Disorderly conduct

Mark Twain writing in bed, seemingly awake, however.

It is time to admit that I have a serious writing disorder.

I cannot write while I am sleeping, and I am asleep a lot. I thought of referring to it as a sleeping disorder, but I don't really have any problem sleeping. Perhaps "consciousness disorder" is more appropriate.

We could even go so far as to trace it to my depressive disorder(s), but none of that would matter if I could overcome my ridiculously-irritating inability to write while I sleep. I have extremely bold and creative dreams--why isn't anyone taking notes? They seem to last for hours and trying to write them down every morning would require the time span of approximately 3 days. There are extensive plot lines, vivid colors, full soundtracks, foreign languages (okay, Arabic), and always guest appearances by ex-lovers, highly-desirable celebrities and/or musicians, and my beloved deceased pets wandering around. It can get quite congested.

Which is another reason I am sleeping so much. World's Longest Bout of Sinus Infection. Chronic headaches and facial pain are inarguably contraindicated as far as writing is concerned. Likewise, writing on migraine meds is difficult--especially from the perspective of moving one's fingers about correctly on a keypad--something I am not very talented at to start with. I think I just ended that sentence with TWO dangling participles.

As the Sundays are singing it on last.fm, "Here's where the story ends."

"But don't you have to get up for your dogs?" asks the astute and concerned reader. Let me tell you, dogs are just as eager to get back under the covers when it is 20 degrees outside AND their owner is cranky as shit from chronic sinus pain and a life without direction.


SodaPop (frequent dream visitor) and Ginger warming up my guest bed at Sarah and Jeff's about 5 yrs ago.
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Favorite Sign from Rally For Sanity

Don't worry, it really does say that.

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Dear FB: Salaam means PEACE in Arabic

Letter to one of several friends who could no longer find me on Facebook and feared I had unfriended her:

Dear L___ ,

Sorry to scare you--I've had a few e-mails...

I suspended the entire account due to the hate-posts I was getting or reading on other friend's pages. I was just so tired of the Obama-bashing and then when the mosque/Muslim hate started going, I was so upset I had to leave. It was either that or unfriend 90% of my friends--mostly for what THEIR friends were saying. I couldn't let it roll off my back any more.

The final breaking point was when one woman equated people that would go to the mosque proposed near ground zero as "the same as letting sex offenders set up practice next to an elementary school." I nearly threw up when I read that. So now Muslims that had NOTHING to do with 9/11 and just want to worship God are not only automatically terrorists but also sex offenders and, in another comment by someone else, Nazis?

After 25 years of studying Middle East and American history, 15 years of studying Arabic, a year of living with these wonderful, caring people in Cairo, and all the Arab-American friends I have (on FB also) I couldn't stand it. It has become a platform of ignorance and hate, and it broke my heart.

I still get hate e-mails from my blog, which is where I took refuge with my opinions, but they are only a few a day and I can handle them better.

I didn't cancel FB entirely--I just have to wait till this blows over and figure out how to handle friends I love that have all Muslims confused with 11 sick-ass men that were not in ANY way religious. They may have called themselves that, but no Muslim I have ever met considers them anything but hate-filled crazy men--NOT Muslims.

We have Christians commit mass murders all the time in our country but we do not fear Christianity (well, I do) but the fear of Muslims is being exploited by the press and by campaigners to an extend that I had to almost completely isolate myself.

Tomorrow, for example, I am going to dinner with relatives who are right-wing religious Republicans. It's hard enough for them that my dad is a gay activist--though they treat him with complete respect. You know me, I plan to wear my white tee that has the huge word "peace" on it--in Arabic.

So if you need me I'll be on e-mail and my blog. I just can't take the hate and misinformation anymore. I just didn't want to keep finding out the hard way which of my friends were racists. I've spent my entire adult life fighting those stereotypes with school and personal experience, but in the end, the opposition overwhelmed me. Now they can hate without me constantly commenting on it.

You can see, I'm obviously still worked up about the whole issue (since I can't block the news) so that is why FB was not the place for me anymore.

I did announce it before I left but once I suspended it, people can't see me and just think I unfriended them. In fact, this was the only way I could think of to save those friendships.

Love you,

Nancy

Salaam means peace in Arabic. In case anyone wondered. And no, the person modeling this t-shirt was not be-headed by extremists.

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Don't Ask, Don't Tell--Don't Translate

Image from www.theshoyencollection/arabic.htm

Another powerful story about losing yet another Arabic linguist to Don't Ask, Don't Tell. What if all Arabic linguists boycotted working for the US gov until this was repealed, the way many straight couples have started a movement to boycott marriage until gays can wed? A fantasy, but I'm just sayin'...

Don't Ask Don't Tell: A Story Highlighting the Anguish Faced By Soldiers with Indispensable Skills By Sasha Suderow, from the www.huffingtonpost.com target="_blank">HuffPost

Beirut -- On Sergeant Jed Anderson's back is tattooed "I give life and death." As a US Army Arabic linguist in Iraq he did just that -- process intelligence that saved or ended lives. He performed this crucial role in the war effort until becoming the 64th Arabic linguist discharged under the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy.

President Obama, Secretary of Defense Gates and Joint Chiefs of Staff Mullen support overturning "don't ask don't tell" -- signaling the possible demise of the controversial sixteen year-old policy. Although it humiliated and ruined the careers of many soldiers, Arabic linguists suffered disproportionately at a time when their skills were indispensable. By adhering to the policy -- especially during wartime -- three Presidential administrations handicapped American military capability and demonstrated the policy not only inhumane but self-defeating.

Anderson's story highlights the daily anguish gay and lesbian soldiers face; jeopardizing their lives for comrades and country while concealing an identity punishable by expulsion from the military or even jail-time.

"The Army invested in me, taught me discipline and self-confidence and made me what I am today," Anderson says fidgeting with a cigarette in a Beirut cafe. He enlisted in the Army on a linguist contract only months after the invasion of Iraq. Although practical considerations prompted his enlistment, faith in America's democratizing mission in Iraq endowed his new job with a higher purpose. "I wanted to make the world a better place," he says.

Anderson scored high on an aptitude test and was given a year and a half of rigorous Arabic and analyst training with two-hundred peers at The Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California.

Deployed to Iraq, Anderson translated and analyzed enemy communication first in Mosul and then Rawa, near Syria. He handled sensitive, classified material. "I gained information that saved American lives," he bluntly states. He eventually became the top Arabic linguist for his brigade and was chosen as the personal street interpreter for a Colonel who wrote a reference extolling Anderson's skill.

Anderson did not enter the Army acknowledging his own sexuality. Ironically, it was the military's emphasis on integrity that gave Anderson the self-confidence to accept who he really was. Those same values became his undoing. He sought to uphold the principles instilled in him, and as a result, became increasingly aware of the lie he lived.

In Iraq he focused on the mission and suppressed his emotions "the way any soldier learns to ignore personal issues like marital problems," he says. Anderson hid his gay identity while on tour for fear of rejection by his peers. Hearing derogatory terms prevalent in macho military culture did not affect him. Occasionally, however, the topic forcibly confronted him. Once, an interrogator requested Jed write "faggot" in Arabic on a placard that would be used to humiliate an Iraqi detainee.


The rest of the article is here. Read more!

It Is Not A Crime To Know Or Study Arabic

Apparently someone needs to remind the TSA and the FBI of this fact, as they just arrested a college student for traveling with Arabic flashcards.

I own the flashcards George was detained for and while I didn't take mine with me on my DC trip, I did almost take one of my Arabic primers I read each night. I didn't because I had a friend with me and I didn't trust the TSA not to be morons. Looks like I was right.

When traveling on holiday through Israel on the way to Jordan in 1994, I was warned to leave all study materials back in Cairo or risk heavy interrogation and strip searches by the Israeli Defense Force. A student one year before me had this happen and it was a fresh lesson--absurd as it was. (The language of Arabic wasn't illegal in any country then, either.) Is this what we've become?

Here's a picture of the J. Edgar Hoover FBI building in downtown D.C. No wonder I got the chills walking by it every day I was there. It wasn't because of the snow.




Pretty scary looking, I know.



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Struggling to practice Arabic in Egypt

Midan at-Tahrir, downtown Cairo

I found this article this morning and it carried me right back to my year in Cairo.

I, too, found that the greatest struggle in Cairo (besides keeping weight on) was finding any Arab willing to talk to you in Arabic instead of English. Taxi drivers, in the beginning, were my only subjects to practice on, and I am convinced they were all natural born linguists. I took hundreds of taxi rides in my year there and I only remember ONE DRIVER who admitted he knew only Arabic. I should have hired him for the rest of the year!

As the fellow in the article states, you soon find yourself pretending not to be an English-speaker so they'll be forced to speak Arabic with you. I don't know what the writer looks like, but I'm blonde with blue eyes, so my first try was telling the driver I was German and spoke no English.

I should not have been shocked when he answered me back in fluent German, at which point I had to confess that, though I am 50% German, I only know 5% of the German language.

Eventually I had better luck telling them I was Norwegian. If I was too tired to argue, I just got used to speaking Arabic to Arabs who always spoke English to me. I mean, after all, we were both just trying to learn a new language.

The only surefire way to be immersed completely in the local language was to get out of town. I was extremely fortunate to get invited to a four-day wedding in a remote village north of Cairo in February of 1994. Four days of being grilled non-stop in the Egyptian dialect by numerous generations of very curious villagers did more to advance my fluency than the entire year of colloquial classes at The American University of Cairo.

Struggling to practice Arabic in Egypt
By PETER PRENGAMAN, Associated Press Writer Peter Prengaman, Associated Press Writer – Mon Mar 16, 1:36 pm ET

CAIRO, Egypt – It was a simple question that I know I posed correctly in Arabic.

"What time does the movie 'Stolen Kisses' begin?" I asked the guy at the ticket booth in my best Egyptian dialect.

"At 7 o'clock," he responded in heavily accented and barely understandable English, as if I hadn't just spoken to him in Arabic.

"How much are the tickets?" I said in dialect, refusing to speak to him in English.

"Twenty Egyptian pounds," he answered, again in English.

I had come to Cairo for a month to do an intensive Arabic course after studying the language three years at UCLA, and had become accustomed to such linguistic battles. With a small group of men hovering to watch this ridiculous conversation unfold, it was time to employ a surprise maneuver that would be my best chance for linguistic triumph.

I shook my head in disbelief, and then, switching to Modern Standard Arabic, and speaking louder, asked the man in a sarcastic tone: "Do you even speak Arabic?"

The question produced laughter from him and the audience, but it had the desired effect: By asking in the written and more formal Arabic that only educated Arabs are truly versed in, I had changed the equation. Instead of trying to show me he spoke English, he was now on the hook to show me he had a good level in standard Arabic — in essence, that he had a certain level of education.

"Yes, of course," he said in Arabic, the standard variety, no less. "You are funny."


I told him that since we were in Egypt I figured we might as well speak Arabic. We both had a laugh, and after a few more exchanges we shook hands. I told him I would come back later to see the movie.

When it comes to culture, history and even Arabic, Egypt is arguably the center of the Arab world. Egypt strikes a middle ground, both philosophical and geographical, between the more liberal Arabic-speaking countries like Morocco to the west and conservative Gulf nations like Saudi Arabia to the east. And as Egyptians will proudly tell you, their dialect is the most widely understood worldwide thanks to Egyptian movies and music that for decades have been beamed into Arab households across the Middle East.

Despite all that, trying to learn Arabic in an Arabic-speaking country can be difficult. For one thing, Egyptians jump on any chance they get to practice English, even if they only know a few words. And spoken Arabic dialects are hard to master no matter which country you try to learn them in, because they're often so wildly different from standard Arabic that they seem like a different language.

Most universities in the United States and other English-speaking countries only teach standard Arabic, and not the dialects of particular countries. Standard Arabic is the written language of schools, diplomacy, banking and news. It's not, however, a language that anyone outside of those circles speaks on a daily basis.

So does it make sense to learn it? Wouldn't it just be better to study a dialect? These are questions that perplex every student of Arabic. My short answer is that if you just learn a dialect (likely on your own, because few places teach them), you may be limited to that one country. Also, dialects are not widely written. You might be able to read a street sign, but not a newspaper or magazine if you don't know formal Arabic.

The reality is that the Arab world has a standard written language and then several spoken dialects (so as not to offend Arabic purists, I should also mention Classical Arabic, the language of the Quran and Arabic's highest written form).

When I arrived in Cairo and got in a taxi, I thought I was in the wrong country. Because I had had very little training in Egyptian dialect before arrival, I spoke to the driver in standard Arabic. He understood me — most Egyptians comprehend it but can't converse in it — but I had no clue what he said in reply.

Eleven terms of high-level Arabic at UCLA, including advanced courses with poetry, Quranic verses and full compositions, and I couldn't even shoot the breeze with this guy!

Within a few weeks, I was more comfortable with the dialect, in large part thanks to an intensive course at the International Language Institute that focused on helping advanced students morph their standard Arabic into something they can use on the street.

One of my coolest experiences in Cairo happened at a kiosk. Buying a newspaper in Arabic, I struck up a conversation with the guy working at the kiosk, Ahmed. An avid reader, Ahmed had a very good level of standard Arabic and was proud to use it. A few minutes later, his friend Mohammed arrived.

Mohammed saw my newspaper and told me he couldn't read or write since he had never gone to school. Curious about the United States, as many Egyptians are, Mohammed had question after question. But I struggled to understand a lot of what he said because he of course spoke in dialect.

So Ahmed jumped in, translating for me Mohammed's questions into standard Arabic. I would then respond in standard Arabic, and if Mohammed didn't understand, Ahmed would then translate what I said back to dialect. The fascinating 45-minute conversation hit home for me just how complex Arabic can be, even for native speakers.

The second challenge in Egypt is communicating in English. As in many foreign countries, there are a handful in Egypt who speak it amazingly well, while the vast majority have a level somewhere between zilch to intermediate.

The difference is that so many Egyptians seem to believe they need to use what they know with foreigners. Of course, so few foreigners speak Arabic that Egyptians assume it's better to use English — and getting them to change that assumption can be tough.

"Speak to me in English," the guy at the train station in Alexandria told me when I asked for a ticket in Arabic.

I did just that, responding in unfiltered and normal-speed English just to test this guy's chops (after all, he had questioned my manhood, in linguistic terms).

The result? He stared at me blankly, and we were reduced to gestures and grunts.

This passion for English may have several roots. Egypt is a former British colony. English-language movies, TV and culture are ubiquitous. Plus, English is the worldwide language of business, and Egyptians are some of the toughest negotiators you'll ever meet.

On the street, it comes down to this: An Egyptian man who knows 10 words of English will often, literally, use them over and over in conversation, even if you both are speaking in Arabic and it's clear you understand. For example, while speaking Arabic, when he comes to a place where the word "good" could be used, and he knows that word in English, he'll insert it.

That can be disorienting. When you don't understand something, it's hard to know if he used a few words in English that you didn't recognize because of poor pronunciation, or if you simply just didn't understand the Arabic.

Attempting to avoid English, by week two I was telling taxi drivers and others I came across that I was Spanish or French, and that I didn't speak English. That neutralized English somewhat, but pretending that I didn't understand my native language felt strange.

Of course, studying Arabic in Egypt will help students develop a much better grasp of the language than anything they could do in the United States.

Egyptians may be enamored of English and have a hard-to-master dialect, but Arabic is the national language and it's alive and well. Add to that fun and very social people — not long after meeting someone, you often find yourself at a cafe sipping tea and smoking flavored tobacco out of a hookah pipe — and you've got a formula for what any stint abroad should be: an adventure.

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FBI plans large hiring blitz

(Phil Klein/Reuters)

Yes, I saw it. No, they won't be any more interested in hiring me now than they were in November of 2001. Trust me. You don't get more fluent as time passes, you get less. It's just a funny thing about complex languages with 5 times the vocabulary of English.

And I somehow doubt they'd see the humor in this morning's earlier entry.

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240,000 dollars awarded to man forced to cover Arab T-shirt

Image from littlecloudyskye on Flickr

I like, sometimes, to imagine that American citizens are not the stupidest ones on the planet, but most of the time the evidence points so overwhelming in the other direction that I have to throw my arms up and pull my hoodie down over my face. This would be another one of those times.

Just last week we had the family of Muslims ejected from an airplane after one of the women quietly asked a family member (not standing up and canvassing the flight, mind you) where the safest place was to be seated on a plane. You mean Muslims are scared to fly, too? Why, that almost makes them human! Not quite, of course--don't be stupid.

That article can be found here, under More Stupid American Tricks.

Now, word surfaces that another traveler was forced to change shirts so he could board a JetBlue flight back in August.

240,000 dollars awarded to man forced to cover Arab T-shirt

His transgression--besides being born with Arab features, which is unfortunate--was that he wore a t-shirt with Arabic script on it. I cannot tell you how often I have been tempted to do this. I realize it doesn't have the same punch when worn by a blonde, light-skinned woman, but maybe it would save me the cavity search. Then again, it's been awhile...

Anyway, his shirt--and I will try to figure out how to get the script on here--was Arabic for "We will not be silent." Now if he had worn his other t-shirt, the one that says "You're all going down, suckers" I can see where someone mught be concerned. But the issue here, obviously, is that not enough people know Arabic. Maybe I can get that new job I am struggling to find by offering my services at airport terminals reading subversive (and non-subversive) Arabic t-shirts. Nike actually had one with Arabic script on it years ago as an ad campaign. I tried so hard to get one, but they sold out immediately. I can't remember if they actually said "Just do it" but the thought makes me break into fits of Liberal giggles all the same.

Now, someone is going to read this and think that I am a horrible woman who was pro-9/11. That person, and others like her, are the stupid people I was referring to before. If they really want something to be scared about, they should be watching out for redneck Oklahomans wearing sweat-stained cowboy hats waiting for their connection to Waco. Now THOSE fellas make me piss my pants.

UPDATE: Here is the t-shirt I found on the Internet at United for Peace and Justice.



Photo by AFP

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