A few thoughts on good-natured watonness.

I began a Dickens novel last night, one which promises to have its share of intrigue and vice in the way only the gloomy streets of Victorian London can deliver. While the novels began to pull me into a world of corruption, of scandalous and mysterious parentage—I suddenly started laughing.

For the past four years, while living in Seattle, I surrounded myself with friends who had cultivated a fine appreciation for deviance. Perhaps there's no better place to find this than on the margins of a small Christian college—where the mainstream culture sets standards that are lofty and rosy and all too easy to violate. The temptation for good natured rebellion is simply too tempting. There are too many forbidden fruits—and the faux-scandal created a bit too enjoyable to see. For better or worse, my friends and I enjoyed ruffling the upstanding citizens around us with our preference for the mildly profane and sacrilegious.

It seems that Egypt has subtly started shifting my world view around without my noticing. In the culture here—which I find myself increasingly internalizing, which is perhaps the key problem at hand—ankles have recovered their Victoria era shock value, along with handholding, collarbones, and girls smoking cigarettes on the street. Maybe I'm just "growing out of" a college phase, but my own lifestyle has become more cautious—mostly because I'm worried about what the neighbors will think. With so many windows, and so many prying eyes, any vice (and this is a setting in which baring my elbows in public is pushing the envelope, so "vice" here is terribly easy to accrue) can be cause for a stained reputation.

But that's not it, exactly. It's the moral dichotomy—in the cultural mindset prevalent here, everything falls into categories of good or bad. Mostly, those categories are pre-established, which grates on our pioneer-wagon American notions of discovering the truth for yourself. So sure, I have Egyptian friends who drink, but it's in a different spirit than we did it at SPU. Ours was mischevious. Our Muslim friends who choose to drink seem to do so with a blatant and careless disregard—or with contempt and condescension for those who would condemn them for it.

With both my Egyptain and American friends, I haven't found many people to sheepishly recount stories of past rebellious moments to who would laugh and commiserate with me. I asked two of my Egyptian students in English class last night if they had ever done something rebellious. One offered up that she once, in defiance of her high school teacher, copied something from the chalkboard before the teacher had explained the lesson.

But what made me laugh last night was that I suddenly realized that I had begun to swallow this cultural framework wholesale--and hadn't even noticed. Gone was any sarcasm or criticism of anything around me. Gone was any good natured complaining or slight bending of the rules. I had become a veritable Pollyanna, always looking for the positive and accepting the culture for what it is.

Granted, such things are different for outsiders and insiders. As an outsider, to strongly object to the culture I'm living in is the raise the question of why I chose to live here in the first place. There's a certain logic to "Get on board, or go home" for foreigners. I don't have much respect for those who insist on living exactly as they would in America. It seems pointless to me. No, it's something in between the two extremes that I'm searching to reclaim.

My friend Nagla—the 40 something culture writer for an Egyptian newspaper I wrote about before—is one stark exception to all of this. She will smoke and leave her hair uncovered and socialize openly with men, and she will not apologize for it. She has a certain gutsy spark that I admire in people whenever I see it.

Reading this Dickens novel—which relishes in the suspense created by immorality and indiscreet behavior, and was given to me by a friend who, more than anyone I know, has an appreciation for wantonness—I was suddenly reminded of the mischievious mindset I had left behind in America. I was made aware of what a pure and uncomplicated worldview I had begun adopting here. That's not a bad thing—in some ways, I appreciate the changes a lot. But in order to protect against getting lured in by the comfort of simplistic moral thinking, I'm glad I have Dickens to remind me of my roots