Oh hello there, blog

May 2010
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Poor neglected blog – it’s been nearly two weeks since my last update & so little & so much has happened.
So little in the way that life is mostly work, not much else & I spent part of this week in bed sick.
So much in the way that living in Cairo is never simple & never boring.

The dust came in today. When I woke up at 7:30am, it was 90 degrees & the skies were looking ominous.

My mouth was gritty & my eyes were watery anytime I was outside. Also, the table I wiped down last night has a lovely layer of dust [as does EVERYTHING in the apartment] now. As my roommate said, cleaning is a lost cause until this passes in the next day or two.

I’ve been giving some thought about applying for a Fulbright lately. Coming back to Egypt would be ideal & I’ve emailed about possibly auditing Arabic – I need at least a year of study, but I don’t want to stress about those grades on top of finishing my grad work, considering it’d be an extra 5 credits each semester.

My very rough idea is this: “To explore the use, creation and dissemination of records in fighting human rights abuses and to better equip archives and libraries to facilitate future work toward exposing and stopping human rights violations.” I’m looking for feedback & suggestions, so please don’t hesitate to give your input!

Things are going wonderfully well at my internship. Running a Twitter account & Facebook page is fun [check out both!!] & they’re interested in setting up a Flickr account. I’ve gone through 31 boxes of records & have just finished comparing them against the retention plan – something that wasn’t in place when the records were created. Although we talk about weeding & deaccessioning a lot in class, it’s a little frightening really to look at these records & know that I’ll be tossing out a third of them. They’re records of the Vice Provost, so no one will live or die without these records so I get to avoid what my professor refers to as “the long, dark night of the soul,” but it’s still a little intimidating.

Well I’m going to go indulge myself now. Today my roommate & I took a journey & procured ourselves a small stockpile of liquid in cans that is absolutely haram in our neighborhood. We’re quite the scandalous foreigners, sneaking in heavy black bags!