Of Wiley Coyote, Nuclear Shelters & Rum.

Looking back on an academically wrecked week of missed classes and overdue work, today is looking a little too suspiciously bright. I have two finals to work on and an 11-hour window to work with. The day is starting off wonderfully tho, with coffee, catching up with a friend halfway across the universe and taking the barn quiz only to find out I’m Rory, not Stan, not the butcher and to my special consolation and guilty pleasure, not the cynical wise old Ram. I choose to overlook the fact that it’s a deafening confirmation that I’m not grounded in reality, but as long as it’s working, then being grounded in reality is an overrated concept, well, unless you’re a tree..

Also, my TWSS-integrated head is ruining Keane for me. ‘And iiiiiiif you have a minute why don’t weeee goooo?’

I woke up craving dessert, so I tried to microwave a forgotten old piece of cake with strawberry jam. Well, looking on the bright side, even tho I didn’t get my dessert, I think I may have uncovered one of the lost secrets of mummification. Humanity is one step closer to making mummies again, because of me, be proud.

One of the shushed marketing hoaxes is finding ways to say things that make absolutely no sense in a way that people would buy it. For instance, ‘This sizzling shower experience will leave you invigorated and smelling of fresh pomegranates.’ It smells nothing like pomegranates, actually, I don’t think pomegranates have a smell, but then again they can’t market a product saying ‘This sizzling shower experience will leave you invigorated and smelling of nothing!’

Anywho, I’m in the mood to start working, as soon as I’m done with my nuclear shelter routine. To further elaborate, when I’m looking at a day as stuffed as this one, I head to my nuclear shelter, known to regular human by the bathroom, taking a long shower and swear on everything holy that I’m not coming out until I’m ready to face the world again. It helps. It’s one of the few places where time seems to stop, like for instance, it doesn’t feel like you’re gonna be screwed if you don’t finish work on time when you’re washing your hair and working through the stubborn curls. Another place is under the blankets, when it’s dark enough for you to neither see nor acknowledge the clock tick-tocking your career away. Or waiting on the water boiler looking into the coffee crystals waiting to transform into that magical beverage that pumps through your caterpillar veins turning you into a human being with the attention span of a meth-charged butterfly. To each his own, but this is my secret recipe of sugar, spice and everything nice.

My list of nuclear shelters extends to encompass an old tree, Photoshop, a Coldplay list and this blog. Combining them by sipping my glorious coffee in the bathroom with Coldplay playing in the background and blogging while you’re at it sure beats meditation at running away to your happy place in just your tumultuous head. Also, it’s three-dimensional, better and a lot more hygienic than carrying your old blanky around everywhere you go.

On an unrelated note, I just realized that the lead singer of Keane is chubby. That’s comforting.

Along my list of comforting realizations are the following:

People grow up when they stop asking why the rum is gone. They start getting better when they stop wondering why the rum is gone, and they’re irrevocably healed when they stop hoping there’s another stash of rum in reach that they forgot about.

Also, people grow up when they start relating to the Simpsons or relate to Tom and Wiley Coyote in Tom & Jerry and Road Runner, and find it a painful reminder of how the asshole always gets his way.

Some people are turtles. They have this agonizingly heavy shell they carry around everywhere and can’t help but whine about the burden when the sun’s out and there’s nothing to hide from. A little ambitious thing like trying to climb a set of stairs would kill them, because once they’re overturned, they’re not resilient enough to bounce right back up. After all, they’ve always depended on problems sorting themselves out just by swooshing back into themselves.

You can take your tree everywhere, all you have to do is take a picture of it and set it as wallpaper on your phone. To all of you who thought I chopped it off and shoved it in my back pocket, get therapy.

Memory Maintenance.

This blogpost is a reminder. It’s a reminder that I write for me, and not any of you. It helps straighten my often wonky perspective . It’s a reminder that work makes me happy, not because of the outcome, but the actual mind-numbingly gratifying process. It’s a reminder of the assholes certain people have been which is a fact I somehow forgot about and was reminded of through retrospect and a memory jogged fresh by old entries. It’s a reminder of how loins can reduce a person to their stupidest, most disloyal and overall pathetic versions of self, which can’t be helped, but somehow understood. You can’t ask a person who’s high on hormones to think or be themselves. Those are a minority that I have yet to meet. I’ve learned to be tolerant of it, but sometimes, all a person needs is a shot of endorphins up the right vein and they’ll turn into the worst person they could have ever become in a fictional parallel universe. It’s a reminder that keeping your distance is never a bad thing. It’s a reminder that white tea contributes to world peace by making your urges to smash people’s faces in a little more repressible. It’s a reminder that Ralph Hagen stalks me and sends me life lessons through his barn comics. Unluckily for me, since I’m his muse, they come a little too late to be applicable at first try, but hey, even I couldn’t say no to little snippets of wisdom that I can use next time in that adorable form; they definitely beat that senile voice in your head looking down on you over their glasses with their do’s and don’ts. It’s a reminder that no matter how badly one person may think of you, there will always be one person, maybe one you haven’t met yet or is stuck halfway across the universe in the north pole with a fishing stick that will think you’re the most perfect human being that ever walked the planet, and that the only consolation is to have a tiny capsulated version of that person in yourself to keep the abusive voices company and maybe even be loud enough to be a trend setter at one point. It’s a reminder that you’re never of what anyone thinks you are as much as you’re of what you know you are and are too scared to admit. It’s a reminder that, believable or not, I will never be fully awake and sober without my certified coffee dosage. It’s a reminder that the stupid things I’ve done were done by everyone else at one point who may not be at peace with themselves enough to admit it and are insecure enough to deny them space and time patches. It’s a reminder that listening to Keane and watching standup comedy shows are one of the many excellent ways of starting the day. It’s a reminder that it’s not in my sanity’s best interest to be awake at night, since not sleeping is still not a good reason for my head to shut down the nightmare department. It’s a reminder that what you think and what you believe are not bound by right or wrong. It’s a reminder that right and wrong are determined by you, not the majority. It’s a reminder that choices make the person as much as their implications, but would amount to zilch if you’ve learned just that; zilch. It’s a reminder that people show their true colors when shit hits the fan, and it’s not until then that you should come down to a list of constants. It’s a reminder that the aforementioned list of constants is not to be used until it’s dog-eared, worn through and fingered beyond recognition. It’s a reminder that goodness is acquired, a conscious choice you make everyday that is never made into a habit, so you shouldn’t depend on it being one. It’s a reminder that people are stupid, too. They fuck up too and more often than not, they hardly know any better than you do; they’re just better at hiding it and worse at owning up to it. It’s a reminder that you should never let go of the little routines at which you’re at your absolute happiest, latently speaking. Be it working, practicing piano or reading a good book, because no one will give up their equivalent for you. It’s a reminder that people put themselves first, and that it’s a fact of life that is rarely compromised by fairytale-oriented concepts like love, including every possible variation, semblance or void statement of it. It’s a reminder that I do not for the life of me regret missing prom and may not attend my own graduation ceremony, and it’s because I have priorities which do not include spending one of the most pivotal moments of my life around haters, even if it means I spend it at home reading an online article about the origin and history of soap operas. It’s a reminder that even tho at nights like these that I wish I had somebody, I know that I don’t need them. It’s a reminder that nothing is pathetic, as long as it works. And last but not least, it’s a reminder that nobody gets out of this ditch alive, so you might as well get a kick out of killing yourself.

Women..

Spineless Dreamers Hide In Churches.

 

I shake through the wreckage for signs of life

Scrolling through the paragraphs

Clicking through the photographs

I wish I could make sense of what we do

Burning down the capitals

The wisest of the animals

Who are you? What are you living for?

Tooth for tooth, maybe we'll go one more

This life is lived in perfect symmetry

What I do, that will be done to me

Read page after page of analysis

Looking for the final score

We're no closer than we were before

Who are you? What are you fighting for?

Holy truth? Brother, I choose this mortal life

Lived in perfect symmetry

What I do, that will be done to me

As the needle slips into the run out groove

Love, maybe you'll feel it too

And maybe you'll find life is unkind and over so soon

There is no golden gate, there's no heaven waiting for you

Oh boy, you ought to leave this town

Get out while you can the meter's running down

The voices in the streets you love

Everything is better when you hear that sound

Woah, woah, woah

Spineless dreamers hide in churches

Pieces of pieces of rush hour buses

I dream in emails, worn out phrases

Mile after mile of just empty pages

Wrap yourself around me

Wrap yourself around me

As the needle slips into the run out groove

Maybe you'll feel it too, maybe you'll feel it too

Maybe you'll feel it too, maybe you'll feel it too

(Spineless dreamers hide in churches)

Pieces of pieces of rush hour buses

I dream in emails, worn out phrases

Mile after mile of just empty pages

Spineless dreamers hide in churches

How I Ruined Today’s All-Nighter.

Of Dadoscope, Doppelgangers & Sophia Loren.

It’s been a rather relaxed day, with the exception of a couple of incidents where the accumulation of assholes made me blow up in the face of one of the sweetest people I’ve come to meet. Quite a recurring incident, it’s how karma likes to be funny, or maybe how evolution tends to those who have not been morphed yet by survival’s better judgment. I have no idea what  I came here to write, but I’ve had quite an interesting conversation with my father and judging from my goldfish memory, I’d hate to let that go to waste in the folds of my troubled mind.

It wasn’t anything that special really, we were just sitting there, him after a very long day at work and mine just barely starting, I had an all-nighter ahead and I wasn’t that pepped up about jumpstarting it. As usual, I turned off the lights, made us a couple of glasses of white tea and we sat there enjoying an old 60’s movie called ‘The Countess Of Hong Kong’, starring Marlon Brando and that chick with the unbelievably awesome boobs called Sophia Loren. My dad, as usual, made the most observant and abstract comments, which usually but not always had a hidden meaning he was hinting at. It’s one of his method of getting advice into my subconscious past my defenses. He commented on how Sophia Loren has been made to wear flats so she wouldn’t be taller than Marlon Brando, how the acting was theatrical because at the time, movies were a foreign concept to them. He commented on how all the girls have been casted and scripted to sound ordinary and paling in comparison with Sophia, even though she wasn’t that slick herself; just a pretty face and mysterious demeanor really. He mooted my outraged observations about how much of a male-dominated society it used to be by asking me what Marlon just said, which I didn’t remember, hence proving his point that after all, it was Sophia’s lines to which our attention was directed. He told me that boob jobs didn’t exist back then, and laughed at how I retorted defensively that they don’t make em like that anymore.

Somehow our conversation drifted to our dreams. Not the ones you have in your sleep, the ones you wish for when you’re wide awake with your head given the pink slip. I already knew his by heart, but I like to hear him say it. I get my goldfish memory from him so he never fails to cover all the details. Sipping on his white tea and staring off into the reluctant shadows, with only the TV giving his facial expressions just enough lighting and the movie chatting up the background into a comfortable haze to give room for his speech to be personal yet laid back, he’d talk about how he’d always wanted to retire in a little cabin by an expanse lake, somewhere in the outskirts of a tranquil little town. He’d press that the food needn’t be that great and the cabin would probably be more on the shack side than an actual reputable condo. He’d say that was all he wanted out of life, with the luxury of a quality fishing line, a comfortable reclining chair and access to a beautiful library and good classical music. Somewhere quiet, away from all the confusion of modern needs and commitments of the city life. He’d say that the only adventurous version of that dream of his would have to be roaming the world on one of them yachts that have been furnished into a little floating house.

He’s always been a hopeless romantic, one that has been undercover as a working class blue collar for so long that he’d effortlessly fool anyone into thinking that person has been obliterated long ago. I daresay he’d give the thought police a run for their money had his first name been Winston. He’d talk about his father when I ask him why he wouldn’t go fishing as often as he’d like, much like he used to till I turned 8, and that’s when the story always comes, the one about my grandpa. He was a rebellious soul, confrontational and took life by the balls. The bad boy who took idiotic risks and made it big despite his own father’s expectations of him yet never failed to enjoy the little niceties of life, the redhead on the basketball league and the flirtatious playboy who knocked all the ladies off their feet yet managed to maintain a sense of integrity and chivalry that seemed to have been travelling down the same line since the medieval times and almost gone extinct. He’d say how much of him he sees in me that it scares him, reminding me of how my grandma always follows every little thing I habitually do by an ‘Oh my, just like your grandpa, bless your soul’, and I giggle at the irony, since I’ve never actually met the guy. I’d inevitably start thinking about how a lot of what feels like our choices has been predetermined by genes.

The story that inevitably follows being how he stopped being confrontational and didn’t take the risk of telling his boss he was a total ass after he got married. He’d quip his line, how he stood there in the middle of the bank and told his boss off saying ‘If I wasn’t married, I’d make you into the fool you are, lucky enough for your new set of front teeth, I have kids who’ll pay for this.’ In case you were wondering, he was shortly promoted afterwards. Then my father would never fail to add in the little footnote that I should never try that because people are no longer grounded in a sense of morality and I would most probably not only get laid off, but no other place would hire with that mole on my CV just so the asshole could save face. And yes, dad never forget to add in a ‘Don’t try this at home’ when he’s talking to me; he knows I’m nuts enough to try it against every reasonable argument common sense or self preservation may offer.

He’d always ask me what my dream is, the form of life I’d like to lead, and I’d always say the same thing, an independent life void of attachments and being tied down to a spouse, family or any form of preset agenda or zip code, leading a career that I love doing which doesn’t have to bring in that much money but enough to get me by on my own without tagging me as a kid who can’t pay her own electricity bill and getting evicted for failing to meet the deadline of payment after so many notices. He’d again comment of how much of his father he sees in me, using adjectives like bohemian and existentialist to describe it in retrospect. I’d always ask him what he thinks of it and he’d follow with the usual line of how the striking resemblance I have with his own father is gainsaid by the amazing contradiction I have with my own father, giving a little smile, the one that makes me feel he can see through me more clearly than he can see through the white tea he’s holding; I call it dadoscope. He’d comment on how I always liked it in stock as opposed to his choice of enjoying the tiny luxuries life offers in retail. I always say I get better discounts and he’d retort that his losses are not as paramount to the invested capital.

Then, like every other night, we’d agree to disagree as we drudge on to the things we have to do, cussing at the clock for stealing our time and academia for occupying our heads, only to do it all over again.

And I’m Afraid Because I Have No Fear.

Eshtery Dma3’ak.

Happiness Has A Price Tag.

Of Sparky.

‘Let me tell you about a Labrador retriever named Sparky. Sparky could not wag his tail, because of an automobile accident many years ago, so he had no way of telling other dogs how friendly he was. He had to fight all the time. His ears were in tatters and he was lumpy with scars.’

– Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut.

Every Criminal Was Made Into One. Or So Say The Pussies.

When you're the only common factor in a great diverse number of heinous things, you start to wonder if it was your fault and they're all derivatives. I don't know which higher power believes in my superhuman abilities but I'd like it to stop trying to win the bet with the one who doesn't.

'لا نكلف نفسا إلا وسعها.' - Well, I gotta say, I'm flattered.

And no, I’m not being sarcastic.

You’re Looking At Me But I’m Looking Through You.

Now I Gotta Get Used To Not Living Next-door To Alice.

Life Lesson #302

يعني ايه كارما؟ يعني تفضل تقابل ناس وحشه طول حياتك فا تخليك لما تقابل ناس حلوه متصدقش نفسك و تديهم بالجزمه

Of White Tea Ring Stains On Kübler-Ross Models.

I’ve had an odd month, it’s been one of those months when life doesn’t seem like it’s gonna give you a break any time soon. A good friend postulated that life just realized I’m turning 20 soon and decided to give me a painfully accelerated crash course which I might as well gain experience from.

It gets me thinking about how people think a baby dear surviving in the jungle all on its own is so damn tough, hah. Well, Bambi, wait till you get a whiff of this. Humans have it a lot worse, they’re handling the animal/neanderthal/intelligent beings/psychotic mutants  integrated version of survival’s book. That’s numerically quadruple the work, but would amount to a lot more if the value was assigned according to the level of difficulty. We’re looking at a six figure here people. It doesn’t seem like it’s taking any coffee breaks, because it’s been surely interrupting mine.

I woke up this morning and it took me thirty minutes of all the verbal variation of  ‘Everything’s gonna be just fine, I’m stronger than this shit’ to muster up the guts to get out of bed, because somehow, right there, with the lights off, doors closed, no people, no technology and no phone, absolutely no means of connection to the outside world, it felt like I could finally pause life, or at least its effect reaching me. The blanket was the cape that deflected all the warped psychic bullets coming out of everywhere.

But then I needed coffee, and it was all the way to the kitchen, passing through a vulnerable time tunnel with phones, laptops, people and news broadcast in the way. You could say that coffee got me out of bed and saved the day. And it’s not even Irish.

Work is good, I’ve voluntarily been working for almost 10 hours, and I’m not done yet. I’ve got another 8 ahead, and it’s splendid. It’s amazing in the way how it takes the guilt and all the unnecessary brain activity and turns you into a happy bot. I’ve always wondered why the natural course of life would state it logical to put our brains on overdrive while our bodies were on overdrive, but looking at  it with a glass-half-full-of-coffee perspective, it now makes sense that puberty and high-school are simultaneous, much like how a drunkard’s vehicle would only revert to uniform velocity when it’s reached maximum acceleration. Either on its own would leave too much room for thinking which has a small possibility of making room for your creativity as opposed to a humongous and a more likely possibility that you’ll have enough time on your hands and ram in your head to fuck up irrevocably. Conclusion? Burnouts are in badger-less bliss.

Also, white tea is great for all-nighters, because it offers the comfort of the illusion that you might or might not get sleep some time soon, which is otherwise eliminated with a caffeinated shot up cranium in a mug of coffee or a guiltily fattening coke. It doesn’t mean you’ll sleep soon, it just means you can if you want to, and the choice is always liberating. Even in a stupid little irrelevant thing, because let’s face it, you’re more likely to hang around if you don’t really have to. It makes you look at the piles of Advanced Maths and Physics with the rejuvenated lust of a hook up rather than the grudge of a spouse.

Along the lines of all-nighters and white tea, help could come from more unexpected routes, like a med student who happened to be up at just the right time, ogling a glaucoma text with a droopy sleepless eye. A shout out to all the little tools of desperate luck coming at you from all the angles you’d have your butt towards at just the wrong time who manage to hit you in the back of the head with an annoying little hopeful blow.

Funny thing happened today, when I recounted the series of unfortunate events to one of the odd birds I call friends, I was called lucky, and it made me think about how of all the adjectives, lucky was the one to fill the designated clearing. Maybe being lucky doesn’t necessarily mean the right things happening to you at the right time, but rather the wrong things happening to you at all the wrong times just because you, of all people, were up for it. It would give off the sense that you’re a working-class underrated hero, which is yet another illusion that humans seem to find comforting. Another shout out to the old soul who said that weakness is a self-fulfilling prophecy, taking people’s word is much like looking in a  reverse mirror and first impressions are a second chance at a third person perspective.

And for now, I leave you with the thought that bad things might be an indicative, though a paramount fail at a funny cosmic joke, that you’re up for great things, regardless of  how little you are.

And Then You Call Upon God.

One Day.

Close Enough To Start A War.

These couple of weeks have given me a lot of time and reasons to come down to many realizations. You know, those middle of the night aha moments where a light bulb materializes in the thin air above your forehead and you end up smacking it off because the pain of that revelation almost scorches it and end up with a theatrical facepalm? Yeh, those ones.

I realized that at this point of my life, my sanity has been sufficiently unhinged to make me see things that no other person can second. I’ve been told that I needed professional help by two of my closest people and I came upon the conclusion that my psyche Vikings push people who care away with tiny little axes and dismember them in an obscure vault in my subconscious while simultaneously convincing me that they never gave a fuck to begin with, or existed, for that matter. Shame I had to find out after being held hostage and led into that same room earlier this week when I tried to take care, the only way I can, about that little figment of evolution’s imagination that goes by the name of soul, proudly crowned with a ‘my’ pronoun that isn’t really its own, nor mine.

I realized that people actually care, I just was never let to believe it by my Vikings because it was easier that way, it was much easier when everybody was a temporary it that never gave a crap and never will. It prevented the  progress of a thing that was more likely by historical odds to leave by making it sound like it never intended to stay. The Vikings weren’t happy that I sneaked into their HQ and found out about their current war strategy. I’m guessing they’ll wage another soon enough, with a strategy that I have no clue about, a plan B that hasn’t been put down in textbooks or tried on a former human psyche. And I use the term human loosely.

‘It would be difficult to determine the state of that soul and what form it had assumed, under its twisted envelope. If we were to attempt to penetrate into Quasimodo’s soul through its thick, hard outer shell, if we could sound the depths of that twisted mind, explore the shadowy interior of that opaque creature, illuminate its obscure corners and absurd blind alleys and suddenly throw a clear light on the spirit enchained at the bottom of that cavern, we would no doubt find it stunted and rickety, like those prisoners in the dungeons of Venice who grew old bent double in a stone box too low to stand in and too short to lie in.

Quasimodo scarcely felt within himself the blind stirrings of a soul made in his own image. The impressions of external objects underwent considerable refraction before they reached his understanding. He received almost no immediate perceptions; the external world seemed further away to him than it does to us. His brain twisted all the ideas which passed through it. He was therefore  the victim of endless optical illusions and aberrations of judgment; his thoughts wandered aimlessly, sometimes mad, sometimes idiotic.’

I realized that my logic, uttered incessantly by the voices inside my head, has been rendered inept; it’s no longer one that I could listen to and follow with confidence, because by the statement of people whose word I’ve learned to trust more than my own, it’s no longer in sync with that of the world. It’s been pushed back into another dimension by the aforementioned Vikings, known to the world as defense mechanisms.

I realized that the world is not coded in mathematics, and couldn’t be predicted with formulas, because it’s full of ‘People’ whose formulas are too volatile to be bracketed in one general term. In fact, they’re so elaborate that even if you take one person and try to formulate and extrapolate his actions and reactions, there’d still be more variables than the slots you’ve made into their formula, and as a consequence would be impossible to fit in just one and quite a laborious task to try and make an extended version of that x function to include all those y variations, let alone know, by your current state of judgment, their true limit or form.

In the words of a good friend, the only consolation is this: “Being nuts isn't a bad thing, look what all the sanity brought to the world.”

As for the solution, I’m not nearly one to know.

Life Lesson #301: Running away is not an option.

‘I mean if you’re able to go into a collapse with all your might, why can’t you use the same energy to stay well and busy?’ – J.D. Salinger.

A Dream.

i had a dream recently

and it was about

...*drumroll*

zombies

kal 3ada

i was in a pyramid fil 2wel

(my dreams are super gory btw)

anyway, fil pyramid and i dnt rmr details, but there were mummies everywhere

and they were SCARY

intestines falling out and shit

7agat 2raf awi

b3deen there was a struggle 7aga keda, neseet el details honestly

i ran out

thinking the dream was over

XD hahaha

oh me. el mohem

i ran out into the heart of a city of roaming zombies

first image

blood splattered on the ground and pieces of flesh

one zombie on a lamp post

hanging b3deen fell and smashed on his face

and i freaked out

not that he fell

no

that wasnt the scary part

the real scary part is if you know zombies, they don't know how to climb really..

at least not lamp posts.

this was an indication that i was screwed

so naturally, i pretended to be a zombie with this other guy, who was also human zayee

i know, i keep telling my mom im messed up

3lashan this isnt normal

but whatever

anyway,

this is when it gets really weird

and you'll realize

what zombies are

to me

i finally got it

i pretended to be a zombie with this guy, and there were a bunch of zombies hanging out keda, like chilling as friends

and they demanded we do this weird zombie dance

el mohem we sucked, and fil akher i was like

...im sorry im just not a zombie

hahaha

and they're like, we know, it's okay we won't do anything to you

and

the dream ends with me telling them

"you're genuinely good people, though."

and they all smiled.

***Courtesy of Sara Soliman, one of my closest friends and someone whose head is a place I’d personally book a ticket to in one of my next lives.***

17th of February 2012

But that's just how the story unfolds, you get another hand soon after you fold.

Well, guess what, dad? Turns out I’m a wimp after all.

Phantom Soul

We Feel What We Can’t See.

‘You may be a lot of things, but wimp is not one of them.’ – Dad.