The anti-Lawrence

I wrote this late at night/early in the morning, when I had decided to go. I'm not sure it's the most flattering portrait of my thought-processes, but it's honest:

I'm not exactly living through a revolution so much as living next to one. Most of the foreigners I know in Cairo, except the journalists and would-be journalists, are having a similar experience. Ultimately, this is why I'm going to leave Cairo. I don't think I'm in danger, but this isn't my revolution, my family and friends are worrying, and I don't really know what to do with myself here.

The thing that I don't know how to explain over the phone is the mixture of boredom and excitement. In one sense, it's really boring. I spend most of my time glued to al-Jazeera, or cooking to distract myself. Occasionally, I can hear gunfire coming from the Interior Ministry, a couple blocks away, but that's as scary as it gets (pro-tip: when searching for an apartment, consider whether you want to live next to the most hated ministry in the country. Location, location, location). Needless to say, I'm not getting dissertation research done. Libraries aren't open, and for some reason nobody wants to talk about houses...

But there's another sense in which it's really exciting. This feels vain, but it's true. It's intoxicating. All around me, people are coming together with remarkable discipline to bring down a regime whose combination of thuggishness and banality was making me depressed, to say nothing of the people it was actually hurting. It's exciting. I feel like I'm in the realest place in the world.

But it's not actually my revolution. I haven't been protesting or covering it like a journalist, or doing anything else to bask in the reflected glory of Egypt's uprising, to feel like I'm a part of it. It's tempting to join in the protests, but it would feel to me like a case of Lawrence of Arabia syndrome. I'm a nerdy little scholar who often finds life back home boring. Planting myself in someone else's protest to feel like I'm involved in Something would be, I don't know how else to put it, deeply self-indulgent. It's not my country, and if I don't like the new or the old regime, I can leave; the stakes for me are not the same as for Egyptians here.

I don't think I'm the only one, either in Cairo or at a keyboard back in America, who feels the urge to be a part of someone else's revolution because of that thrill. Even if I'm not participating, just being here is exciting. I won't lie and pretend there's no vicarious thrill to this. Bumming around Cairo, hunting for fresh vegetables, hanging out with neighborhood watch guys, speculating about when Mubarak will give up and go away, passing the time with other nervous expats while the streets take on a carnival atmosphere – ok, a carnival with tanks, but still, it's an adventure. I have front row seats for history.

But there are people back home who are worried about me, and the excitement isn't worth the possibility that the phones could go down again and they'd have no way to contact me. I'm a selfish only child, but not that selfish. So I'm going. I hope I can come back soon, under a new and better regime.