show yourselves. currently on round 3 (been looping it since april).

and everyone is right, it does get better each time. the complexity/layering/elegant density is beyond human understanding.

specify the number. winner gets to go to Epcott

*Disclaimer: wouldn't read if you have trauma around sexual violence*

I'm a first-generation Palestinian-American who studied FosHa and Egyptian dialects in college along with Middle Eastern affairs. I love Egypt, and the Arab world, but my experience there makes it very difficult to think about going back.

For context, this is around the time of the revolution and its aftermath, when an American journalist was gang-raped in the center of Tahrir Square while everybody looked on.

Some things that happened to me and my expat friend group:

1 - Someone pulled his genitalia out in an elevator next to this girl who was waiting for the doors to open so she could move away from his body pressing against hers

2 - Walking along the Nile (not wearing a hijab), I started to get tailed by one maybe 14-year old boy, and I thought it was kinda cute. Then another appeared, and another, and suddenly I was surrounded by children. There were older men standing by all around us selling their wares on the riverbank. They watched passively, not particularly interested, like it was a Succession episode they've seen before. As the boys were beginning to tighten their circular formation around me so that I couldn't find an easy exit point, a car of young Egyptian activists pulled up with an open door and told me to get in. Told me that no man was safe to be around here, not even "boys."

3 - On my way to my first day of work for an Egyptian feminist rights activist (Dalia Ziada), I was taking some pics of the nearby bombed-out Muslim Brotherhood headquarters. Two policemen approached me and told me to come with them to their "station" (a sort of shack up the road). I showed them pictures of my passport and Visa, and they told me it wasn't wise for women to hang out alone in this part of Cairo. One of them pulled out a metal revolver and pointed it at me to make sure I understood his point. After that they served me Turkish coffee and we chain-smoked cigarettes. I wasn't allowed to leave. They kept asking me questions about myself, showed me pictures of their daughters in lockets around their neck. They delivered me to the feminist activist's office, wide-eyed, a good start to the job. Before leaving one of them "asked" for my phone number and he proceeded to call me a few times a day for the next 3 months or so.

And in general, everywhere you went you were subject to a near-constant stream of cat-calls and every male gaze

On you. I finally left after the newspaper I was working (Al Masry Al Youm) for refused to pay me for 3 month's of full-time work, and the clincher was being woken up by the vibrations of a bomb going off in a nearby neighborhood.

Plus all the disfiguring acid attacks on women that were big around that time.

Not sure why it took so long, I think the sexual stuff was just normalized as a trade-off for living in dirt-cheap apartments in an insane city.

Got back to the states and developed what turned out to be a pretty permanent hyper-vigilance.

Prequel of Gabriel's past

Arkady's ascent without nepotism

Oleg's wild boyhood days

Henry's life in America after the Departure

Martha finding love with a mild-mannered Communist in her job as a translator. Raising her daughter. Fighting.

Complex and detailed look at the exact recruitment criteria/protocols and training Directorate S agents are subjected to

Pastor Tim being annoying

Stan staying with Renee, always wondering, but after his love for Philip and all the loss he's endured, perhaps not caring

One-liners and highly detailed comments accepted

*Disclaimer: wouldn't read if you have trauma around sexual violence*

For context, this is around the time of the revolution and its aftermath, when an American journalist was gang-raped in the center of Tahrir Square (the base of the revolution) while everybody looked on.

Some things that happened to me and my expat friend group:

1 - Someone pulled his dick out in an elevator next to this girl who was waiting for the doors to open so she could move away from his body pressing against hers

2 - Walking along the Nile (not wearing a hijab), I started to get tailed by one maybe 14-year old boy, and I thought it was kinda cute. Then another appeared, and another, and suddenly I was surrounded by children. There were older men standing by all around us selling their wares on the riverbank. They watched passively, not particularly interested, like it was a Succession episode they've seen before. As the boys were beginning to tighten their circular formation around me so that I couldn't find an easy exit point, a car of young Egyptian activists pulled up with an open door and told me to get in. Told me that no man was safe to be around here, not even "boys."

3 - On my way to my first day of work for an Egyptian feminist rights activist, I was taking some pics of the nearby bombed-out Muslim Brotherhood headquarters. Two policemen approached me and told me to come with them to their "station" (a sort of shack up the road). I showed them pictures of my passport and Visa, and they told me it wasn't wise for women to hang out alone in this part of Cairo. One of them pulled out a metal revolver and pointed it at me to make sure I understood his point. After that they served me Turkish coffee and we chain-smoked cigarettes. I wasn't allowed to leave. They kept asking me questions about myself, showed me pictures of their daughters in lockets around their neck. They delivered me to the feminist activist's office, wide-eyed, a good start to the job. Before leaving one of them "asked" for my phone number and he proceeded to call me a few times a day for the next 3 months or so.

And in general, everywhere you went you were subject to a near-constant stream of cat-calls and every male gaze

On you. I finally left after the newspaper I was working for refused to pay me for 3 month's of full-time work, and the clincher was being woken up by the vibrations of a bomb going off in a nearby neighborhood.

Plus all the disfiguring acid attacks on women that were big around that time.

Not sure why it took so long, I think the sexual stuff was just normalized as a trade-off for living in dirt-cheap apartments in an insane city.

Got back to the states and developed what turned out to be a pretty permanent hyper-vigilance.

Stan/Philip garage scene in the first ep? Barbeque party? Or later on

My new bk roommate is a total caricature of herself. On the surface her politics look excellent, she has a podcast and is one of those people who’ll rush out of the house like they’re on call at the ER when ICE is reported being seen in the neighborhood.

On the level of human interaction with me, it’s just so cringe. She doesn’t smile, at anything, and often when I make decent jokes she responds with total silence. She doesn’t ever ask me a question, and threw this serbian orthodox-based sort of microshrine to my mother into a drawer when she used my room for a music lesson. She’s like a game I’m trying to beat. I won once, when I showed her an AI pic I made of Osama bin Laden reading Gone Girl, and she laughed, and it was like milk and honey.

Spent 4 hours, 4 fucking hours, talking at me about her views on Palestine and politics.

Meanwhile whenever I tried to say like one sentence about my experience or take on the issue, she would cut me off. My father's a Palestinian refugee, my mother fled from NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia, so it was pretty savage to endure someone educating me about my lived experience.

Anyway, I have never experienced someone creating such a hermetic seal around a one-sided conversation, and I went to rehab with a guy who clinically lost the ability to control his language center after years of doing DMT (his parents were the directors of the electroshock psychiatry program at Yale, so it figures).

He also had this compulsion where he moved through space using simulated skateboard tricks, like the equivalent of an air guitar, he'd do these 360 degree ollies on his imaginary board while making sound effects.

So yeah I hadn’t slept in a few days and my eyelids were vibrating with the strain of staying open. My lazy eye just started to shut completely, and she stared at me for hours in that state while she continued to educate.

Also she was criticizing my decision to attend NYU because of its treatment of pro-Palestinian protestors, its status as an elite institution, and its use of token minorities to further its image.

Her apartment was paid for with a $93,000 fellowship she got from Princeton.

Zionist Trustee blood money from a bedrock of American class disparity. Her south Asian identity generating distilled PR compared to being a grad student, because of the notoriety of the award.

She makes experimental music and it gives me panic attacks. It’s just insanely discordant sounds while she sings one lyric over and over, like one of her songs she just says “Eat the Rich” over and over for like 10 minutes. She said she was reluctant to allow poetry to distort her message and prevent it from being sufficiently implanted in others.

This approach to art is the exact opposite of everything I have ever learned or believed in.

Why are 99% of “radicals” freakishly hypocritical narcissists.

hey guys, pretty open to meeting anyone.

i like going to analog experimental film screenings and other art events.

i've got free guest admission for every major museum in the city.

this is my insta: @ against__light if you want to get some more background on me.

xoxo

I see a lot of posts on here expressing their frustration/claustrophobia at having a roommate who is at home literally all the time, even if they are just in their room. Actually most of them are about roommates who stay in their room quietly. 

I resisted posting something similar after reading the feedback and determining that I must be reacting from a less than considerate space. 

I just moved into an apartment where my roommate (who owns the apartment) surprised me by texting me from the afternoon of my arrival little updates on when she’d be out of the house and for how long. 

I thought she did this so that I could be more attentive to her cats or something, but she explained that it was because “it just feels different being in a living space alone.” 

It’s a small apartment, but my last roommate and I also shared a small space and it always felt like he was standing next to me just because of him constantly shouting at something on his computer or sort of moaning in frustration (at a news article probably). So inconsiderate of how sound travels. And honestly it was still just the physical presence thing.

In my experience, my current roommate is right. My depression and anxiety, and as a result intellectual curiosity and creativity, are affected by someone being nearby. Especially if I am in the common spaces and they can hear everything I’m doing through their door/wall. 

Maybe I am hypersensitive, but that’s not really something a person can easily change. Leaving the house for a few hours a few times a week (even just that, much less every day) — doesn’t seem like a lot to ask, unless the person has debilitating agoraphobia, and even then small amounts/microdoses of exposure therapy is what they should be doing anyway. 

Am a daughter of Palestinian and Yugoslav refugees who were infused with resourcefulness, intelligence, and resilience because of their conditions.

I was taught their mother tongues and arabic/cyrillic script before being allowed English, and I think this might have affected my language center.

Also had a brain bleed from being a premature triplet that caused some overactive neuroplasticity/rewiring of the right and left brains to compensate for the area damaged.

Our father's generational trauma made him physically abusive, and while he was removed from our lives at age 8, I've read studies about childhood hypervigilance/PTSD causing --

"intense pattern recognition, acute environmental reading, and rich internal fantasy worlds. l when I was generative thinking can be hyper-creative. [Because it] frequently ties back to self-referential stress loops, it can making sustained, linear idea generation exhausting."

I applied to 41 colleges, basically the top 40 ranked schools in the US. Wanted to go to Yale, but after a rejection there got waitlisted at Stanford and accepted to Duke.

Ended up being class president at 16 and graduating magna cum laude while also doing stuff like taking hallucinogens we ordered off Silk Road that hadn't been tested on humans yet. View intelligence as not knowing/uncertainty now, and work as a writer/experimental film artist