My Misadventures with Jimbo

By Salma Ahmed

Managing English Editor 

The 280-character Twitter limit is an obstacle to my rants and complaints about my seemingly never ending run-ins with airheads who feel a “connection” with me.

For some context, yes, I am shallow, but in my defense, so is everyone else. Most are just too scared to admit it. People love to preach generally, and preach about inner beauty and how they disregard their interest in physical appearance, specifically.

This philosophical enlightenment inevitably leads them to spit out the generic “it’s not you, it’s me” when they’re not physically attracted to someone.

I would like to blame my shallowness for the tough luck I had in the dating scene. The dating pool in Cairo is sorrowful as is, now add shallowness on top of it and you’ve got a recipe for disaster.

They weren’t lying when they said no one can have everything. Those who satisfied my shallowness ended up being great for laughs during my daily therapy sessions with my friends, but very very draining for my emotional and mental health.

First case in point, and most recently, is my “friend” Jimbo, who I met at the gym. He was in red so he was easily recognizable the day we first met, and I didn’t lose him among the sea of buff guys who gave me the side eye when I walked up to the weights rack.

He wasn’t the first to approach me while in my leggings and struggling to hold my weights, not even close.

Jimbo made my shallow-self very happy, until he opened his mouth and a series of racial slurs rolled out. Nevertheless, my shallow-self overcame the protestations of my intellect and I continued to “accidentally” run into him day after day. And with every interaction, his mouth betrayed him as less and less appealing.

He was not just racist, but homophobic and very extremely sexist, which my feminist-self failed to take lightly. Still, I continued my series of conversations with him, each of which left me questioning why I was doing this to myself.

We were out for a post-workout meal when he truly amazed me.

He told me about the time he was almost blackout drunk and ran into one of his lady friends, then proceeded to verbally harass her. He continued to casually tell me all about how this is normal for him in his drunken state.

“I become a sexual harasser when drunk,” he told me, laughing at the sheer comedy of it all.

Get the heck out of there, right?

Probably the sign any normal person would take as a red flag. Not me though. I was hungry and we had just ordered food. Also I wanted to not rush into judging someone, which I have been accused of doing before and had promised myself to never do again.

I only saw him several times, few of which were by accident. He was great company but other than satisfying my shallow-self, he didn’t do much. Only four years apart, you’d expect us to have more in common other than our newly-found love for lifting weights.

He didn’t read much. He listened to rap. He didn’t know who Plato was, let alone Aristotle. He exuded power and confidence. He didn’t get my humor or any of my references.

He littered. I followed Kant’s categorical imperative like my life depended on it.

He did lead a life full of adventure, which he would tell me about and my eyes would unconsciously double in size as I listened. But he would end many of stories asking me to tell him some of my “wild adventures”.

And I’d have to squeeze my brain long and hard in search for something half as intense as what he had just shared.

We had different definitions of adventure, though. The extent of my interactions with a firearm was when someone fired one within my proximity and I burst out crying. Jimbo owned a few, one of which he kept in his car.

Unfortunately (or fortunately), I am no longer in contact with Jimbo. I lost his number and we failed to exchange any social media accounts. So all I have left are a few tweets I shared right after my interactions with him and my slightly disturbing memories of my own stupidity.

Jimbo was but an episode in a series of guys I have come across during my time as a mature woman, definitely not the craziest I’ve come across but he was significant enough to warrant 700 words.