After being called out on Twitter by Jim Groom, I decided to blow off the massive amounts of serious work I have to do, and revisit my ds106 roots.

I’m not going to promise a sudden flood of thesis updates; I’m not going to try and shoehorn other work into the ds106 mold. But I’m going to visit again anyway, regardless of whether or not this is a regular thing — some things have to be taken a bit at a time, Jim Groom. (Plus, this lets me go off on tangents without it affecting my grades!)

Thinking back on all the assignments I did in ds106, one of my favorites was the design assignment I did. I really enjoyed creating the juxtaposition between the silly pop lyrics and the serious protests in Tunisia. And while it’s perhaps a bit unoriginal, I’m out of practice, so cut me some slack:

The image is from The Big Picture of the renewed protests in Egypt. The lyrics are from the song “The One that Got Away” by Katy Perry. The idea of combining these two just struck me as I scrolled over the pictures on The Big Picture.

The song is a cliche little song about a girl who ends up not marrying her high school boyfriend, and is (as you might expect) convinced that he’s “the one who got away.” The highschoolish things they do together are unimportant and kinda stupid — but what struck me listening to this song is the yearning for a better alternative to the life you’re living: “In another life I would be your girl/We’d keep all our promises, be us against the world.” Obviously that’s not directly applicable, as I could never have been a girl, but I really do identify personally with that sense of loss of what was possible, which is something I’ve had to deal with my last semester here at Mary Wash. Simply put, the price of any actuality is the loss of some potentiality.

And maybe that loss is good, and maybe it’s bad. In Egypt, what they’ve got going is clearly pretty bad. But it didn’t have to be, and that’s what I think is driving the protests. They know that life doesn’t have to be lived under the boot of an authoritarian state. And what’s more, they saw the possibility of something else earlier this year: Mubarak was overthrown, a nation and a people was freed, and democracy finally had a chance. But the military and police have cracked down, and the people are ticked off — they know that they’ve been robbed.

And that’s what I was trying to get at here — the sense of loss and betrayal that the Egyptian people are clearly feeling. They know they don’t have to live in a country where laughing riot police attack veiled women publicly supporting democracy. And that’s not just a national loss, but a personal one as well.