I recently realized (or perhaps more precisely, I recently admitted to myself) why it is that I spend so much time and effort cooking, when really I'd be so much better off spending that time writing or studying.

Very simply, it's because I associate good home-cooked food with places, times, and people who made me feel as safe, loved, and at home as I have ever felt.

Thanks Mom and Mrs. D!

This summer, soon after I first moved into my apartment, I put up a sheet of aluminum foil over the little bedroom window that faces east over the Nile and the cityscape of Cairo, and which also happens to overlook my bed. The early rising sun would peek through at an unseemly hour, and even when I tossed and turned on the mattress trying to escape its indomitable march into my sleep time, the ferocity of its rays warmed the room to an uncomfortable temperature that was impossible to sleep through.

Over months, crinkles, wrinkles, then hairline cracks began to appear in my window cover. In the mornings golden flecks began to glimmer along the aluminum faultlines. Soon tiny holes punctuated the steely gray, sun freckles flowing through onto my pillow, the headrest, lights of something divinely alive behind the tattered thin but tenacious metal curtain.

And when a starry burst of morning strays over my yet half-sleeping eyes, in dim musings I consider that behind the world I choose to see, is another more glorious light-filled world to which I am somehow tied inextricably but unwilling or unable to behold other than through the cracks in those fragile barriers that anchor me to the finite spaces of the familiar.

Thoughts about living abroad

A very important part of me wants to exert every effort to make a difference in the world, which I often imagine to entail being places, seeing and doing things that other people might not be willing to do.

But there are also times when in a more personal vein I imagine what will inevitably come to pass—my parents growing into old age, my grandparents ebbing in their twilight years and someday leaving us, my siblings becoming adults, dear friends getting married, having children—and I wonder how I could tolerate not being there for it all, what portion of inner humanity I might be sacrificing if I absent myself from the ordinary events of lives in procession intertwined.

in response to david's note about marriage

In addition to most of what you've said, it's also occurred to me that maybe marriage as an institution and a construct is useful because it essentially is a mutually agreed upon raising of the efforts required to get out of a relationship. In other words, I mean there are the very mundane but time consuming aspects of a divorce (legal fees, contacting a lawyer, custody, property, etc), but they're really only important as extensions of the larger idea of a merging of two people. I know we're all bigger on the emotional/psychological/spiritual dimensions of such a conjoining (oh, and the physical... although that's not at all what i'm talking about, but since I'm a guy I guess I had to throw it in) and with respect to the emotional stuff we think: why the hell do we need marriage if it's just a technical affirmation of what we already know in a more visceral meaningful way? I mean, the short answer is we don't, but I guess the long answer might be that why shouldn't that emotional/spiritual/whatever conjoining also have its legal and socially constructed counterparts. Or from another angle entirely, if I and my partner mutually agree that we'd like to be together for the indefinite future, conceivably even the duration of our natural lives (because when I am reborn as a robot, I want to be able to date other hot robot chicks--not my old repulsively human wife), then why not make it such that should an extemely difficult but ultimately resolvable conflict arise between us, we have additional incentives to work things out, and should we decide not to, then it would be easier for me to feel certain it was too much to deal with, because otherwise why the hell would I think it worthwhile to go through the double hell of emotional devestation and pains in the ass that both come with divorce.

Also, with regards to marriage and monogamy both being social constructs I agree, with regards to whether or not they bring a semblance of order I'm not as sure, just because the whole idea of their being mere constructs may be that there is nothing organic or intrinsically inevitable about monogamy or marriage, and so if society were constructed such that we all didn't have this big hang up about our soulmates of opposite gender neccesarily being our exclusive bedmates (or more importantly our being THEIR exclusive bedmates), and maybe... instead sex were more divided from emotions, or both sex and emotions were made communal and inclusive rather than competitive and exclusive (one drawback is of course the matter of who would raise the world's children and how) then maybe we'd all be cool with that too.

Having said all of this, and I'm not sure how much any of it's worth, I still desire that happy day when I can convince myself to marry someone (or much more importantly, consequently convince them to marry me) because of all manner of half-imbibed dreams, stories, and images of marital happiness which, in sum total, basically just means in my limited myopic way I try to see outside the constructs but rarely actually manage to sucessfully divorce them from my inner self--like i said, it's just such a pain in the ass.