Bill's Blog

I wanted to read Cline’s book, Switzy, about a retired executive ready to end his life through assisted suicide, but there is a long queue for it on my digital library app, Libby. So I selected one of her earlier books, The Guest (2023) about a young woman’s week out in the Hamptons, the expensive eastern end of Long Island. She is an escort and the story begins with a falling out she is having with her latest client Simon, a rich, 50 year old divorced man. The guy’s personal assistant takes her to the train station to go back to NYC after he finds that she dented his car and didn’t tell him. The protagonist Alex, is 22 years old and makes a living selling her youth to rich, older men and being a girlfriend-for-hire. She is hit some tough times with only $400 in her bank account and getting kicked out of her shared accommodations in NYC because she fell behind in rent payments. She also stole a large sum of money from her ex-boyfriend, Dom, who seems to be a type of gangster and is after her.

Instead of going back to NYC, she stays in the Hamptons in the hope of reuniting with Simon at his Labor Day party the next week. The story follows how she manipulates people to find places to stay and food over the week. People eventually get on to her as a thief and future bag lady as she makes her exit from a free meal and night’s stay to find the next target. She is addicted to pills and alcohol as well and I followed the story with sadness. I would have liked to know how Alex got into this lifestyle. Cline gives nothing of her background, except she is from Upstate New York and never went to university. She is attractive but her unhealthy habits are quickly aging her. I wonder how many women are in similar situations? They must not have the family support to get them started in a decent career.

I liked that Alex enjoyed swimming and being at the beach. Cline’s description of the sun, sand, wind, dunes, etc. made me feel I was there. I love the simple things in life and spending a day at the beach and riding bicycles is my idea of the perfect day.

I won’t give away the ending. Alex has all her hopes on having Simon take her back and she refers to a vision of him welcoming her back as she makes a romantic entrance at the party. It was a compelling story that I wanted to find out if she made it through the week. Alex is not thinking long-term about anything, just trying to get by day-to-day. That was a good choice by the author as many young people don’t see the big picture. It helped me pass the time while waiting for Nadia to finish shopping or at this doctor’s appointments this week and fall back to sleep. I am looking forward to Switzy to show up in my Libby App as I will probably relate to him more than I did Alex. However, that is one of the great aspects of literature, it allows you to empathize and truly experience another person’s experience. We are all human and relate to each other despite differences in age, gender, nationality, etc. Humans are humans.

It is remarkable that Frankl was able to survive and fortunate for posterity that he chose to bear witness to the atrocities of the Holocaust. He was born in Vienna, Austria in 1905 and became a respected neurologist and psychiatrist, leading the department starting in 1940 at the Rothschild Hospital. It is a coincidence that one of my last blog posts about Positive Discipline teaching pedagogy was based on the work of Viennese psychologist, Alfred Adler, was one of the mentors of Frankl.

I wondered why Frankl ended up in a concentration camp when many German Jews had the means to escape an increasingly agressive German government. He did get a US visa in 1941 and chose not to use it due to his aging parents. In December 1941 he got married to a nurse at the hospital, Tilly Grosser. Their happiness was cut short when his family was sent to the Jewish Ghetto Theresienstadt in Terezín, now part of Czechia in September 1942. Approximately 140,000 people were sent there with the overcrowding and horrible conditions killing over 33,000 people, including his father who died of exhaustion in January 1943. Another 88,000 residents eventually died in concentration camps. Frankl served the traumatized residents of the ghetto.

The couple was forced to have an abortion because Jewish people were not allowed to have children in the ghetto. In 1943 they were transferred to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp where his mother was immediately sent to the gas chambers because she was not physically able to work. Tilly was transferred to the Bergen-Belsen camp in late 1944 and later died there in 1945 shortly before the camp was liberated. What trauma he endured with the death of his parents, the forced abortion, and being separated from his wife. He was transferred to different Dachau subcamps and eventually was freed by American forces on April 27, 1945 after over 2 and a half years as prisoner 119104.

He would go on to be a director of the Vienna Neurological Policlinic for 25 years and a world famous author and speaker. He married again in 1947 and had a daughter. He founded the Logotherapy movement and eventually dies of heart failure in September 2, 1997 at the age of 92. He taught and spoke around the world including Harvard and the University of Vienna.

Going through such a traumatic experience shaped his philosophy and him as a person. Having a scientific mind, he viewed it as an experiment where the subjects, him and his fellow prisoners, got everything taken away from them. Stripped of material possessions, family, comfort, health, reputation, etc. allowed him to clearly see that humans need meaning or a reason to live and thrive. It was easy in the those conditions to lose hope and many prisoners died from sadness and grief. It shows how powerful the mind is to strengthen the body’s immune system and other biological processes.

That is good advice for all of us even today. We are not subjected to the suffering he had, although suffering is a part of life. I get a lot of joy by being able to provide for my family and love my wife Nadia and my children. I also get satisfaction and reward by serving others as a school leader. It is the idea of something bigger than oneself, something that is not self-centered, that actually gives me the most pleasure. I do still pursue happiness in the in Jeffersonian sense. Exercise and sport (yoga, tennis, cycling), exploring history and culture through travel, and contemplating nature and wilderness give me much pleasure. But without meaning, they are a secondary concern.

The second half of the book details his Logotherapy, which is the therapist helping patience find meaning in their lives. The idea is depression and despair come from the feeling that life has no purpose. The three paths to meaning are creating something for doing a deed, experiencing something or loving someone, and choosing one’s attitude towards unavoidable suffering. Below are quotes from the first half of the book that resonated with me.

• “Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.” “…everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.|
• “I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved.”
• “For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensure, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.”
• “…the most depressing influence of all was that a prisoner could not know how long iis term of imprisonment would be.”
• “One could make a victory of those experiences, turning life into an inner triumph or one could ignore the challenge and simply vegetate, as did a majority of the prisoners.”
• “I once had a dramatic demo of the close link between the loss of faith in the future and this dangerous giving up.”
• Nietzsche – “He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how.”

Nadia and I spent a lot of the week exercising and getting to know the amenities of living in Uptown Cairo. We moved in last month and haven’t had much time to settle into our new lves. The Fall Break was a good time to catch our breath and improve our well being. We played our first tennis game together since we moved here. There are three tennis courts in Uptown Cairo. The court at the Community Center in Reyna is free and the two courts in in Sports Complex are for rent. You can book courts on the Emaar App which is very convenient. For the record, I won 6-2 in our one competitive set. There were a lot of deuce games and my shoulder felt OK.

Yesterday morning I visited the Wadi Degla Reserve for the second time this week. I rode my bicycle this time and went 12 kilometers from the entrance. It was a beautiful morning and I thoroughly enjoyed riding the trails. Next time I’ll ride along the top of the canyon walls as I noticed mountain bikers up high.

Nadia got me a new yoga set for our anniversary. I got Nadia a bicycle and so we went out for a ride Thursday evening. We discovered a full gym called LA 7 at the Golf Clubhouse. Yearly memberships cost only $200 per year and the gym as you can see below, is quite large and has indoor and outdoor sections. There is also a beautiful 18-hole golf course here but I am not a golfer. Not too many people play golf on the courses I’ve seen inside of gated communities, I think they are put in more for the aesthetic rather than for playing. The cart trails make for excellent cycling and it varies up my trails around the compound during the week.

After getting through the Zabbaleen streets, we reached the beautiful monastery named in honor of St. Simon. We didn’t explore much of the monastery because the afternoon breezes were sending odors from the garbage city into the monastery and Nadia couldn’t take it. We did manage to enter the huge outdoor church inside a shallow cave-like formation and sit for a bit to soak in the atmosphere. I am fascinated with the Coptic Church. Coptic tradition dates back to the St. Mark (author of one of the four books of the Gospel) who founded the Church of Alexandria, Egypt between 42 and 60 AD. Of course ancient history is difficult to verify with so much time passing and no video/digital documentation back then. He was martyred under the reign of the Roman Emperor Nero in 68 AD. Today’s Coptic Pope is considered a successor to Mark. The Copts separated from the Roman and Byzantine churches in 451 AD, more than 500 years before the split Orthodox and Roman churches. It looked more like an Orthodox alter than a Catholic alter. The word “Copt” derives from the Greek Aigyptios, meaning “Egyptian”. The Coptic language is only used in the ceremonies and liturgy today after so many centuries of the growth of Arabic in Egypt. It uses mostly Greek letters and Copts consider it to be the last stage of language of the Pharaohs. Estimates put the population at around of 10% of Egypt today.

St. Simon is traditionally place in the 10th century (900s) and the location centers on the Mokattam Mountain miracle. The mountain is said to have moved in response to the faith of the community. A local leader challenged the Christian community by citing the Biblical verse that a mustard seed could move a mountain. The mountain is said to have moved three times. Saint Simon also represents a “blue collar” profession. Tanners take livestock skins and turn them into leather and it was considered an unclean profession in those times. That must resonate with the waste management workers in the Zabbaleen community that built the monastery.

I recommend visiting early in the morning to avoid traffic delays going through Garbage City. I also would wear a mask if you are sensitive to odors.

When you get to be my age (59 years old) and having traveled the world for almost 40 years, I don’t often have totally novel experiences. Yesterday afternoon Nadia and I visited the Monastery of St. Simon “The Tanner” which is less than 2 kilometers as the crow flies from our house. The monastery is carved into the cliffs of the Mokattam Plateau. The church is beautiful and one of a kind. What makes is even more fascinating is driving through Garbage City to get there. The Zabbaleen (Garbage Collectors in Egyptian Arabic) is a community that makes its living by collecting, sorting and recycling a good portion of metropolitan Cairo’s waste and garbage.

There are no warehouses or waste management facilities, families sort through bags of rubbish in the streets and in their homes. It is literally everywhere in the narrow streets. Waste laden trucks constantly come into the city and dump it for others to sort and turn into prime material for recycling. The entire city smelled like a combination of sour milk mixed with vomit. It was like the sequel to BladeRunner but after a nuclear bomb made it even more dystopian. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The place had a normal community feeling however, with people going about their day. School kids walking home in their uniforms, old men drinking coffee in a cafe, a vendor waiting for customers in his appliance store, etc.

The Zabbaleen are a group of Coptic Christians that migrated to Mokattam in the 1930s and 1940s from southern Egypt. They have carved out (literally and figuratively) a living under the cliffs through being the waste management company of the city. You can watch the 2009 documentary “Garbage Dreams” that follows the lives of three Zabbaleen teenagers.

We didn’t stay long at the monastery because Nadia is sensitive to strong odors. There was no entrance charge to the monastery and we did see the main cathedral, but couldn’t explore the rest of the complex. On the way out of Garbage City after visiting the monastery, we had a Homeland moment. We were stuck in traffic and waiting for the truck in front of us to move, when suddenly a group of men wielding knives and machetes walked around the cars in the narrow street. A guy in the middle of the group was screaming with blood flowing from his head that was wrapped in a rags. It looked to me that he had been attacked and a vigilante mob was seeking the perpetrator. Thankfully they were hot on the trail of someone and quickly walked past us, but our car was vulnerable, stuck between two trucks front and back, and apartments on both sides of the road. It felt like we were in a movie. I wonder if they found the alleged attacker and what form of justice did they seek?

I’ll post about the monastery next. Here video Nadia shot as we made our way through the streets up to the monastery.

I ran the 10 kilometer race this morning in the Roody 50X in the nearby Wadi Degla Protectorate Nature Reserve. Ultra Ibex is a trail running and outdoor adventure events organizer. One of the founders of the organization, Raid Gamaleldin, is a parent at our school. I connected with him through his daughter leads a conservation group at our school. It was natural for me to participate considering my love of silent sports (trail running, cycling, nordic skiing) and environmental conservation. Raid told me that he started the race five years ago when he turned 50 years old and to celebrate, he ran a 50-kilometer race. He is now 55 years old and so he ran the 55-kilometer race. There was a 28-kilometer, 10-kilometer, and 5-kilometer categories.

My race was running 5 kilometers into the canyon and returning to the starting line. It was slightly uphill with only one elevation gain at around the 2.7 kilometer mark where there is a small dam. The canyon was formed by winds and occasional flash floods. It is unique to have a desert canyon on the edge of a metropolis of over 20 million people. My Strava app paused during the run while I was shooting video so I didn’t have an exact time. It was a minute or two before or after the one hour mark, which was my goal. With a bit of training, I can certainly improve my time. I felt strong coming to the end of the run. I haven’t run a race for awhile and I was exhilarated to be in a competition with others. I do more cycling that running to preserve my knees from a lifetime of distance running.

The Ultra Ibex calendar of races is amazing with trail runs in the deserts and mountains of the Sinai Peninsula and wadis along the Red Sea. The shortest distances are between 25 and 30 kilometers which I may not be up to. We’ll see how I feel this year.

We had a strong turnout for the cleanup following the races. The German Embassy, Maadi Normer School, a couple of universities, private citizens and our group from the American International School Egypt. In the first 3 kilometers of the canyon there is a lot of litter and garbage from campers and groups spending the day in the canyon. There is an almost overwhelming amount of cigarette butts, plastic food containers, potato chip bags, etc. left by picnickers. The “pack in – pack out” mentality is not here in Egypt.

My daughter got me hooked on a Japanese company’s “Life Books” that I absolutely love. Hobonichi Techo has been making planners since 2001. Japanese culture is obsessive compulsive about many things, including designing great products. The company’s designers put a lot of thought into producing a useful notebook that is meant to last as an artifact or record of one’s life for the year. The Tomoe River paper is sturdy but thin so you can fit an entire calendar year (1 page per day) in the notebook. It also has weekly sections, monthly sections and various pages to record information. I ordered the Hon model for 2027, the same I have for 2026.

I had to preserve for posterity the video exchange Ocean and I had. She had them delivered to her dormitory at Northern Michigan University. We both love stationery, notebooks, and school supplies. She will be visiting us in December and I can’t wait to see her.

I was surprised to learn there was a nature reserve a 25-minute drive way from our home. The Wadi Degla Reserve protects a long, dry limestone valley that narrows into canyon-like stretches with walls up to 50 meters high. I think the most amazing aspect of the reserve is that is adjacent to a metropolitan area of over 20 million people. Wadi is the Arabic word for a valley, specifically a dry riverbed or canyon in a desert that carries water only during occasional heavy rains. Flash floods can rush through them with little warning during the few times it rains here. The canyon is carved out of 500 million year old limestone. It used to be the Tethys Sea when the continents were splitting. Visitors can find fossil shells, urchins and coin-shaped single-cell organisms called nummulites.

Nadia and I drove over to do a reconnaissance of the reserve for a race and cleanup that is taking place later this month. We found groups of visitors have picnics/BBQ and a few hikers. You can probably drive all the way through the valley that is between 12 and 30 kilometers (online research). We drove about 10 minutes and Obi and I walked up a side canyon to get a better view of the park. It would be beautiful around sunset. The term Degla may means Tigris in Arabic and the nearby neighborhood has the same name. It is odd that the valley is named after a river in Iraq.

Two aspects of the park I didn’t like were the garbage/litter that collects in rocky areas and the pack of dogs near the entrance. I am looking forward to exploring more of the canyons.

One of the insightful things about reading a digital book is that it tracks how much time you spend reading it. I first opened this book 1 week ago and I spent 8 hours and 42 minutes reading the novel. It didn’t feel like almost 9 hours, but it is surprising how much time you can accumulate reading in moments when you are waiting in the car for your wife, shopping and IKEA and trying to falling asleep.

The two things I most like about Tokarczuk is she is a beautiful writer and an original thinker. I highlighted many passages of writing and was delighted with the fresh thinking she puts into her characters. The protagonist of the story is Janina Duszejko who lives in a remote, mountain village in the Klodzko Valley, near the border with the Czech Republic. I’ve been to Warsaw and Krakow and much of my ancestry is from Eastern Poland so I have an interest in the region and culture. Olga is an activist and voice against the right-wing, conservative politics and aspects of Polish culture. She is a spokesperson against anti-semitism and anti-gay views, as well as supporting animal rights and feminism. The book was originally publised in 2009 in Polish and translated in 2018 into English by Antonia Lloyd-Jones and was adapted into the film Spoor in 2017. She has lots of fresh ideas, such as wondering why the brain cannot process all of the body’s internal processes. We need blood and urine tests, x-rays, cat scans, MRIs, etc. to figure out what is going on. Janina is regarded by most of the village as a crazy, old woman, but she has a good core of close friends that There were many passages that I highlighted below.

• “Sometimes, when a Person feels Anger, everything seems simple and obvious. Anger puts things in order and shows you the world in a nutshell; Anger restores the gift of Clarity of Vision, which is hard to attain in any other state.”
• “Long years of unhappiness cause a Person worse degradation than a fatal illness.”
• “It is at Dusk that the most interesting things occur, for that is when simple differences fade away. I could live in everlasting dusk.”
• “One thing’s for sure – these houses won’t be here; my efforts are insignificant, they’d fit on a pinhead, just like my life as well. That should never be forgotten.”
• “Nowadays no one still has the courage to think up anything new. All they ever talk about, round the clock, is how things already are, they just keep rolling out the same old ideas. Reality has grown old and gone senile; after all, it is definitely subject to the same laws as every living organism- it ages. Just like the cells of the body…” – education suffers from group think
• “…he told me, probably quoting Luther, that he who suffers sees the back of God.” – A Catholic criticizing a Protestant
• “Children are soft and supple, open-minded and unpretentious.” – that is why it is so uplifting to interact with young people
• “On a Wednesday in January, at seven in the morning, it’s plain to see that the world was not made for Man, and definitely not for his comfort or pleasure.” – winter mornings, cold, dark, painful, better to be in bed
• “It’s better to live with someone than alone. It’s easier to go through life together than on one’s own.”
• “I would go into the forest – I could wander around it endlessly. Here things were quieter, the forest was like a vast, deep, welcoming refuge in which one could hide. It lulled my mind.”
• “One has to tell people what to think. There’s no alternative. Otherwise someone else will do it.”
• “For people of my age, the places that they truly loved and to which they once belonged are no longer there. The places of their childhood and youth have ceased to exist…the parks with uncomfortable benches where their first loves blossomed, the cities, cafes and houses of their past.”
• “So for people like me the only thing possible is here and now, for every future is doubtful, everything yet to come is barely sketched and uncertain, like a mirage that can be destroyed by the slightest twitch of the air.”
• “Everything will pass. The wise Man knows this from the start, and has no regrets.”
• “every single Person has their own expression which he or she overuses. Or uses incorrectly. Generally – Apparently – Don’t you think – In truth”
• “lifetime opportunities are missed, because you overslept, because you didn’t feel like going, because you were late, because you were neglectful. It’s a tendency to be sybaritic, to live in a state of mild semiconsciousness, to fritter your life away on petty pleasures, to dislike effort and be devoid of any penchant for competition.”
• “President was pretty good at carousing, and had a wild, typically Slavic streak, dangerous for himself and others.”
• “This drifter physician reminded me that we should never make ourselves too comfortable in any particular place, in which case I had probably gone too far with my house.”

• apoptosis – programmed cell death
• foehn wind – wind falling down the leeward side of a mountain; warm and dry after dropping moisture on the way up the windward side; the name from the Alps in Switzerland; Santa Ana in southern California; chinook in the Rockies; Eastern European folklore claims it causes headaches, irritability, and unease
• reconnoiter – a military observation
• hyleg – astrology term, Persian-Arabic term for the planet with the most important position
• postprandial walk – post meal walk

This is the first book I read of the 2018 Nobel Prize laureate in Literature. I will seek out her Man Booker Prize book, Flights.

Uptown Cairo is a 1,000-1,200 acre master-plan gated community built atop the Mokattam Mountain, a huge limestone plateau rising 200 meters above the eastern desert of New Cairo. Emaar Properties, the Dubai company that built the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa, and downtown Dubai, developed Uptown Cairo starting in 2007. The gated community is very different than much of Cairo, looking more like Spain or Arizona than Egypt. Legal disputes with the Egyptian government have plagued the developers and it has slowed completion of the compound. The most recent settlement dictates Emaar must finish by 2028. We live in one of the many phases which are mixed, with some being massive, multi-million dollar villas down to nice, furnished apartments. The center piece is a beautiful golf course that rarely has golfers. In Egypt I noticed several compounds with golf courses that are more for the views than actually playing golf. There is also a retail center (grocery store, internet office, restaurants, cafes, etc.) which is convenient.

My two favorite aspects of living here are first, being close to the school so we have a short commute, and second, I can get decent bicycle rides in and around the compound safely. Emaar installed many speed bumps all over keep vehicles moving slowly and they have wide, tree-lined roads that provide shade and a smooth rides. The hills are a good size, not soul-crushing mountains of Uzbekistan, but more like the hills in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I can get 20-25 kilometer bike ride any time. It is a little bit boring taking the same routes, but living in the megapolis of Cairo, I am grateful I am able to ride safely anytime. We haven’t played tennis yet at the sports center, but Nadia has swam laps in the pool and worked out with her trainer in the gym at the nearby community center.

Often expatriates like to live in more vibrant parts of Cairo like Maadi or Zamalek. At our ages, Nadia and I prefer the quiet and convenience of a gated community, sacrificing proximity to cafés, restaurants, and the visual feast of street life in Cairo. There is a nearby district of Mokattam, that looks like downtown Cairo, Mumbai, Bangkok, etc. We can drive down the mountain to get some of that. Obi is begging me for a walk, so I need to stop writing.