One eye is nearly shut the other wide open and dark. She is likely half-blind but certainly illiterate. Dirt layers her olive skin. Her elbows and neck are caked with an opaque layer of grime. The palms of her hands are black as engine grease. Black lines stripe across her hand where dirt filled the wrinkles in her knuckles. The raised parts of her body are cleaner only because the added friction rubs away much of the dirt. Her forehead and cheeks are the few places where her original skin color can be seen. Countless layers of thin dresses shield her amorphous body from the city chill. The outermost layer is a dingy mauve with lime green flower prints. In one hand she is holding a dog-eared piece of cardboard, the other hand rests on her hip. It is hard to estimate her age but she is much younger than she looks. A life of misery has aged her far beyond her years.
Stepping over a puddle of filth she stumbles and catches herself on the knee. A shot of pain reaches every part of her body, but she lifts herself up again on her swollen ankles and continues down the street. A diseased cat jumps quickly passed the hag from a mountain of garbage. The hag briefly pauses to let it pass and mutters something cruel through the few teeth she has left. Moving just a little forward she sits down slowly onto the curb beside the garbage. Flies hum around her landing occasionally on her face, but she doesn’t seem to notice. The reek of rotten vegetables, garlic and feces rises off the garbage. A black and white taxi rumbles past her, belching a cloud of carbon monoxide in her face. Small bits of broken glass are sprinkled over the sidewalk. The wall behind her is stained with urine. This curb is as good as any, and she has no better place to go, so she stays.
Shuffling for a moment she places her piece of cardboard on the pavement beside her. The cardboard is stained and mangled at the corners. Off from the center is printed “SHARP Televisionâ€. Half standing, the hag repositions herself to sit on the cardboard. Laughably, she thinks she is keeping herself cleaner by not directly touching the street. The street is probably getting the better deal though.
The street is by no means uninhabited. People walk by frequently into the night. People throw their chip bags and candy wrappers at the piles of trash. One man tosses a coke bottle at the pile beside the hag. Missing though, it hits her in the face with a thud and clinks to ground beside her. Her moan of pain fades into the cacophony of late night traffic and activity as the man walks by unaware, and uncaring of what he had done. Recovering, she scuttles to the trash rips open a discarded potato chip bag to lick the salty crumbs from inside. Very hungry she begins to sort though the trash to find anything else consumable. She kicks aside a cat gnawing on a fish skeleton. It screeches and slides down the pile of trash. She picks up the conquered bone, and thinks she can do better. Out of the corner of her eye she sees the sharp glint of a can. Within is a treasure of day old pre-cooked beans; at least a spoonful. She scoops as much as she can with three of her blackened fingers from the bottom of the can. The taste is rancid and revolting, the solid parts of the bean clam up the throat while the liquid parts split the tongue in half. She sits back down on her lonely curb disappointed.
Cats return to the garbage pile. Wearily the hag lies on her side. She bends her legs up in a cannonball and tucks her hands under her head as a pillow. A gust of cold, dry air and sand blows against her. Mucus runs down her lip and she licks it into her mouth enjoying its taste. Briefly she is reminded of her humanity, and begins to cry because she knows that tomorrow she is still going to be forgotten trash. | | |
| I just finished my first real day of college. I have a four hour class. Its quite boring. Hopefully this is just a first impression. One of my profs is German and another is South African. Both have thick accents. Accent plus lecture plus time equals lullaby.
I'm getting promoted at UPS to part-time supervisor. I've been upgraded from peon to grunt. No longer am I an Israelite slave, now I'm the Israelite slave that's not getting whipped.
My cellphone is coming in the mail. I feel like Robinson Crusoe without it.
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| - Ka-BoomI know what you all are thinking. Your thinking, "What Mitch living on his own? Paying rent? His own apartment? That hobo!?" Well amigos here's the proof for your doubts, the unalterable evidence of digital photographs:
My living room sans-roommate. Aaron is away in Wisconsin.
The kitchen; rarely cleaner than this.
My bedroom, study and office. Doesn't that light make a dramatic effect. Truth be known I have no other light than that. I need to get the Home Make-over people over.
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| Do not watch Miami Vice. It is very bad. I could write pages and pages about how bad it was, but I'll spare you and just write the things that were good. They had cool hiarcuts. Everything else was bad, very very bad. | | |
| - Goodbye California Life is just skipping along. I go to work for from 3:4am to around 8:45am. My job is alot like tetris, or doctor mario. I stand at the bottom of a huge metal slide and down it come hundreds of boxes. Behind me is a train of cage bins, each with its own color. My job is to franticly read the labels on these boxes and throw them in their respective bins behind me. Sound easy? Well you try playing tetris and lifting weights at the same time for five hours a day and see how much you like it.
Oh and one more thing. If you were thinking about shipping anything through UPS...
PACK IT WELL. IT WILL BE TOSSED. "FRAGILE" STICKERS ARE IGNORED.
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