Subways Run On Hope.

I don’t like being a grown up, I don’t. I’ve been getting a whiff of what the real life is like out there and all I’ve seen has been hope-sucking. If growing up is about knowing how to diss people and calling it pragmatism, or how to be a heartless bastard and calling it professionalism, or about lying and calling it sociable behaviour then I’m not sure I want to be part of it. Too bad nobody asked me to sign the dotted line before handing me the life-sized fine line-choked contract. What’s scaring me is that I’m taking part of it, that I’m not minding it, that I’m not feeling things like I used to anymore. I now know better than to appreciate things because I automatically see the ulterior motive in flashing lights. I don’t feel love towards people because my head has automatically run a statistics scan and decided the profit margin isn’t worth investing in. I see people changing to the worst and my automatic reaction is not worrying about them, but blaming myself for taking the precious time to see that in the first place. I don’t care about people because my head knows that nobody gives a shit and there’s no changing that, so there’s no point in caring for them. I’m no longer pissed when someone’s rude or flippant because I never expected any better. It’s been like that for so many things, so many gestures have been soaked dry and I can’t blame the empty gestures on anything but the growing up process. I’m changing into a heartless asshole and the world not only doesn’t seem to mind it, but calls it normal human behaviour. Not even I seem to mind it.

 

 

Something happened on the subway today; I was caught in a death stare with an infant. There’s something about starting contests with babies, and it’s not the odd fact that they hardly blink – it’s true, they blink every 5 minutes and I think that’s alien – it’s the fact that while I was looking into her eyes, it wasn’t an empty stare. It was the stare of someone who knew everything there is to knew, the stare of a Jedi, a misplaced demigod who got lost in our dimension and doesn’t feel the need to speak his wisdom out of knowing that nothing they’ll say will make a difference, it was the stare of someone who was seeing into your soul. If there’s any truth to the whole ‘I know what you did last summer’ line, the guy who made the horror movie had probably just had a baby.

 

There’s so much to see if you’re willing to look, like for instance that baby on the subway, his parents were an interesting sight. The father was the mother and the mother was the father. Despite the fact that they were a regular lower-middle-class couple whose sex life ends at the point of conception, the typical stereotype didn’t apply for these two. The father was holding the baby like it’s precious, being extremely cautious with the applied pressure and taking care of every spit and groan the child was making, going heavy on the PDA and incredibly unaware of his surroundings or anything that is not directly baby-related. The mother on the other hand, which I personally believe should have been appreciating her family more concerning the state of other families in the same social faction, was staring blankly ahead, taking calls, fixing her clothes and getting obviously pissed that she had to close the window on her own and not have her husband close it for her since he didn’t seem to hear her when she asked him even though she was sitting right next to him, all because he was indulged in the baby’s spit ball formation talents. He didn’t notice that the worker standing next to them spent the entire ride trying to look down his wife’s shirt and looking into her bag and phone screen, and he didn’t notice when it was time to get off at their stop, which I assume should have been routine behaviour by now. While I was marveling at the father’s ape-like tendencies and mother’s short-of-being-human tendencies, the baby tried to suck on her woolen-gloved thumb, didn’t like the taste of it and started crying. What happened afterwards is the interesting part, despite the fact that she had a bag full of baby stuff, or that’s what I thought, she settled on giving the baby a plastic bag to play with – despite the choking hazard, 101 for parenting really – and got a picture on her phone and shoved it into the baby’s face – despite the fact that babies thinking abilities do not bypass those of a spoon’s, and even if they did and technology failed to record it, they are scientifically proven to have the memory of a challenged goldfish. I didn’t know what I should be pissed about, their incompetence, their lack of care, their sub-par intelligence, their failure to evolve from primates, their ignorance of basic hygiene precautions that started with the father kissing the baby’s face although her immunity is still weak and ended up almost killing her three times by being cretins, their immaturity or their nonchalance, but I did manage to sum it all to this: Just because you can fuck, doesn’t mean you should be allowed to have kids. Japan was right.

 

Another interesting subway specimen was a lady, for lack of a better word, who managed to shout at everyone for no less than 30 minutes about politics – which she was incredibly ignorant of, as well as anything else that involved the world, and by world I mean anything outside her kitchen – then faked a leg pain, hijacked a seat from a student, talked to herself for 10 minutes announcing her domestic problems, then proceeded to shout at everyone just to let them know of her badass ability to take their seats or let them keep it, according to her impulsive whims at the time. The scene was surreal, almost like it came out of a low-budget Khaleeji musical, and it viciously consumed what little hope I had left concerning the humanity of the Egyptian majority. I realized I was detached from life just by being born into a good life, and then I realized that was probably the case of most people out there, and couldn’t see a way out other than communication, which means there is no way out because she didn’t seem to register the whole communication concept like we do. I was reluctant to type we, since it’s impossible to group people into like-minded factions in the Egyptian community – yet another thing that I found out today. I don’t remember wishing I get out of this shitdump a lot of times, but what I do remember is this: The few times that I did, I was using public transportation.

 

I need a source of hope, one that I can register at this newfound state of grownup being that doesn’t seem to be willing to absorb as much as spit flat out.

Of Dem Shuffling Digits.

Well, 20’s been taking me by the storm. Ever since I turned 20, grown up problems have been coming up that I’m supposed to know how to handle. I don’t know about other 20 noobs but I gotta say, this shit wasn’t in our textbooks. Most of the time, it feels like somebody shoved onesie-wearing kid me in a corporate office while the kid screamed ‘you’re making a mistaaaaaaaaaake!’, leaving me to feel like this most of the time:

 

 

Other times, this has been my reaction to any sort of sudden change that accompanied the growing up process:

 

 

However, I’m not exactly complaining, at least not yet anyway. I've managed to balance three jobs with freshman year so far, they used to be five but turns out I lost my cape when my speech capabilities afforded a little more than goo goo ga ga-s.. It’s true that I haven’t quite figured out how to fit in the whole sleeping and squeezing out a dookie in the process, but I’m getting there.

 

There’s this trending hashtag on twitter called 2012 Highlights, and I couldn’t help but take part of that universal update of thinking up your clean slate on the rubble grounds of your old slate’s smithereens that happens every year around December. I’d be lying if I said 2012 has been free sailing for me, but then again none of the changes, albeit important, were exactly accompanied by flashing billboards. As I sit here trying to think of how 2012 has redefined life as I know it, I can’t quite ignore the urge to punch an innocent kitten in the face as I force-feed it another puppy’s, otherwise ingrown, tail.

 

So here’s the message people, it’s never good to look back on things and expect some sort of life-changing revelation to kick you in the mental nuts; it doesn’t work that way for several reasons. For instance, nobody really cares about your problems unless you’re a handsome guy in a late-night, low-budget Hollywood indie movie at worst, and another one of those includes the fact that even if you were, the director would be too busy trying to get him laid with a hot part-timer and side-track the audience from the actual problem at hand rather than giving the script wright the little extra job of, you know, trying to solve some of life’s mysteries in his torn down basement office.

 

What’s good however, even though I’m positive I’ve said this before on here, is seeing life for what it really is; the second longest running show after cats that people take way too seriously. I mean, look at it this way, if the few of us who actually tend to make life interesting with their nonchalant view on things and non-existing sense of shame died out with the turn of the new year, what would be left to wake up to in the morning other than, well, a joke-free umpteenth time run of the second longest running show after cats?

 

As I sit here, I’m struck by my complacent composure about this whole new year thing. For once in my life, I’m not getting the urge o make a far-fetched new year’s resolutions list because again, for once in my life, I feel that things are going by as planned, even though there was no plan in the first place. I’m not known for possessing that certain glimpse into the future talent so I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing just yet. What I can tell you is this, I have a good feeling about this..whatever it is. There’s nothing I’d rather have differently and I think that’s nice. Or at least a nice template to work with.

 

I’m happy.

My Life In A Picture.

“I’m going to kill myself. I should go to Paris and jump off the Eiffel Tower. I’ll be dead. you know, in fact, if I get the Concorde, I could be dead three hours earlier, which would be perfect. Or wait a minute. It -- with the time change, I could be alive for six hours in New York but dead three hours in Paris. I could get things done, and I could also be dead.”
― Woody Allen

Early Christmas Cheer.

A Round Number.

How do I feel now that I’ll be 20 in ten days?

 

Like this. Pretty much.

 

Kilgore Trout once wrote a short story which was a dialogue between two pieces of yeast.  They were discussing the possible purposes of life as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement.  Because of their limited intelligence, they never came close to guessing that they were making champagne.

- Kurt Vonnegut.