My site, originally created as a place to lay out my thoughts so I could hear them echo back, became a job and a burden at least a year ago. That’s never what I wanted for myself, never what I imagined anyway.

Since the beginning I made my writing a tedious effort, more so than it ever really needed to be. My nights were consumed by writing and my days by responding to commentors and dreaming up new topics to write about. It was an exhausting task and it was compounded by my own scrutiny, deleting and re-writing whole paragraphs, never being satisfied, always wanting more and never feeling truly accomplished.

By someones standards I’ve accomplished so much, writing for several sites, making many friends and gathering the respect of many of my peers. Now that I’m writing for the first time in over three months, things feel so hollow and empty. To come back home, to write my thoughts, not knowing if anyone remembers I exist anymore…its sad.

I’m now reaping whats been sown by my own hands. Somewhere along the way I lost my passion for this and I want it back so desperately. I let down too many people, people who really relied on me, to write articles, perform tasks and simply do my job, people who have done so much for me, Esra’a, Amira and so many others.

What caused my loss of steam? An association of things, changes in my personal life, a change in my outlook, exhaustion but mostly one thing, a lack of honesty. I’ve never been able to be myself with my audience, most of the time I’ve felt like a ghost writer for myself. I’ve always been burdened with a need to shield myself from my readers for reasons so eerily related to the topics I write about.

Believe me, the faults and flaws of the Middle East are staunchly reflected in our blogging community, often times by the same people who speak out against them. The politics, the backstabbing, gossiping, bigotry, jealousy, extremism, cynicism, and even the tribal mentality are all well represented across the Middle East blogging community.

When I made the decision to start this site and begin writing I made a clear decision that my personal details would be as ambiguous as possible so I could write as freely and honestly as I wanted without the constraints of stereotypes and negative perceptions.

What I found was that these freedoms I tried to preserve for myself became confining and more binding than any constraints I had ever imagined. I have become a prisoner in my own identity or lack thereof. I never lied, embellished or exaggerated, I never claimed to be something I’m not or encouraged any false perceptions of myself. Instead I wrote based on how things were and let people assume whatever they wanted. In return I became a writer who is just short of being comfortable in my own skin.

I want my passion back, I want to let my audience in but I don’t know if that will give me what I want. What to do, what to do?

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Whenever election time comes around and all the candidates become poised in partisan battles the urge for people to label their peers liberal or conservative becomes more appealing.

I always find this cycle tiring because friends, family and readers try to slap some sort of label on me and they almost always fail miserably. Generally the political identity they paint me with tells me a lot about how they identify themselves.

I realized this today when I was checking my Email. I received an obnoxious forward from an Egyptian friend, born and raised in the U.S. and who talks as if he has a live feed from George Bush wired right into his ear.

He’s a republican but not for any governmental policy reasons, he’s a republican because he hates gays, immigrants and “terrorists”. He’s the, “they attack us because they are jealous of our freedom” type. Sometimes talking to him about politics is like talking to an Alabama baptist preacher who goes hunting on Saturdays and to Ku Klux Klan rallies on Fridays. Essentially, he’s like most Social Republicans, paranoid and terrified of the world around him.

His email today had the header, “This is more for my Liberal wack job friends!”. Unbelievable, we’ve had our fair share of conversations about politics which usually consist of him repeating something he heard in a George Bush Speech or on Hannity & Colmes and me telling him how irritating I think it is. Somehow that makes me some liberal “wack job”.

Ironically I was having a conversation with a young idealist Egyptian friend the night before. He’s your stereotypical college liberal who believes the world can be a utopia, poverty can be eradicated, plants have feelings, and we should all ride bicycles to work because cars are bad for the environment. He’s the “free tibet and the Dali Lama” type. Conversations with him are beyond frustrating, its a lot like talking to someone on LSD, and for all I know that might be the reason for his radically illogical liberal views. For some reason I enjoy talking politics with him because part of me believes I can bring him back to the real world.

On this occasion he asked for my views on U.S. foreign policy and in the course of the conversation he discovered that my views were critical of U.S. foreign policy and his response was, “wow I thought you were a conservative nut job”. What the hell is going on here?

Well its not that complicated to understand the issue with both of these assholes. I’m a moderate, I’m in the middle of the spectrum, some conservative principles makes sense to me and some liberal principles makes sense to me, thats hard for people to understand though. People’s minds enjoy labels, they like to see black and white, gray is much harder to process.

To a conservative I’m liberal, to a liberal I’m conservative. You can test this phenomenon yourself. Ask a liberal if the media is conservative or liberal and ask a conservative the same. The liberal will almost always say its conservative and the conservative will almost always say its liberal. To them it is, anything to the center of their position is the opposite to them. For my readers, especially new ones, my position can be hard to understand, they come looking for one definitive side of the spectrum. Sorry you wont find that here, you probably never will.

A long time ago when this blog was in its infantile stages I was talking to Sandmonkey and he gave me some advice, he said “you need to pick one definitive side and go with it”, explains a lot doesnt it ;). I dont deny that readers respond more to the demagoguing of political affiliations but thats not the answer, progress requires balance, it requires deep thought and passionate heart felt opinions, if those opinions are spread along the spectrum than so be it. To be honest, I dont really care if everyone who reads it gets it.

In my life I’ve learned the most from those with balanced views and most people do they just do it differently, maybe they listen to balanced opinions, maybe they have the discipline to listen to unbalanced individuals of both sides separately.

My advice, if I’m worthy of giving it, is to stay away from extreme conservativism or liberalism, extremes of anything are destructive, the answer is in the middle.

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Any regular reader of this site knows I haven’t endorsed any of the available candidates and its fair to say I hate all of them although I cant deny that I’ve reserved a special serving of disgust and ridicule for both Hillary and Obama. However I hate Hillary a little bit more than I hate Obama, shes just so darn unlikable, in fact shes probably the most unlikable candidate since Ross Perot. Well I stumbled onto this little video and I found it extremely entertaining.

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The cost of living has risen drastically around the world from increasing real-estate, gasoline, education and now food. But its not fillet mignon or sauteed lobster tail that have risen in cost, it’s the basic essentials of developing nations. Take Egypt for example and the increase in simple staples of nourishment, rice, bread, beans, onions even vegetable oil. Foods such as these have increased more than double since 2004 and some cases quadrupled in only a few months. We’ve all heard of the massive bread shortages in Egypt due to the increased cost of wheat but now what used to cost 2 EGP for vegetable oil now costs 15 EGP. Fava beans, the most basic food, afforded by the poorest of the poor costs 8 EGP per Kg, something that cost a quarter of that a year ago.

Egypt is not alone in rising food costs, its an epidemic affecting millions of people across the third world and the cause of the increase will amaze you. Though rising gas prices and the corresponding increase in transporting food is part of the problem it only accounts for 15% of the increase. Ironically the increase in the cost of beans, grains and oil’s have come from developed nations and their response to increased oil costs. Governmental policies within the U.S. and E.U. have caused an increased demand on beans and grains to be used for bio-fuel, a supplement of petroleum. The programs designed to fulfill specific quotas are operating with an inefficiency not seen since the peak of the Soviet Union. Farmers, corporations and scientists are milking the government for extremely high and wasteful subsidies, robbing taxpayers and wasting enough grain to make Stalin proud, resulting in the worldwide cost of farmed goods to sky rocket.

Do I blame the U.S. like every Osama bin Laden loving Arab will once this news reaches the mainstream? No, no, no, quite the contrary. I blame Arabs! You heard me. As always Arabs manage to shoot themselves in the foot out of their own greed and their inability to see past their own nose. Do you happen to notice something here?

Since 2004 the barrel of oil has gone from $32 to $115 because Arab oil producers want to squeeze the U.S. for every last penny being that they consume 35% of the worlds oil and as a result of the price gouging, the U.S. (seeing no end in sight) has begun to pursue other forms of fuel such as Bio-fuel causing food to dramatically rise in price starving the very nations who have profited off the oil in the first place. (Egypt hasnt made crap off of oil but we’ve been caught in the crossfire like many other poor nations). You see the world and all its misfortune are a chain reaction of events. So when the Arabs want to blame someone for this problem, please look at your neighbors.

Wall Street article about Bio-Fuel and Poverty

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A protest has been planned on Sunday May 4th, 2008, 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM at the Egyptian Consulate in downtown Chicago at 500 N. Michigan Ave.

Demonstrators are assembling to protest Egypt’s State run repression of workers and opposition groups. Here’s the description on the facebook event.

Egyptian security forces arrested over 400 opposition activists across the country, seriously injured another eighty protesting residents and workers in the city of Al-Mahalla, and killed two of these locals while putting down a peaceful protest – all this on April 6 – the day on which a general strike and popular protests were planned against the sky-rocketing prices of commodities and services, and against the daily intimidation and inhumane treatment of citizens by Mubarak’s 26 year-old thug regime.

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…and by “I” I mean someone else, whose Photoshop skills far eclipse my own.

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