Goodbye New York

After a week of loafing around here doing nothing of any use to anyone, I'm off to seek my fortunes among camels, palm trees, and pyramids. If this were a Paul Bowles story, I would play the role of a naive Western intellectual who goes traipsing off to the Middle East in search of anthropological enlightenment and a touch of exotic adventure, only to find herself unwittingly mixed up in a dark subculture of cannibalistic Bedouins and ancient barbarism. However, this is not a Paul Bowles story, and from our modern perspective of educated liberalism, we have to condemn the idea of cannibalistic Bedouins as being the product of stereotype and imperialist ignorance (rather than acknowledging any possibility that Bowles might be telling the truth). Instead, we'll take a more humanist view of things, and say that the Egyptians are people just like us, and despite linguistic and cultural barriers, our more-similar-than-different human identities will facilitate communication.