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things are good again.

nose to grindstone; grindstone to the ground

I've gotten a couple letters recently - most of them of the "so what's going on?" variety. It seems I've managed to write a lot on this blog but I've missed conveying what's actually going on with me and what it's like to live here.

2009 thus far has been a year of sickness and exhaustion. I haven't conveyed that because I myself was trying to drive through it and didn't want to admit it. But the truth is I've been sick more often then healthy, with bouts that last for several weeks.

I'm rather fed up with it. Throat raw. Limbs heavy. No energy. Little desire to mingle with my co-workers. Barely enough energy to make it through the day. One day weeks ago, I thought it was on the way out today and then I slept for 12 hours, got up, showered, got dressed, ate lunch and went back to bed. Not feeling it.

I guess I've avoided writing about it because I don't want to meditate on it and I don't like myself in this state. Everyday is the same - up at 6.45, to work at 7.15, back at 2. Shower, eat lunch, try to fall asleep and take something for head. sleep until evening. get up. work on talatat (process photographs and upload to server for the Egyptologists), eat dinner. work on talatat. sleep. repeat.

The hardest part about this is that there is so much going on here. If I were coming into this place with the sole purpose of shooting - I would have endless resources - life on the Nile, the orphanage that I discovered not so long ago, the Copts vs. the Christians, gender issues (big time), the whole gamut of important and interesting social documentary projects. Having to shoot blocks every day for 6 hours and then edit them on a computer for 3 more kind of destroys me in a sense - slowly I've come to run purely on auto-pilot; I'm getting through the days, I guess you could say, but the "I" isn't all there - isn't the same. I also noticed that up until yesterday I haven't written a damn thing for myself - more evidence of the fact that I've locked up inside. I make lists of things I intend to do in my spare time but the weekends are typically filled with sleeping, catching up, and trying to break out of this stuckness with some activity out of the house.

So - I want to apologize - I need to do something to come back down to earth, to get healthy, to feel like a person again and once I do that I can be a good friend again. I'm really fortunate to have people that care about me and ask and genuinely want to know how it's going and what it's like and I want to be able to do a better job of conveying that. Sometimes it requires waking up and putting the pen down onto the paper - there are some things computers can't capture first hand. (This was originally written in my book for the sole purpose of getting it out onto the paper and copied into this blog).

So what is it like? Right now it's not so good because I'm on autopilot, feet dragging, there is no time or energy for exercise, for Arabic, for photography, for writing, for love, for bike riding. But I will get out of this.

Owen is good, he is trying to figure out a way to bring me back. Obviously I'm the only one who can do this. His uncle and cousin are going and a 3-day feluca trip in Aswan is in route. Not sure what this will be like - I don't want to put on a face. I can only be myself now. I hope the water and the fresh air cure me and I can be a pleasant person to be around again.

I'll try to write about what it's like to live in Luxor, Egypt in my next post. Give me some time.

can't find the time to find the time

SO much has happened.

Let me chronicle them one by one.

1. We went to Dahab and Aswan in December (I wrote about that a little before).
2. Owen put the moves on during the overnight train to Cairo.
3. I got super sick during Thanksgiving and barfed up my dinner multiple times.
4. My sister gave birth to her second daughter: Evelyn Ruth Karr.
5. The ARCE compound started to feel like a police state.
6. Work got insane.
7. Me and Owen moved into a new flat together.
8. My boss got fired and his wife, my other boss, resigned.
9. A bomb went off in Cairo.
10. Me and Owen got hired for another year.
11. I paid off all my grad school debt.
12. I turned 26 and Owen and 7 others here in Luxor took an epic early morning cruise over the Nile in a hot air balloon.
12. I thought I was pregnant and almost lost my mind.
13. I got THREE pieces of mail, one of which was a package (THANK YOU GABBY, LAURA, AND CLAIRE!).
14. I have had no time to do anything except work.

Phew. Ok. Let's start with numbers 4 and 5. Remember that bit about "the doubling" - when I had to start shooting twice as many blocks as I had been shooting? Well after that shit got even crazier. After increasing our production at the talatat magazine by 400% going from 20 blocks a day to upwards of 80-100, our "project director" came to us telling us that we should really be doing about 300 blocks a day. This was a little jarring, considering we only have about six hours to actually work at the magazine once you take out our breakfast break and the time it takes to set up and put everything away - and at that rate we'd have to take a block out of the magazine, clean it off, conserve it, number it, document it, photograph it and put it back in approximately 70 seconds. The fucked part of this is that we actually were forced to kind of go along with this and make preparations as if we could actually accomplish this.



Let me explain, the said project director was a little bit off. This is someone who isn't an Egyptologyst and had no degree in anything relating to antiquities. In fact, he previously worked as a manager in big oil. And he pretty much took the same approach with us, as long as you are out there producing the right numbers you are doing your job. Basically, all concern for the real job at hand: conserving, documenting, photographing, "researching" was kind of not his concern. I was pretty flustered by all of this. I kind of had a really bad month. I got sick at some point during all the madness of it all and couldn't get better. One day it got to the point where I could barely walk so I left the magazine and caught a cab home and only came back halfway through the workday the following day. The sickness stuck around for 3 weeks.

So how do you go from 70 blocks to 300? Number one - you get Owen in on it, take him away from his three other projects and make him come to the talatat magazine at least two days a week. Number two, instead of shooting blocks one at a time on one table, you get three more tables made and shoot on four at once. But since you can't buy [read: don't want to spend your money on] 3 more sets of fancy Swiss Elinchrome studio lights you just get your photographers to use house lamps. That's right. Owen took it upon himself to make several trips to Luxor's one and only "hardware store" or something that resembles a hardware store to inspect what kind of lights and bulbs were available so he could rig up something strong enough to light the blocks with. I kind of scoffed at all of this.

From a photographer's point of view, it is totally ridiculous to be asked to shoot with household lamps when you've thus far photographed over 2,000 blocks very carefully and systematically using top-of-the-line studio lamps to pick up the blocks every detail and fine relief. I mean, we're talking hieroglyphs and relief carvings that are around 3,000 years old. This isn't a job for Ikea and they don't even have that here.

In any case, this went on for some time, we ordered two more tables to be made, Owen screwed around with the lamps from our apartment and a bunch of tin foil to no end and I cursed under my breath.

The strange thing about the PD (Project Director) is that no one really recognized him as such. There was a plaque on the door that said that was his job, but the archeologists and Egyptologysts certainly didn't consider him to be their superior in so far as he knew little to nothing about their projects or their historical significance.

We had one meeting with said director where he basically had pulled us in to say, "you know, I've been fired from a couple jobs because of lack of communication with the director... so I'm just going to let you in on a little secret here - check in with me from time to time. You know, come in once a day, or even once and week and tell me how it's going, what is working, what isn't. If there's one thing I've learned over the years it's that communication is really important."

Now if this were coming from anyone else, I would have thought to myself "of course! my mother would have told me the same thing! how silly of me.." but coming from him it felt a little hypocritical because it was really part of his job to "manage" and in order to "manage" you have to be there from the beginning, you have to have an idea of what's going on with your projects from day one, you can't just jump in half way into the deal and say "hey, what's going on? you need to be shooting 5 times as fast as you are now! why aren't you checking in with me? if you don't pick it up now we're going to scrap your project and they're going to throw your precious blocks in the back of a pickup truck and drive them to another city [finger pointing and beat-faced here]. Of course, when several weeks later, he was fired, this whole conversation became even more ironic.

Anyway, during this period of stress and administrative difficulties, the whole ARCE compound became like a ship out in the sea. Like a ship in the sense that a small isolated community became ridiculous, everyone had gossip to spread, everyday we heard another update on the absurd situation we were in and once you told one person everyone else immediately knew. The problems were daily: once we were reprimanded for cooking eggs and told that we weren't allowed to buy our own eggs because we were a risk to ourselves. This quickly became a favorite joke amongst all.

Once we got a strangely worded memo about photographic guidelines and were lectured about the dangers of photographing any Egyptians in non-standard lighting. I should really upload this memo. We were told we could be put in jail and that we should remove any pictures from the internet immediately. We politely asked what picture had caused the problem but the PD replied that he could not tell us and that they were all a risk. After this meeting, Owen and I both frantically went through all of our pictures trying to figure out what picture was the problem. We found nothing. We had our flatmates look through them. They found nothing. We later found out the real reasons for this memo/meeting - a complaint from the PD's secretary about a picture that she found and didn't approve of that we had in fact taken with and at the PD's encouragement on the roof during our first week of work. This rendered the whole thing totally ridiculous and un-called for.

Once we got a memo in our email accounts entitled: "A reminder about the purpose of the ARCE residence" which told us again that we couldn't cook our own eggs, that we shouldn't take too much food from dinner, that we couldn't use the laundry room after 8pm, and that we shouldn't become overly familiar or friendly with the staff and that we were listening to our music too loudly. Here are some of my favorite quotes from this memo:

"Although ARCE intends that its residence may be as comfortable as home . . . ARCE employees are reminded that the residence is not their personal space, but is in fact a hotel facility. Complacency and excessive familiarity with the residence and its staff can be an unfortunate psychological result of living in a hotel environment for an extended period of time"

That last bit is my favorite.

This too:

"In order to control hygiene standards, food prepared in this facility will be prepared by our kitchen staff. Residents are welcome to provide suggestions to the facility manager for supplemental menu items. Residents are also welcomed to vary their diet at any one of Luxor’s fine restaurants."

The bit about suggestions to the menu was particularly comical to everyone at ARCE. The menu had become kind of unbearable. See the thing is Egyptian food is fantastic. Everyone loves it. Everyone except the PD. He was convinced that having the Egyptian cook prepare Egyptian food will physically make ARCE's residents sick. As a result, he made the cook prepare Western food, but since the cook is Egyptian, it's kind of a strange version of what you usually encounter. Hence the grilled cheese consisted of a thick piece of bread with American cheese on it. No grilling involved. Just like that. Fajita consisted of a piece of pita bread with fried peppers and feta cheese. Pasta consisted of a full plate of the same white curly pasta with a teaspoon or two of sauce. Needless to say, day in and day out, this got a little frustrating.

Now I'm not complaining. The ARCE facility is amazing. Almost breath-taking. When I found out I was going to be working in Luxor, Egypt, I imagined a plain barren room with a simple cot and maybe a lamp for reading in the middle of the desert. When you arrive at ARCE you are taken away by the downright luxury of it all - the huge mahogany dresser, the Japanese styled window, the Queen size bed, the European bathroom equipped with a bidet (that no one uses). The point is that it became clear that ARCE funds were happily poured into the building itself where we were living but with great hesitation when it came to actually supplying ARCE projects with necessary amenities such as wood trays for damaged talatat blocks, new mastabas, and shelving. And in terms of the meals, the PD just basically decided that his sensitive stomach or whatever scared him about Egyptian food gave him the right to make things miserable for everyone else in a way that they really didn't need to be. From day one, Owen and I and others suggested maybe just letting the Egyptian cooks just cook what they know how to cook (fabulous chicken, fish, and other meat dishes which are tastier than god). But he basically knocked our suggestions unanimously, explaining that Egyptian food was liable to make residents ill. Huff.

One of the funniest things about this memo and other memos is the way in which it makes us look like a big company. We are about a dozen people. The tone of these memos and emails just never seemed appropriate to me. There were half a dozen other things - like locking the door and changing the lock on the door that connected our office/Owen's bedroom to the exit which forced us to bring our photo gear through the cafe at the end of each day into the offices and caused a fire hazard as well. I don't know. It's not so interesting any more because said PD is gone and I can forget about all this now. But I remember when every single incident felt just like icing on the cake of a totally ridiculous situation. Indeed, there are somethings I just dare not bring up.

Here's a new one from today: The PD came by the labratory one day where Sayeed - the Egyptian who translates lectures all day works. He asked Sayeed if the lab needed anything - Sayeed responded that they really needed a copy machine so the students could have copies of the worksheets. "A coffee machine!" the PD thought, "a great idea!" The next week a top-notch coffee maker was installed in the lab. It was until much later the much-needed copy machine materialized.

Anyway, stay with me for more news.

letter to an old studio photography prof at SVA

De Lessio!

Hey is this still your address? Try real hard to remember me, this
is Sara Lafleur-Vetter I took your studio class at SVA 2005-2006,
tall, skinny, rough around the edges. We have to talk. I've since
been hired to work for the American Research Center in Egypt.

I've been living in Luxor, Egypt since October and I'm on contract
till about July 2010 it looks like. Guess what my job is? After not paying
any damn attention to studio photography I got the job of photographing
16,000+ ancient Egyptian blocks with fine relief hieroglyphs and
imagery. That's irony for ya, screw Alanis Morisette.

Anywho, please write back and tell me you are still at this email address
and we can have some correspondence. That would be swell.

I'm currently at about 4,000 blocks. So, I've got a ways to go.

Best,

lafleur