My very own popular high school snob

Before I wrote that exaggerated self-pitying dollop of a last post (I would delete it but that seems emotionally dishonest) I was actually hanging out with a friend. This friend, Little Bubbly, is my oldest remaining friend. I have known her, literally, since birth. We went through all the various milestones together (feeling superior to our community and friends, doubting religion, rejecting the conformist bourgeois pressures of Egyptian society, thinking about boys). She is teeny and cute. I usually feel like a lumbering giant around her, especially as every meeting of ours begins with her criticizing my outfit, hair and figure. I actually put on a top I don’t even like because I thought she would like it, and then she made me take it off, told me that I had always had a belly although the scales beg to differ, and that my hair was coarse (it’s so not, especially for an Egyptian chick). She’s a lovely person.
She is moving to Egypt for a while in order – get this – to experience good Christian fellowship. The Christian fellowship in Kuwait is definitely lame; there aren’t enough young people because they all go off to university and don’t come back. And in Canada, she opines that the combination of whiteness and churchiness results in utterly boring people. But seriously, I have met very, very few born-agains anywhere who I can stand to be around. One of them is my sister, and we wouldn’t even be friends if we didn’t venture forth from the same womb. And I have a lot lower standards for coolness than Little Bubbly. She hopes to meet fashion-conscious, interesting, fun, rich people who walk with Christ. It’s not going to happen.
So that’s the first problem I have with her moving-to-Egypt plan. Another is that she is a real clean freak and super finicky. Her favourite words are “nasty”, “dirty” and “eew” – and I’ve never heard them uttered with such expressiveness. She refuses to eat out, and thinks City Stars is gross…and I mean actually unhygienic. This bodes ill, as any Cairene knows. I continued to stuff my face with cafe food as she told me this, while she fastidiously drank a mineral water. Nowhere here is clean or luxurious or even properly maintained and that’s just the way it is. She works for an NGO, and they and their staff are always dodgy, too. She doesn’t want to ride in any taxis – she airily informed me that she was going to hire a car and driver. At this point we stopped to watch the couple in front of us – the girl was pornographically biting her greasy, long-haired boyfriend’s muscular bicep. This happened more than once. He sat there accepting her teenage sexual twitchings as his manly, just due.

I will try to adequately amuse her, but where? And who with? None of my friends wear tight gold belts around their waists! Most of them eschew real shoes. I can’t remember when I last interacted with anyone with spiky gelled hair. I wear more makeup than most of my female friends – and I don’t actually own any foundation and never wear mascara. I don’t personally know anyone with skinny jeans (which, by the way, are truly dire). We will see.

Posted in: Copts, Egypt, friends