My First Post

I've often struggled with the idea of creating and maintaining a blog. How do you come up with a vision, a tone, a message, a persona, with which you can consistently present yourself and the world to, well, the world. How do you present a voice to change the world in this ever changing world? And how do I, a young Egyptian woman fit into it the world after all? How can I reconcile writing about corruption in Egypt, about poverty or about injustice with the fact that I write these things on a new laptop sitting on the balcony of an expensive apartment complex in the trendy Cairo suburbs. I've never stood in line for bread but I want to write about the subsidies. I've never really been hassled by a police man but I want to burn down the police stations. I've had an American education yet at times I can barely look at the American flag. I've had an Egyptian education yet at times I can barely listen to the anthem. How can I criticize over consumption as I listen to my i-pod on shuffle?

Then 2008 came and my life shifted and shuffled almost beyond recognition. To me at least. I figured 21 was a good age, for most things. I may never reconcile any of what I just mentioned, or maybe this blog will help me do just that. Maybe they are all irreconcilable, but maybe they're meant to be just that. Speculating about it any more seemed futile. If I do have a place in this ever changing world, then it is precisely an ever changing place. So this blog is to mark my positions, moment by moment as they continue to evolve and regress and shift, probably beyond recognition. But maybe they will seem familiar to someone else. And maybe I will eventually carve a space, even if it is only in virtual reality, in which things don’t really need to be familiar for them to be totally mine.