Where Moses took a float

April 13, 2005 - 12:38 p.m.

<%@LANGUAGE="JAVASCRIPT" CODEPAGE="1252"%> I hope you are sitting on the toilet because what I am about to tell you is so monumental you are going to shit yourself straight to hell. Laptop users: Proceed to the facilities.

My birthday is coming up soon, and I will be 29 years old. That is not the monumental part. When me and the Pilot were recovering from our accident, he asked me if I could take 10 days off of work at the last minute, and my eyes bugged out because we already have plans for a 10 day vacation in September, and this is America, where you aren’t awarded 20 days of vacation unless you take the days while lying in your coffin six feet under.

Even then, they would call it “sick leave without pay.”

But then the pilot said it’s really only 5 or 6 vacation days, plus 2 weekends, so I was like MOS DEF. He wants to take me on a trip the last week of April, but he wouldn’t say where. I assumed somewhere warm, like the Caribbean, since I’ve been bitching about the cold since the day he met me last December.

So I took the days off and immediately started going to the gym 5 days a week, because I’m sure no matter where we’re going I’ll be taking my clothes off at some point. This is truly the ugliest time of year for me, when the winter has just ravaged me, I’m soft and squishy in a bad way, and my skin is the color of Elmer’s glue and the texture of a chicken’s.

The real kick in the pants came when Belle stopped by my house a few weeks ago and I answered the door in my pajamas. He said, “You’re looking thin.” But then he grabbed my arms and my belly and squeezed and my skin squished between his fingers and he said, “What happened here? You used to be so toned, did you stop lifting weights?”

“Yes.”

He lowered his voice, cocked his head, and with the Pity Face he said, “You’re lean…and LOOSE.”

Lean and Loose.

Lean and Loose.

Lean and Loose.

Lean and Loose.

Those words have been haunting me ever since and I can hear my body reminding me with each step of the elliptical trainer: Loose, loose, loose. Hopefully I’ll be able to make some improvement in three weeks.

So here comes the monumental part, the part where each reader will momentarily lose control of his or her bowels. I am clenching my own buttocks just to be safe.

Last week I was over at the pilot’s house after a shitty day at work. He hands me a wrapped package and says, “I got you an early birthday gift.” It looks like a book, so I open it and read the title: Eyewitness Travel…Egypt.

Egypt.

EGYPT?!!

“What tha?! Uh…what is this? Uh…how? Uh…but? Uh…no fucking way…”

“Yes. That’s where we’re going, to Egypt. We’re flying to Cairo, and we’ll stay there for a couple of days, and then we’re taking a cruise down the Nile to Luxor and Aswan.”

SHUT YOUR MOUTH. The Nile? I’ve been drowning myself in De Nile my entire life and now I get to see this beautiful river up close and personal?

I was in shock for a week.

You see, to a person like me, Egypt is a fictional place like Atlantis, or heaven and hell. Egypt is a fairytale that cannot possibly exist in the same space/time continuum that I’ve been living in. I feel like I’d sooner get to Mars with Marvin the Martian than Egypt.

I’ve already discussed this at length with KC because I needed to talk to someone who can UNDERSTAND the enormity of this opportunity. He and I come from the same place, where things like travel, opportunity and knowledge do not exist beyond the scope of traveling to the river’s edge, with the opportunity of riding an inner tube on the water, and the knowledge of first applying 45spf sun block.

When we were young, KC and I spent many any hour, days and nights, discussing our dreams of what we wanted to experience in life, and places we wanted to go. Usually it was him conjuring up fantastic plans and me being supportive of his plans. He always said he wanted to see the pyramids of Egypt and vowed to get there someday. Not me. My reply was usually something along the lines of: “Good for you. You should do that.” Because in my mind I knew I was never going anywhere and couldn’t even bother to dream about it.

I’m not trying to sound like a melodramatic teenager, but honestly I was taught that my world is *THIS BIG* and that my world will never grow beyond that and my view will never change. My parents basically said: “Education, opportunity and happiness costs money. We’re not giving you any and no one else ever will, so you should just accept it and get a job.” This ideology was pounded into our heads every single day. It was like I was a horse wearing blinders and could see nothing but my feet and the patch of grass I stood on.

I could barely envision a world outside of the farmlands of the United States, much less an exotic land of desert and oases that holds evidence of an ancient culture from thousands of years ago. Growing up, I regarded National Geographic magazine as equally factual as my Dr. Seuss books, or Disney. Like Africa might exist two streets over from Sesame Street. It was all fantasy.

Now that I’m older and have lived a little, I can say with confidence that places like Germany and Italy probably do exist. However, Egypt definitely does not. When visualizing the flight, I imagine we fly over a border somewhere, like maybe past Spain, encounter some turbulence and enter a great white light. A blinding light that is so bright it eliminates sound and everything will be muffled like I am deaf and it will feel like the plane is weightless. Then the plane will disappear and we will all be floating on the white light and far away in the distance we will see Egypt and have to approach it on foot. But going to Egypt is a one-way ticket, like going to heaven (which also doesn’t exist). Our plane will fall off the radar and we will all disappear like Amelia Earhart, never to return.

You think this sounds ridiculous, but seriously, this is the thinking that goes on in my pea brain. I can’t even begin to conceive what this trip will be like.

So here’s the deal. If you email me your mailing address, I will send you a postcard from Egypt. No, I’m serious. I’ve heard that they have the worst mail system in the world, and that your letter will arrive a month later, or possibly never. I wanna do an experiment.

PS – Yes, I plan on wearing the hijab, in the hopes that it will prevent me from getting kidnapped and beheaded on video for Al Jazeera.

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