Summer 2018 Story 4

Tima just finished her graduate coursework in CandAL at IUP, and she wanted to start working on her dissertation on code switching and code meshing using swear words in English and Lebanese. This was a topic she knew well because she grew up swearing all the time. Ever since preschool, Tima swore at her friends, her parents, and her teachers.

Tima was a Lebanese-American girl who was born and raised in New York. Every summer, her parents would fly her to Lebanon to spend a few months there and learn Lebanese. However, no one in Lebanon wanted to speak to her in Lebanese and opted to practice their English with her instead. The only words Tima managed to get anyone to teach her were swearwords, so she mastered these. Because her parents were very conservative, she found ways to curse in Lebanese without getting in trouble. If she wanted to say "kiss immak" (a very bad swearword) in front of them, she would use "kiss me again" to mask that. Soon she noticed that a lot of people did the same. She even got so used to it that she started using this expression even while in New York.

One day, she was standing in the rain waiting for a cab in Manhattan. When she finally managed to stop a cab, another woman stole her cab! Tima was furious. She yelled "KISS ME AGAIN" a the top of her voice, and a man standing nearby complied. He grabbed her by the waist, and he kissed her! It happened so fast, and it was dark out that she barely had time to react. But when a car came and shown light on the man's face, the man said, "Didn't that kiss make America great? I was just on my way to build a huge wall on the Mexican border when I saw you. There are thousands of children separate from their families, but all I could think about was kissing you and my golf game tomorrow at my resort. Those separate families can wait. They're all criminals anyway!" He then jumped into a limousine and drove away.

Walking in the rain, Tima was trying to make sense of what had just happened. She had always made a conscious to be collected. How could this have happened to her? Quietly sharing her story with her friends over drinks the next day, they all agreed that she had just been harassed!

she posted about it on Facebook using the #MeToo. The overwhelming response was that she shouldn't have used "Kiss me again." After all, she asked for it. Now Tima has no friends. Tima quit Facebook to protest and moved to a small island in the Pacific where

no men exist. She decided to give up on her Ph.D. and the effect her research life had on her personal life. She spent her days searching for coins and other valuables on the beach.  She adopted a pet jellyfish who she swore at on a regular basis. Tima and her jellyfish were happy.