TMI?
December 13, 2005
I have mentioned here before that there is a newsgroup at Penn I still subscribe to and sometimes post to when I�m bored. Today I posted two stories there, one of which received some response, while the other received no response at all. Was it too creepy, me telling the second story? I put this question to you.
Here is the first story:
This past Saturday I was out running a bunch of errands, and made my last errand stop at the pharmacy near our house. In Egypt you can get everything delivered, so we don't usually go to the pharmacy to get what we need, but I figured since I was out I would just get the stuff myself before heading home. I walked in feeling icky and harrassed because of the heat and the fact that I had misjudged the weather and was wearing a sweater, and I'm pretty sure I wasn't looking my best or friendliest. In any case, I picked up some stuff for my gran who is staying with us, and left as quickly as I could, while trying be a little polite to the female pharmacist who was on duty.
Last night, one of the delivery guys came to our house even though we hadn't ordered anything, and asked for my dad's phone number. My dad, who buys a lot of medication for his family and so is in the habit of consulting the pharmacist over the phone, gave him his number without much thought figuring that the pharmacist wanted to have his number on file in case any new medication came in or something like that. A little while later the female pharmacist who had helped me on Saturday called my dad and told him that she had met his daughter and had an older brother who is an orthopedic surgeon who is looking to get married, and that she'd liked what she had seen of me and wanted to set up a meeting between our families to see if there was any interest. This is the way people do things in Egypt sometimes, though my immediate family is not in the habit of doing these socalled "salon style marriages". So, even though my parents don't generally encourage this type of meeting, I sense that they are curious about trying out this method that
most of their friends and family use to get their kids married. While
obviously I reject this concept, I can't say I'm not also a little curious as to how this sort of thing works, and did not outright reject the
proposition. Ok, actually I did, but now I'm wondering if I shouldn't just
meet the guy as a sort of social experiment/experience.
[What do you guys think? Should I go through with the meeting? Yes or no?]
And here is the second story, which I posted because the folks on the newsgroup like to joke about how I abuse my maids, even though I don�t, especially since, as you will see, up until last week we didn�t have a live-in maid:
So, contrary to popular belief, up until last week we didn't actually have a maid. We used to have someone who came in two or three times a week to cook and helped with the cleaning, but not someone who lived with us like a lot of Egyptian families do. She quit a few months ago, but we were in no rush to replace her as my mom and I both like cooking, and are a litlte OCD about cleaning. So, anyway, last week my mom gets a call from this lady from her village. It seems that she had been working as a maid for another family when they moved away, and her son recently got married and had incurred some debts so she was looking for a job to help him out. None of us, believe it or not, like the idea of someone living in our house or waiting on us hand and foot, but my mom wanted to help a fellow villager out, so she told her to come to Cairo and we'd see how things worked out.
On her third night with us, (actually I think it was Saturday night) she
went to bed at her usual time, which is around 9pm, and we were hanging out
with my grandmother in the TV room, which is sort of behind the room where
Mabrouka sleeps. Suddenly we hear this blood-curdling scream (seriously, it
was right out of a horror movie) from Mabrouka's room, and we all jump up to
find her running out of the room still screaming and shaking. At first we
thought maybe she'd seen a mouse or a roach or something, but she's all
crying and shaking and trying to tell us what happened. I don't know the
exact story, because my sister and I were trying to make sure my grandmother didn't have a heart attack, but from what I understood from my mom, Mabrouka says she had just nodded off when she felt something tugging at her blanket.
She tried to tug the blanket back and saw an arm reaching out from the night
table. She tried to shake it off, and the arm grabbed her wrist, and worried
that it wouldn't let her go she started screaming and ran for the door, etc. Of course she was totally freaked out and my mom held her until she was able to go back to sleep, but now she's convinced our house is haunted and doesn't want to sleep there anymore.
The end.
Too creepy? Should I not have told this story? Does it make me sound insensitive? We have all been really worried about Mabrouka, and don�t know what to do, but did my posting this story make it sound like I was making light of her fears?
Finally, I sent out the link to my more personal pictures from Ireland, anyone who did not receive the email let me know and I�ll send it along.