I Love Elephants.

Highlight of My Whole Fucking Week.

 

http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/03/26/violent_clashes_erupt_after_Egyptian_student_sit_in#.UVHbtFe9Ws0.twitter

 

Karma Is A Bitch.

And yesterday was the living epitome of that statement.

 

There’s an Arabic saying whose context I can’t remember word for word that went something like ‘If you do good in this world, you can be sure life will ladle shit onto your plate in ample repay.’ It was mother’s day, and my friend Leena made 48 cupcakes that Nour, Leena and I went around campus distributing on the forgotten cleaning ladies that life rode hard and put away wet. We got some gorgeous wishes from most, wishes that originally belonged to Leena but I guess she didn’t mind sharing her good karma with a couple of friends. We felt good, like the world was okay again kind of good. I usually have trouble believing that people are inherently good, and the proof I was getting was a little too much to take in all at once, but I’d set aside my surprise for the errands at hand.

 

 

5 cupcakes remained and we decided to sit down and share them after spending 90 minutes going up and down loopy flights of stairs. Nour was basing her mass media English essay on the employment fair, using my sad experience of the usher shooing freshman-me with ‘Your CV is worthless, there’s nothing in there for you; it’s for seniors. Besides, we have a limited number of booklets anyway.’ She was surprised to hear that he laughed at my 4-year work experience and quipped that it was probably my height that triggered it, and that’s when it happened. We were spit on, twice, from a happy-go-lucky mofo that was lounging in the top floor of that building. The second one was after Leena had tried to retort to the injustice, and we tried to follow the guy and give him a piece of our mind but by the time we got to the top floor, he’d made an escape for it.

 

There are many ways to look at this, but let me shed light on a less common way to look at it that happened to make all the sense in the world to me:

 

Karma is a bitch.

 

You’d think random acts of kindness would get you a nice supply of good karma and all the positive vibes you sent out into the world would ricochet back to you when you most need it, but that’s not how it works. How it works is this: Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. You send out positive vibes, you shall receive negative vibes, and vice versa. That’s why assholes are mostly successful, or successful people are assholes. It’s not a coincidence.

 

What happened was that karma pissed on our parade, quite literally, and ruined a perfectly good day with our begrudging indignation at the society and what it has come to.

 

Earl lied.

 

“You will notice that what we are aiming at when we fall in love is a very strange paradox. The paradox consists of the fact that, when we fall in love, we are seeking to re-find all or some of the people to whom we were attached as children. On the other hand, we ask our beloved to correct all of the wrongs that these early parents or siblings inflicted upon us. So that love contains in it the contradiction: The attempt to return to the past and the attempt to undo the past. This guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, Doc, my brother’s crazy. He thinks he’s a chicken. The doctor says, Well, why don’t you turn him in? And the guy says, I would but I need the eggs. Well I guess that’s pretty much how I feel about relationships. You know they’re totally irrational and crazy and absurd but I guess we keep going through it because, uh, most of us need the eggs.”

― Woody Allen

Dear Parents. Scratch That.

I am not surprised I ended up here, this rant was coming sooner or later. And it is targeted at parents:

 

Do you even know what the fuck you’re doing?

 

Well, I don’t think you do, and I’m not surprised. I don’t blame you either, you never really asked for this. You can’t ask for this, you couldn’t possibly know what you’re up against. And this is one of the main reasons I never want to have children; I don’t want that kind of blood on my hands, it’s too much responsibility, more than a human can dare to handle or call his own. The formation of another human, that’s too much, nobody likes playing god, not even god likes playing god half the time.

 

What I believe is this, parents are the real catalyst behind immortalizing the Peter Pan Complex; they want their kids to remain kids, and instead of teaching them what works in real life, they feed them fairytales and utopian concepts to feed their selfish need of one lasting perfection, their own literary, customized dream figurine.

 

What’s more, they blame their kids for not eliminating their own sense of developing logic and figuring it all out in the end, they blame them for the same conclusions they came upon when they grew up – a time that grownups forget when they morph into parents – and they actually make the child feel bad for choosing their own paths in life.

 

Has right and wrong been anything but subjective? Has it worked for anyone in the unfolding course of history? Has it been proven a stable template at any time since Adam and Eve fucked up?

 

The answer to all the above is no, if you thought about it, then congratulations, you’re delusional.

 

Why do that when you can instead save them a lot of work and yourself a lot of impending disappointment that you could make do without and just tell them how life really works from the start? Will it break their heart, or yours? What’s the honest answer here?

 

It’s beyond me why parents think they’re doing a great job by telling their kids how to live when kids have found the loophole since they knew life for what it is and have been doing the parenting themselves, they’ve been parenting themselves and their parents, a job that is not only unfair and unreasonable, but downright hilarious to ask of creatures that emerge into this world clueless and go out confused.

 

If a person is the outcome of his experiences, then your job is annulled. If a person is the outcome of his choices, then your job is again annulled. What is your job? Your job is to help them, not steer them by the hand away from danger so they wouldn’t know what they’re up against when you’re gone, not to limit their choices by your own prejudices and shortcomings so they have to deal with both sets instead of one when they grow up and count in their own, not to teach them that measuring themselves against another person’s code is what it means to truly love, and definitely not to give them the biggest fight of their lives when you take away their choice by putting it up against losing you.

 

Parenting is really not that hard, you can write books about it and you can collaborate on endless studies to delve into the labyrinthine psychological ways of coinciding age groups in the forced yet instinctively doting responsibility of the guardians’ relationship with their offspring and you’d have books full of bullshit. You want real parenting advice? Ask kids. Kids grow up trying to avoid their parents’ parenting mistakes, that they all know so well, even better than the back of their hands, and end up blind to everything else, everything else that could possibly matter on the larger scale of things, only to come up with a family line that has an identical set of mistakes every other generation. It’s pathetically hilarious.

 

What’s even more hilarious is that you’d think by now someone would have noticed the pattern and actively put in an effort to break it, but it is not surprising that they haven’t since the human race has the peculiar ability to not see something that right in front of them, and usually don’t know a sign if it hit them in the face with a baseball bat.

 

Parenting has become a form of conditioning, deformed into a set that has travelled through bloodlines unscathed by their individual fortune cookies of experiences and uncorrected by life’s travelling hints. Just like every other form of teaching nowadays, it has become void of learning and full of crap. You’re an all-knowing god who does not make mistakes because you had the dismissive luxury of popping out a kid one unfortunate sweaty night; you’re above learning.

 

 

Well, you’re not and it pisses me off.

 

Dear parents, open up your eyes and see things for what they are. You can’t save people from themselves, nobody can. Protect them from junk food and they’ll grow up obese, make them blind to the world and they’ll poke an eye out on a road sign. You don’t protect people by taking them out of harm’s way, you protect them by sharing your knowledge and giving a hand enough to prepare them for when they have to protect themselves. You’ve been doing it all wrong, and you’ve just been owned by a 20-year-old.

 

Also, you’re a dumbass if you think they’re not doing what they want anyway, it’s your fault that you’ve been excluded out of their life and it’s your fault for widening the generational gap by making them too scared to come to you when they fuck up and out begging for pieces of advice from people who are more likely to harm them than what they fucked up in the first place. Great job.

 

No really, let’s hear a roaring sound of applause, maybe that’ll break the sound barrier.

“We can surely no longer pretend that our children
are growing up into a peaceful, secure, and civilized world.
We've come to the point where it's irresponsible
to try to protect them from the irrational world
they will have to live in when they grow up.
The children themselves haven't yet isolated themselves
by selfishness and indifference; they do not fall easily
into the error of despair; they are considerably braver
than most grownups. Our responsibility to them
is not to pretend that if we don't look, evil will go away,
but to give them weapons against it.” ~ Madeleine L'Engle.

Epilogue.

There’s something especially hurtful about misunderstandings; the indignation, the surprise that the alliance wasn’t mature enough to automatically troubleshoot it, the newfound bitterness at the time and energy you’ve willingly invested in someone else’s happiness at the expense of your own, the fact that care was convoluted into malice and all that was once shared in confidence turned into ammunition, the paranoid belief of an ulterior motive, but most of all, it’s the memories. Good memories hurt so much more than bad memories, merely because of the potential they held, the hope they condoned, the dependence that took both for granted. Does it ever really get old? Has evolution truly found a way around it? Why does it keep happening? Do people really need it that much to not learn that they’re perhaps better off without it?

 

Perhaps the cherry on top of the crap cracker is the fact that you will not lift a toe to fix it, because sometimes, when something that important goes wrong, it makes you doubt whether it was worth its assigned value or if you’d miscalculated the person’s place.

 

A good sign is the fact that you will not feel any of the above, or anything at all, as you watch the other person hilariously writhe in imaginary pain at what they’ve misconstrued of your words, and it makes you feel somewhat grateful that of the two, you were the one who was truly free.

“The reason death sticks so closely to life isn't biological necessity; it's envy. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can.”

Life Of Pi – Yann Martel.

“The kakapo is a bird out of time. If you look one in its large, round, greeny-brown face, it has a look of serenely innocent incomprehension that makes you want to hug it and tell it that everything will be all right, though you know that it probably will not be.”

— Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See

Sing it, Sistah!

My January.

Most Of You Were Naked, But Some Of You Were Light.

When you've fallen on the highway
and you're lying in the rain,
and they ask you how you're doing
of course you'll say you can't complain --
If you're squeezed for information,
that's when you've got to play it dumb:
You just say you're out there waiting
for the miracle, for the miracle to come.

My Life In A Picture.

Blind, Deaf & Dumb With Learning Disabilities.

The mind is a scary thing, and being in one all of the time everyday of every week can make you incredibly blind and misled by your own prejudices and kinks most of the time. Its such a shame to see people who’ve started out on the right track then have been driven insane by their own egos or insecurities. It makes you wanna knock on their skull just to see if there’s still anybody in there. What’s even more scary is that no matter how hard you try to make them see the truth, there is a time when you’ll inevitably need to resign and arrive at the very logical conclusion of how maybe, just maybe, they’ve gone batshit insane.

 

Grandpa is not impressed.

 

People are beyond saving, in fact, saving is a concept that is spawn out of mere wishful thinking, for after all, how do you know  you’re not blinded yourself? There is no clear right and wrong that hasn’t been set by man, and what makes you trust mankind so much? History has proven that just because something has been around for long enough doesn’t mean it’s right. Entire regimes that were diligently abided to for decades were, at one point or another, brought down and later looked upon as major trespasses on the rights of the entire humanity. What’s the point of investing any real hope in something as incredibly variable as human nature? More stable and reliable things have been trusted and only proved to disappoint. It doesn’t seem like fair game to me.

Pause.

Of A Begrudging Minion.

I don’t know what possessed me to open up a blank post and start writing, for I have nothing to say. I don’t think that should be an issue though because after all, this is a blog, who reads those?

 

I still haven’t hit the book fair, or collected the last paycheck from the job I recently quit. I have to say, I was rather bothered by the unceremonious reply to the e-mail I sent  informing them that I quit. I had to send three of those for them to notice I’m gone. God knows it wasn’t for lack of hard work on my part, but then again I’m reluctant to see it’s for lack of organization on their part without having my head tell me to stop staging egotistical airbags for the crash. But then again what was I really expecting? That they’d beg a freshman with no credentials to stay at all costs, seducing me with an undeserved raise? I guess I’ve still got some rough edges to sand away. Oh Egypt, where application e-mails’ only replies are delivery notification failures. I’m yet to find one job where hard work is not repaid with frustration and disproportionate workload for little to no pay. I want to tell myself that it’ll change once I’m no longer an undergraduate, but who am I kidding? This country ladles disappointments quite generously and wouldn’t take no for an answer even if your belly’s full to the brim. Where are my manners? Ladle on, I’ll stuff myself some more.

 

 

On a happier note, I’ve found my meditation spot and ultimate happy place, and it’s the balcony in the waiting room of my dad’s clinic. Unsurprisingly enough, it’s the only place where I can just sit there, thinking of everything and nothing, and feeling good about it for no reason at all. Maybe it’s an aura-related thing, I don’t know. Frasier has also been yet another of those no-brainers that have helped me relax over the last few days, I’ve found that it supplies the civil conversation that this country lacks.

 

I’m in such a fowl mood, something my uncle used to say springs to mind. He’d sit there looking at my drudging at my homework and remind me - to my adamant dismay - that I’ll miss this when I’m out of school. He’d say “At least now you know your hard work is going somewhere, and have the luxury of knowing where it’s going too. You don’t get that in real life. Out there, the only confirmation you get is hope that you were smart enough not to point your work off a cliff.” Of course at the time it was mindless babble that I never quite registered, but now it makes a whole lot of sense that I can’t accommodate in my current state. Uncle, if you’re reading this, YOU WERE RIGHT! Gloat on.

 

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go watch Frasier and master the art of homemade Oreo shakes.

The Secret To Life, The Universe, And Everything.

Why This Perfectly Normal Morning Is Odd.

This is an odd morning, on more than one occasion. For instance, I just sympathized with a mosquito. Let me explain, mosquitoes don’t quite go out that much in winter, you can think of them as your average senile neighbour who never managed to pick up the paper after November. This particular mosquito lazily hovered by in the middle of January. I didn’t have the heart to shoo it because I couldn’t help but think that maybe that mosquito’s family didn’t care that much about him anymore, how they wanted to send him to an old people’s home and he took it too much to heart that he fought and regained his freedom only to be left homeless in this awful weather. I’m sure the chill down his spine isn’t triggered by freedom as much as it is by frostbite. Poor mosquito.

 

Knowing me, you’d see it was only a matter of time before I’d eventually

get into anime, and truly that time has come. Although, I cannot for the life of me understand how the hell anime has not been ruthlessly attacked by feminists. I mean they tore Shakespeare a new one for putting females in vulnerable positions and then you watch anime and all you get are airheads, inferior creatures and babbling ingénues and they’re like ‘oh okay then, cool’? It just doesn’t make sense! Also, Japanese metal is disturbing, and I mean a whole new level of disturbing. Which reminds me, Japanese anime is not above killing protagonists and it is not unusual to fall in love with an anime character. It is quite natural, I suppose, one of the many loopholes of being a sapiosexual is the fact that you will fall for anything that radiates an air of intelligence even if in fact it were a thing, or you know, if it were a thing that doesn’t actually exist.

 

 

I’m oh so very glad TV shows exist because we wouldn’t have been able to afford that much therapy with my college education. Another reason why this is an odd morning is that I'm inexplicably craving steak and a glass of dry red wine. At least now I can see why philosophers have died trying to figure out what women want. However, I'm in a good mood today, because when you've been in a bad mood for long enough it bypasses 90 degrees and approaches 180 then you're cool again. Although I have to admit, my reaction to the birds wasn’t quite as mild as they show it on TV; I had the urge to shoot each and every one of these feathered kooks in the face with a bazooka. I’m not a morning person, not one bit.

 

I’ve been having a little bit of an identity crisis lately, so much that I have a feeling that if I ever go to a fortuneteller, she'll just look into the crystal ball & see a future full of anime, coffee & books. They say the middle child gets the best of both worlds, well I'm an only child, I get all worlds and the dimensions squeezed in between..but that’s not always good news. Besides, why should I have an identity crisis and you don’t? Hm? Google 'askew', regain faith in less than 2 seconds. You're welcome. Now type illuminati backwards dot com and lose faith again.

 

Have a great day.

As For Planning..

Roz: Ever heard of Lupe Velez?
Frasier: Who?
Roz: Lupe Velez, the movie star in the '30s. Well, her career hit the skids, so she decided she'd make one final stab at immortality. She figured if she couldn't be remembered for her movies, she'd be remembered for the way she died. And all Lupe wanted was to be remembered. So, she plans this lavish suicide - flowers, candles, silk sheets, white satin gown, full hair and makeup, the works. She takes the overdose of pills, lays on the bed, and imagines how beautiful she's going to look on the front page of tomorrow's newspaper. Unfortunately, the pills don't sit well with the enchilada combo plate she sadly chose as her last meal. She stumbles to the bathroom, trips and goes head-first into the toilet, and that's how they found her.
Frasier: Is there a reason you're telling me this story?
Roz: Yes. Even though things may not happen like we planned, they can work out anyway.
Frasier: Remind me again how it worked for Lupe, last seen with her head in the toilet.
Roz: All she wanted was to be remembered. Will you ever forget that story?

The Best Birthday Gift, Ever.

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.