I miss being able to take the evening to myself and read a good book. I think that’s what they wanted out of education in Egypt, to shove so much information down people’s throats that they no longer have the ability to ingest it on their own, let alone know which ones they want or have the time for the mere process of free thought. I thought I could beat the system, have a life and an education, the good old hardcore way. Now I’m wondering if I’ve overestimated my abilities or am underestimating them right now because of a shot morale.
Watching people is entertaining. I may come off as a classist bourgeoisie bitch after this post, but I don’t really care. Your opinion of me is something that doesn’t really concern me, and this, I write for me. It gets pretty boring in class sometimes.
There’s the socially inept nerd. The genius who works his ass off every waking hour of the day and hardly gets any sleep, with huge eye bags hidden behind disproportionately thick reading glasses, perceives classes as his only chance to socialize, since he can’t really function in any other field than academe. He’s always trying so hard to fit in and being rebutted, because people around this age have a cruel cool-o-meter. He’s always laughing nervously in conversations, starting and stopping abruptly when the people he’s talking to are not even smirking. He hyperventilates and shakes when made fun of. He comes early to class every time, and tries to strike a friendship up with the teacher by trying to think of a smart question, who now ignores that he’s even talking and lets the laughing hysteria handle his breaking voice till it dies out. It’s not a surprise that he can’t come up with something that is beyond his conformist head, for someone whose only knowledge comes from a third-world country, government-assigned textbook, his only intelligence is in his finding out the patterns of medieval curriculums. We still use the same Arabic syllabus as that of my grandma’s, and their idea of modifying it is adding the mechanism of CRT in physics. Needless to add, he always makes a fool out of himself, and doesn’t seem to have any friends, if you don’t count the people who are getting him to do their homework. He’s always ignored if it doesn’t have anything to do with work, locked outside of a tightly-knit circle of bros, interrupted and never heard. I don’t think he’s aware of it, since he seems to be enjoying the attention of being given their copybooks. His friends are demeaning and abusive, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen him relaxed. His clothes look like his dad is trying to get him to look socially acceptable, about the only 18 year old sporting an 80’s design polished brown leather shoes I’ve seen. He can’t keep eye contact with anyone and settles for keeping his broken look fixated on people’s shoulders, or at a point in the horizon beyond their heads. I’m guessing the conversation makes him nervous enough that if he tried to lock another person’s gaze he’d die of tachycardia. I see him an overworked and underpaid accountant in a company where his ideas will be stolen, he’ll never get promoted, marry a chick he’s never seen that his mother has picked out for him and grow into a brown tie and never see any different till he turns 80 and dies in his armchair, working at a crossword puzzle like his life depended on it.
There’s the neanderthal of a chick whose greasy hair bypasses her ass, and long fingernails that make her incapable of picking up objects, old nail polish that’s never tended to, wardrobe that smells of stagnant sweat and looks like a grocer took his ambition of fashion design to the next level. She draws a cross in pencil on top of every page, rubs her finger in it and kisses it with every page she turns, leaving it smudgy and wearing the paper down to shreds by the 6th month. It took me a while to get my horrified expression to be understandably poker-faced. Mentalities like hers scare me. You try so hard to convince yourself that those are a minority, that you pick your own community and even though you’re living around them, you will not be affected, that you don’t judge people according to their looks or backgrounds, you’re only being a classist asshole by thinking along those lines, but you can’t, because people’s looks, backgrounds and manners of speech are a rooted in who they are. They’re acquired, just as their beliefs and morals are. They show you which era they’re stuck in and how they react to progress.
There’s the huge faction of girls who look and dress like a tiny microcosms of their housewife of a mother. They make it a point to breathe quietly, and never say what they think. Sometimes, they make it a point not to think anything other than what they’ve been told to think, and sometimes, not even that. They walk in, keep their eyes on the tiles they’re stepping on and make sure the copybooks don’t make a sound as they hit the desks. They run a little when out of a crowd, and breathe normally again when they’re part of the background again. They all look alike, talk alike, move alike and huddle. They don’t know any different, and they don’t want to. They have their little quiet crowds, and its bubble is almost discernible, an entity with its own vibrations and existing in its own medium. They’d choke if it was poked through, or if they were forced to come out of it, even for a fraction of a second, to maybe talk to a new person, think of an advanced question that’s not covered in the curriculum, or laugh out of cue. The thought of their lives kill me. Not necessarily having it, even just seeing that some people live like that. Reduced to that.
There are the plastics. The Barbies and Jocks, the ones all of the above stop to look at when they saunter in. They’re all perfectly cloned and a little hard to distinguish from in my head as Asians are to the rest of the world. Same shoes, haircuts and blackberries. Same fake smiles and exaggerated hugs, same lingo. Same everything really. They’re especially sensitive to the smallest shifts in social trends, and make sure to keep up. It almost seems like they’re in on all the unspoken rules of a secret fraternity/sorority left from the days Nazism was in. They know all the right proportions, lengths and forms of acceptable conversation. They’re usually selfish snobs who never help if they can help it, and never concentrate unless they don’t have enough coverage. There are the hunks, who are a lot similar to that category, with a little addition of making sure the ratio of their muscle to brain grown is 5:1 at any point in given time.
There are the religious fucks, in all religions and mutations, the ones who spend 78% of their time researching theology and quoting scripture, then complain about not having time to work on their assignments. They’re self-righteous assholes who think that getting to heaven is by scoring points, by hours spent in research, bullying outcasts and obliterating their sex to the point of no return, looking like a tranny. They handle their bodies the same way a person would handle a deformed baby; they keep it covered, unisex and untended to. Their speech is integrated with religious aphorisms and what god wants, as opposed to what they want, which I don’t think they even know. They’ve been taught that different is atheist, that being sweet is whoring yourself out and that caring for worldly matters such as studying takes out points out of their heavenly score.
And there’s the nonchalant cool guys, the ones that everybody can’t decide whether they wanna be like or be nothing like, and settle on not really figuring it out because they never dared to be that different. They’re outspoken, think outside of the box, usually have one or two things they’re exceptionally good at and are every teacher’s nightmare. They have their own clan of worshippers, of all of the above categories. Much like how one would like to keep their friends close and their enemies closer. They can’t understand him, they can’t be like him, they can’t control him, so they keep him close, but not to close. They have a lot of friends, neither of which are really friends. And they can think, but were never given the chance to use it.
People watching is much like bird watching, except that it’s not for the faint of heart.
I need to get away.
