Natalie; the Melbourne Piano Street Performer.

Sep 6th, 10:08

Dobby gave Dobby a sock. Dobby is free.

"Normally heaven or hell spotted the prophetic types and broadcast enough noises on the same mental channel to prevent any undue accuracy. Actually, that was rarely necessary; they normally found ways of generating their own static in self-defence against the images that echoed around their heads. Poor old St. John had his mushrooms. Nostradamus had his ale."

Platform Nine And Three Quarters

Goodbyes aren't my forte.

Came back to the office, for what will be the last time, to pick up the recommendation letter. Got out on the right subway station without counting stops or second guessing.

Doormen let me in without asking for identification. Got assigned three tasks by different women in stilettos before explaining that I don't work here anymore.

Wi-fi automatically connected.

I snuck in on the country director who scared me out of my wits, and thanked her for scaring me out of my wits. She unfailingly yelled at me, I unfailingly giggled back at her. I said goodbye and she refused to say it; she wanted me to keep working there, and demanded that I sort out my schedule around it. She asked me to recruit an army, I promised I would. She wasn't scary, not one bit.

Ran into the nice lady who saved my wet butt the first day, she said mine is a face she'll never forget, although I know my face is not what she'll remember.

Funny, how things wrap to a close. It all ends where it begins, leaving us just a scratch smarter.

Round and round and round we spin, with feet of lead and wings of tin.

I'm going to miss this place.

Rust Cohle: I think human consciousness, is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware, nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself, we are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self; an accretion of sensory, experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody is nobody. Maybe the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.

Goodbye And Thanks For All The Fish.

Fuck you too, Kit Kat.

Alright here's the deal. I've been having trouble people-ing this week *surprise surprise* and thought I might as well come here and share my little revelations with y'all, since y'all don't exist and I don't really like people, or sharing. Shut up, reddit users aren't people; they're advanced aliens from a Utopian dimension on community service.

Bitches be cray cray, that's a fact. It ain't just a brofact, it's a Newton fact, despite the fact that Newton was a bro. It's hard to scale things down to perspective when the world is proportionately gracious to your cup size. Your heart's just gotta go out to Brienne, you know? It took a little getting down and getting my hands dirty to ultimately crack the code, but it's just one of those things you gotta go through to crack, while owning a vajayjay. Okay, the pun was totally NOT intended, I'm not that street smart. Anyway, there's a very thin line between being rational and rationalizing. Hard enough as it is on average homo-sapiens, that line's made microscopically thinner if you're a woman. And I don't mean sitcom-level hard, I mean a professional tap dancing amoeba could trip and fall to its forever single cellular death if it took on that line. Don't get me wrong, I'd donate my coochie to the ARC if I could, but by the time that's made technologically possible, I don't think any of the futuristic droids would be dumb enough to take it.

More on this week, I cut a deal with an old war veteran to buy a beach bucket when he made me realize I've been to the beach and didn't build a sand castle. I found out I don't need an internet degree or to be the captain of my own ship to marry two people - IN YOUR FACE, JOEY TRIBIANI - and that all it took to get on a scary boss's good side is a good old heart-in-a-mug coffee trick, and you don't even have to give the coffee away. You could just drink it, because the heart was totally meant for you.

Growing up sucks, I don't even remember where I stashed my good old beach bucket. Hell, it took me two weeks and a break-down-induced full on nerd-out to realize I turned into one of those grownups who were all icky about sand and didn't make any sand castles. That's another thing you gotta get down and dirty for, and it ain't half icky, dammit! They didn't tell us that shit when we were kids, that's one thing I could have used instead of a singing purple dinosaur. Who the hell needs a singing purple dinosaur? You gotta invest in the right things for them to turn out sweet, and I cross my heart and hope to die if I don't invest in a solid beach bucket before the year is done. Scout's honour.

I know they told you to stop taking advice off the internet, but they also told you bad things don't happen to good people. If you gotta take advice; google that shit, reddit it to threads sweetcakes. Forums are great; it's that shady place in a dark internet alley where people go to secretly be honest, away from judgmental eyes. Strangers have got no reason to hurt you, just as they've got no reason to be nice to you, and you'll learn to be grateful for both - equally, might I add - when you learn that's about as fair as it gets out there in the big bad world. After all, Brutus would have had no reason to kill Caesar had he not been his friend. Well, there WAS a conflict of booty interest, but that's irrelevant to my argument, so I'll go ahead, be an Egyptian and just bleep it out from history altogether on account of the 'bros before hoes' charter. You get the point.

What else did I find out this week? Oh, doctors are idiots. Most of them. Hot doctors exist off-set, they usually have legible handwriting and normally pop out of the grid every once in a blue moon just to mess with you, then turn into a grizzly werewolf, probably.

At the expense of sounding like Ted Mosby, I'll just go ahead and say it. Kids, there are no rules to this thing. And believe it or not, there will come a time when even Will Smith can't cheer you up. That's usually the time when YOU gotta cheer you up. Question is, can you take on Will Smith?

Of Anchors, Introverts & The (Not So) Wonderful Wizard Of Oz

I should probably change the header of this blog to 'The Woes and Mischief of a Confused Humanoid', but that wouldn't be fair because that would imply that I'm at least part human (humanoid) who knows what she's doing (mischief) and knows how to react about it (Woes.)

A lot has been happening recently. And I figured out that part of the reason why I'm not coping as well as I should is because I haven't been taking enough alone time. You see, us introverted people have to learn how to be around other humans; it's a process that's not autonomous and as easily acquired through social osmosis as those of other people.

You spend enough time on your own and you get used to handling everything on your own, which makes it a lot harder on us to include people when they're eventually there. A simple change as spending more time in the living room than you're used to, not having enough time to read as much or having to deal with people on a more regular, and increased, periods of time could throw us off balance.

We're aliens, we'll always be aliens. When aliens lose their privilege of being alienable they start losing themselves. Even using the 'We' pronoun feels all snuggled up where it shouldn't.

I ran out of the office for the first time since I started working there because the kingpin (Or shall I say Queenpin?) professionally smack-talked me. I got assigned a bigass project that will have me shooting caffeine up my jugular vein to perform. And the other game-writing job I became too attached to has been put on hold till September for creative reasons. I see the big ole warlock swisheddy flicked the rugs right out from under me, yet again.

I think the reason people started coupling up or tribing up was because they got seasick. Life's all variables, nothing stays where it should. You start depending on one thing and you be sure it'll be taken away one way or another, so people started grabbing each other at a desperate attempt to have landmarks. Floating anchors, all over the place. That's all there is to it. That's also how it shouldn't be. We're not built for what we're built for, not all of us.

I sometimes wonder how people do it, ones with human anchors. I mean, the woman starts talking and the man starts packing, haven't you watched enough chick flicks? Everybody's got their own problems, and everybody's eager not to have you as one of them.

Funny how everybody wants an anchor to blame.

I'm gonna go read. 

I'm this close to ditching a big job (that I care about) because I'm a runner. What's your poison?

Carla's Cat Heaven.

Something happened last night that shook me up pretty badly. You know what they say, time changes people and what not. But you always think you'll be the exception of that rule; you cast yourself as the hero of all your fantasies, you help old women cross the street and save four-eyed pizza-faced nerds from the big bad bullies, then you get bite-sized surprises as you go along about who you really are as a person.

Yesterday I watched a street dog get whipped and I did nothing about it because of the consequences. There were a bunch of puppies too. They were beaten up pretty badly by some vagrant, so badly you could still hear the wails and the whips at the back of your head and wince recalling the memory. Growing up turns us into cowards. Of course, it's easier to generalize. I guess what I'm trying to say is that growing up has turned 'me' into a pussy.

It's also easy to rationalize, after all it's not that big, it happens everyday right? Worse things happen everyday. If I had done something about it, the guy could have physically attacked me. But that doesn't change the fact that I didn't do anything about it. I stood there and I let it happen, and I could have stopped it. It's easy to think you have no choice when the consequences aren't in your favour, but you do. That's the truth of it. I had a choice and I chose to let the man beat up the helpless dog because I didn't want to get hurt.

Here's the shitty part - not that the last part wasn't shitty - but I'm not sure I'd react differently if I had the chance. I have zero shots against the guy in physical combat, not to mention the fact that this country fails to maintain the most basic of human rights so that says enough about its animal rights policies and pretty much rules out the safer choice of pursuing legal action.

A younger me wouldn't have had the sense to think it through before bolting at the guy with flailing knuckles. That's where the growing up part comes in. We do this everyday; we let go of things we believe in and we become shittier people as the day progresses because we don't want to get into trouble, be it in the workplace or over a nasty argument with friends. We all go through life wanting nothing to do with life, and we sit back with clear consciences because, after all, 'there was nothing we could have done about it' when the truth is this: You're a shitty person and you've been perfectly rinsed into the socially acceptable moral grey we all like so much.

Let me take it from the top. Yesterday I stood by and watched a helpless animal get tortured when there was a lot I could have done about it because it was more convenient for me. Yesterday I took a glimpse at how much of a shitty person I've become, and it's making me wonder what else is in store.

Don Draper, pitching the new Kodak wheel projector: Nostalgia - it's delicate, but potent. Teddy told me that in Greek, "nostalgia" literally means "the pain from an old wound." It's a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn't a spaceship, it's a time machine. It goes backwards, and forwards... it takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It's not called the wheel, it's called the carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels - around and around, and back home again, to a place where we know we are loved.

The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

I'm not sure why I ended up here. This place is a fixed point in time and space, even the doctor can't touch this. Sometimes, the world feels like a safer place knowing that certain people exist; friends and family, etc. But then you get out of bed, make coffee and go to work because you know better. People aren't fixed points in time and space; they're not untouchables. Even if they were, it's not that they don't cut it, it's that they won't. Humans are the only species with a recognized sense of choice, and funny enough, on asking about the reason for most atrocities, the answer is usually this: "because they can."

I have come to learn that I trust cabs more than friends, and strangers more than acquaintances. I've considered going away on my own more than once, and the idea of being alone doesn't scare me. It's the idea of being confined with people for a week that does; I'm not worried about not finding people to depend on, I'm worried because I'm being made to depend on people. Funny what helpless memories could do to you.

All my life I've been against the assumption that the past shapes you, and I still am. People have a choice, everyday with everything every single time. Your right to make the choice doesn't waver with the frequency with which you have to make it. However, I've noticed something else. As you grow up, you lose the capacity for certain feelings and experiences. Children don't have a fuse, they bounce through life shoving their hands through fire and following strangers into ice cream trucks, then they grow up, watch the movies they weren't allowed to sit through, do things they don't like to get things they don't want and gain the ability and choice to irrevocably fuck up without having a grownup take the fall for them. That's usually when they find out what really happened to the sleeping beauty, and it's not pretty.

That's the thing, you don't have a choice about that. As you gradually lose the capacity for things, you experience them differently even if you ignored all impulses, flares, billboards, naked men running across neuro-highways, floating jedis and TARDIS sounds. That's the gist of midlife crisis, people get stuck in the loop and keep throwing themselves into extreme scenarios hoping to get the same high they did when they were young and wild and remain in denial no matter how many things they cross off the list that failed to give them the proper fix. Just that little jolt of electricity and they'll be alright, they'll be as happy as they should be and things will make sense.

But it doesn't work that way, because we move along one timeline and that timeline is both vector and cumulative. They don't tell you that shit when you're a kid; they mention the gray hairs and the bad memory, but somehow they fail to include that little tidbit of information: Time is zombifying, and if you don't have the stomach for bite-sized delusion, you're in for ghost ride.

Case in point: Japan. Japan is one of the most modern civilizations to date; they have technologies that'll make your head spin, an economy that comfortably affords to treat its average citizen like a goddamn Jetson, a standard of living that combats Utopian ideologies and futuristic Sci-Fi wet dreams and points out where they're lacking through real-life application. They've got it all and they've got it good.

Japan also has the second highest suicide rate in the world.

I remember watching this documentary when I was a kid. (It's a 2008 release, despite the present upload date.) I didn't get it. I thought they had a cultural problem similar to the one that the average Egyptian millennial is suffering from due to the generational gap and overall ironclad grip of religion, I thought they had traditions and family crap that systematically led them to that, I thought that it could be the work pressure. Now that I think about it, it's not any of that. It's this:

"Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive."

20th of June, 2014

Good things happen when you don't expect them, even if you've stopped expecting them.

First Day As An Intern

So, first day as an intern, eh? Man have I got a story to tell you. Let's take it from the top.

My tummy declared war on me at 6 o'clock. It was my first day as an intern at UN Women and I was terrified. I tend to keep people at an arm's distance at all times, so I didn't really have any of those chummy buddies to calm my nerves and tell me everything's gonna be alright. Instead, it was a lot of breathing exercises and walking around the house while my detaching mechanism locked and loaded. I had to leave as soon as I could because the internship was a governorate and a half away. And leave early I did. I got lost in the subway because I made the mistake of trusting the system, and had four more stations to add to my already long commute, then had to change lines twice to get to my destination, topped off with a cab ride. I was squished and couldn't reach my hands, let alone call in to explain why I was late, so I figured what the hell, I'm an intern, it's my job to fuck things up the first day, I'll just leave an hour early.

Three hours later I was there. You know how all these sitcoms portray your first day on the job as a series of unfortunate events, throwing in tarantulas and broken down facilities, with a possibility of setting the office on fire? Well, turns out they weren't exaggerating for comic relief. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. The security at the foot of the building was as thorough as they could possibly get, I was surprised they didn't go through my shoes for explosive material. They gave Scrooge McDuck a run for his money; mines, catapults and all, for yours truly was the evil witch come for his first lucky coin. They rummaged through all that could be rummaged through, confiscated all that could be confiscated, and ruffled the rest for the heck of it. By the time I was done with that, I looked like a poodle fresh out of a car wash. Then the fat lady sung, I was there and it was happening.

I walked into the office on the sixth floor. Again, the sitcoms weren't exaggerating. Codes for the door, flags for the wall and each head was matched with a plant, a stapler and a monstrous printer-scanner contraption that demanded paper munchies. I was clueless, of course, so I walked straight to the first person I ran into, who I later found out to be a fellow Italian intern that called dibs on the reception desk for funsies and was later chained there by the director to take calls. Halfway through mumbling 'Hello, I'm here for the internship', an old lady with short black hair and ominous stilettos swooped in and snatched me for a quick investigation. The director, a lady who sent out electromagnetic waves of intimidation that x-ray your bones for incompetence shrapnel rained me with questions about my person, use and whereabouts, she was interrupted by calls and flew off to her nest on top of the nearest mount of doom to take them. I was more or less nailed to the ground by what remained of her presence, only to have the Guido come and slap me out of my noob trance. The Nazgul had finished her calls and came back in time, and they both took my supervisor's number and called her. Turns out she had to go to the bank on a Monday and the bureaucratic overlords claimed her soul, so she might be a little late. She relegated me to the Guido after a phone call of nods and yeses. He hung up, my training began.

But not quite. He was an quadrilingual Italian know-it-all that had a tendency to gesture theatrically, with spaghetti hair, a last name that was Italian for spaghetti hair and a colorful patchy vest. He gave me a tour of the offices on both floors, which was interrupted when he was called into one of the offices and assigned a task for materializing in front of their wishful door. It was going to be a long day, I understood that much, so get off on the right leg I must. I went into the kitchen, made coffee and retreated to the roof - which doubled as the second floor of offices - for a smoke.

It was gonna be a good day.

I took my time, finished the coffee, had a few smokes and went back to the kitchen. I walked into a conversation between the guido, an officious-looking bald giant and a bling-choked diva with flowy black hair. They stopped talking and stared blankly at me. I broke the silence with an apologetic "I'm new here", to which they broke out in laughter. I was confused. The bald giant walked out still chuckling to himself, and the diva walked the kitchen runway to introduce herself, then asked me if I'm the new graphic designer. I don't know, I said, I'm the new intern but I can design. From that moment on, I was her bitch.

She was friendly though, they all were, don't get me wrong, except for the Nazgul, she was just there to scare the working momentum into motion. I followed the diva into an empty meeting room and she put down her stuff and started talking while working. It was a vision, multitasking at its most divine stage. She was doing a presentation, researching for her dissertation, talking to her boyfriend and ranting about her boyfriend to me, to which I just sat there listening and trying to figure out what it was I should be doing. I took the presentation off her hands to appease my workaholic tendencies, and she replaced the slot with another task that was on her pending list. Her laptop was hard to tame; it was a constantly beeping creature that kept popping messages at me while humming to itself. In my head it was furry, although I'm sure it wasn't, but it was pink. I immersed myself into the research and presentation, which was about great Egyptian women of achievement. She occasionally broke into my trance to interject anecdotes about the women I'm writing about, and I'm not gonna lie to you I was already daydreaming if I'll ever do half of what they did with their lives. Three hours later, I started seeing pixels, so I retreated to the roof for another smoke.

And god I wish I hadn't.

Little did I know that was all the work I would be doing today when I sat smack into a puddle of water that had mysteriously collected on my chair. So there I was, on my first day on a bigass internship at the UN Women HQ, looking like I peed myself.

Good day, it was NOT gonna be.

I was gonna be there for while. Drying my butt in the sun. The roof was empty, so I chainsmoked, answered messages and updated social networks. My little accident gave my friends quite the giggle, but trying to hire an assassin in monthly installments and begging for a mercy kill didn't work and they were supportive as they always were. Not that I believed this kind of thing 'happens to all of us', but I was a klutz and I was okay with it. I inspected the bathrooms for blow dryers, turned out feminists didn't really acknowledge their existence, much like yours truly. Drying my butt in the sun was taking too long, and I had to get back to work. So I had to come up with another strategic plan: Butt toast.

Not your average sunbathing experience.

So there I was, sitting on a sunny hot spot on the roof to the sound of my sizzling butt, when a lady walked out of the second-floor offices to take a call. Shit shit shit, I thought as I smiled in her general direction. She finished the call and came up to me all smiles. What's wrong, she asked with a hand on my shoulder. She seemed friendly, and frankly anything was friendlier than the Nazgul. Are you a nice person, I asked. She burst out in giggles and said she was, warming up to me. I shared my little incident and we chatted as my butt considerably dried off, then she had to get back to work.

Not your average work selfie.

I had to get back to work too, and that's when it hit me. Why hide it out here when I can shake it off and get a little laugh out of it? And laugh it off, I did. I walked into the office after a two-hour disappearance with an orange butt stain. It did not go unnoticed, and thanks to my butt I made two new friends. I worked some more then I called my supervisor to check if she was coming in today, turns out she wasn't. I updated her about my tasks and she assigned me 242387492387493 designs I had to get done in three days, then said she'll be at an event at a hotel for the next couple of days and told me when I could come and help out. For now, I could head home.

It was a long way home, so I ordered food, although in this context I should better call it sustenance. The italian made the call, and I had to stifle the urge to giggle as he busted out his Arabic vocabulary in the most hilarious word choreography I heard ever since Andy said his vows. One of the directors was nice enough to bring out treats for us lost puppies since it was our first day and all, and I got to see an office fight! Diva accidentally closed Guido's tabs and he broke out in the most stereotypical fit possible, a fluent range of Italian slurs worthy of a youtube video.

Yes, I sneaked a picture.

Three hours later, I was home. I was broke, mortified and exhausted, but my first day as an intern was in the bag and I had three months to go. I passed out for 14 hours, woke up to a thousand notifications of people laughing at me, and I'm laughing along.

And that's how you intern, bitches. Cheers!

Of A Derelict Cookie, A Fashion Fail & The Day It Rained Candy.

I've had a wibbly wobbly timey wimey couple of days that absolutely need to be blogged about! Let's start at the beginning.

Do you know that nightmare we all have about being naked in a public place? Well, I spent the whole day shopping for a nice dress to attend a good friend's katb kitab, and I had tactically chosen a light blue shirt to make the fitting room battle slightly easier. I successfully managed to finish the girl errands in record time, and then set off to get my friend her weight in chocolate because she broke her leg on a freak bus accident. I didn't want to get her sick people chocolate, so I figured out with etiquette and in with the yummies! The Metro Market aisle it was, since it's Egypt's neighborhood equivalent of Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. Up I reached and down I bent, sideways I chatted with a dozen staff personnel to find the missing bars then to the cashier I bolted to charge and bag. The personnel were unusually giggly for Metro Market, known for their rather hostile staff, I figured they're having a good day and was all smiles. That was until I glanced down my own shirt, perchance on my way to unpocket the money, to find that two out of the four buttons were unbuttoned and I had flashed the entire Metro Market staff Daisy Duke style. Apparently, two hours of buttoning and unbuttoning the shirt had loosened the cuffs, and my messenger bag had the sleight of hand of Charlie Sheen in his naughty days. Let me rewind a little bit. Do you know that nightmare we all have about being naked in a public place? Well, it's not half as bad as the real thing.

How does one react to that? Mortified doesn't quite cover it, my body's heat was abandoning ship through my face now that I knew that it was in fact my boobs that made the staff's day, and not kismet. I kept my cool and buttoned my shirt, then maintained eye contact with a dozen menial workers who were openly giggling and suggestively glancing, took my time at the cash register with middle-eastern fucks who undoubtedly shamed me as a slut for the fashion slip and walked out of there in a normal gait when every instinct told me to bolt. It took me 10 minutes and about 160 muffled 'FUCK!'s to finish my errands and head home.

The day was not nearly done. In fact, it hadn't even started yet. I changed my shirt and took a quick shower, adding about 45 more not-so-muffled fucks to my verbal quota of the day, then headed off to see my friend. I got lost for about an hour trying to get there, spent another hour telling her about it (and every other piece of gossip she could have possibly missed) after throwing etiquette out of the window and raining her with candy in bed.

Dad picked me up at 10 and we headed off to a family reunion. An estranged relative came for a visit, and true to my expectations the two hour visit was testing to dolphins everywhere. A squeal over me being as tall as her, a scream at the haircut, a squeal at the lost weight. Hysterical chuckles over jokes that aren't nearly as funny as she made them sound, and audible awws up to live studio par at the  news of my getting sick. The room was refrigerated to sub-zero levels in an attempt to appease her now cold-blooded physique, and the main dessert was a bear-sized bowl of ice cream to my red-riding-hood-fitted tummy. Around 12 we had to drive grandma home, who in turn insisted we come up for a nibble. Little did I know that she had an agenda, for she took it upon herself to make me regain the pounds that were squealed at. Half a watermelons and two main courses later, we headed home at 2. We came home to find that all the cars in our square were wrecked, their windshield smashed and their doors bent at unseemly angles. Turned out there was a fight and had we come home so much as 30 minutes earlier, the biggest part of our car would have been the sideview mirror, and the largest patch of skin left unmangled of my body would have been squeal-inducing boy scalp. Good things happen when you spend quality time with Teita. Let me digress for a second, but grandma is the kind of person who, when bored, gets creative with her pearl earrings:

By the time we found a safe parking spot and walked about a mile back, I had a baby belly and wasn't feeling so good, only to come home and find that my mother decided to get me fast food in a medical experiment to 'see if I can handle it yet.' I wasn't supposed to eat take out, drink juice or anything remotely related to the outside world until my liver stopped pursuing Broadway, but I didn't want another yelling match and frankly couldn't be more excited at the sight of pizza and lasagna after so many boiled vegetable servings.

You probably see where this is going, and you're right. I went to bed, woke up a short while later and threw up for an hour and a half, taking naps when my tummy elves had to reload food into what I imagined to be a catapult only to run off to the bathroom for another medieval attack at the sink. I seem to be innocent in the arts of war for I woke up to a full-fledged fight between our family's noble houses, grandma blaming my aunt for the AC, my uncle blaming grandma for not noticing, my grandma yelling at mom for not being there and mom yelling at aunt for not foreseeing it. I was fine, but it took about 6 phone calls to re-instate a truce. I had run out of arguments by the 5th and apparently 'hey at least now I don't have to worry about a kersh for the dress today!' was not good enough.

The katb kitab was nice, I got to see my friend's panicky face as he realized he's getting irrevocably wedlocked. I only got lost for about an hour, almost crashed a stranger's wedding, had a stranger give me chocolate, hid a juice box for allergy-related feeling-saving purposes, and got caught by a hot neighbour carrying my shoes Fouad-El-Mohandess style to use the stairs. Just your average Rory day. Amidst the chaos of day 2, there was one heartwarming tidbit (other than getting to see my friend's face going on an emotional rollercoaster), I saw this:

Now let me tell you what's special about this. For one, this mail box has been broken down, dusty and abandoned for as long as I remember living there. What's more, a little detail that I failed to see when I was shorter, is the Borio pack. This version has been out of production for ages; they no longer make single cookie packs and only produce the 6 pack, which means that this cookie has been there for ages, which also means that nobody took it. And I don't think it's because stealing mail is a federal crime. That won the race and made my day. With all the ugliness in the world, some people still have integrity, even if it's as little as not stealing a derelict Borio cookie.

Corporate Vs. Soul: The Ultimate Slashdown

You know that whole shit they sell in pseudo-spiritual neo-hippy self help books about you getting the vibes you give out into the world? Well it's wrong. I just got another call this morning about a job that I applied for two months ago, back when I was this close to stuffing my CV in an atom gun and shooting out its gazillion particles at the part-time job world hoping one would stick, and I had to tell them I can't take it right now because I'm sitting my finals and asked if I could call back after the 10th. Well I can't call back after the 10th, because even though I'm doing this to keep my options open, I've already decided to take an unpaid internship I care about. This triggered another one of my familiar yelling at the ceiling episodes as I threw my head back, glared at the chandelier and let my vocal cords discover their inner Zeus as I shouted "STOP CALLING ME WITH JOBS WHEN I'VE DECIDED TO TAKE AN UNPAID INTERNSHIP, IT HURTS! WHY COULDN'T YOU GRANT ME A CALLBACK WHEN I WAS WILLING TO FAN A SULTAN'S SWEATY ASS FOR DOUGH?"

Which leads me to another job-related rant I've been bottling in since 4 am, when I decided to reply to the work e-mail I've been dreading in an unfortunate middle-of-the-night random awakening (BIG MISTAKE!): There's a special place in hell designed for bosses who make you re-write or re-design because you can't read minds. Here's the punch line, I'm both an aspiring writer and graphic designer, so you could say I pulled the short end of the stick, twice, on a cosmic-scaled Titanic-styled ballot.

You see, the art of writing professional work e-mails can roughly be described as the art of crafting insults. You're either fuming with medieval/neanderthal-ic rage that you're forced to dilute and formulate into a pleasant insult-free e-mail that does the job of getting the point through without grazing your boss's sorry epidermis with shrapnel, or you were picked for a vicious tango where the winner is the one that offends the other without having it register as offensive material in gracious power play, the metronome ticks away an impossible rhythm as you're forced to learn the delicate art otherwise known to the women species as small talk. It's a lot like learning how to be a woman, and I had to dig, deep down, into that untapped part of myself where an angular-limbed, make-up choked woman in stilettos was hiding under a couple of comics and discarded Cheetos bags.

I've had a lot of practice with that unholy part of the game, and I had to learn the hard way, by trial and error that cost me my job, health and took away countless hours of sleep that could have added inches to my height that is now horribly lacking on the hobbit-human comparison chart. It still, however, pisses me off, and that anger is soothing because it reminds me that I haven't quite sold my soul to the white-collared corporate overlord yet. That's the only silver lining to this Loki-shooting apocalyptic cloud of doom that I can think of. You could say I'm selling organs to the highest bidder, but my soul's still there, and it's kicking.

I wanna hide in a pillow fort and re-read Harry Potter. Rory, out.

Of Bouquets, Doppelgangers & Social Death Traps.

Finals are in two days, and I'm so overworked I'm imagining screen savers on turned off monitors. I got a couple of boulders out of the way though, so I have time to let off some steam.

Something pretty sweet happened today. I've been e-mailing back and forth with my favorite professor, to apologize about missing so many classes and explain why and such. When she found out I'm sick, she started helping me out with the material I missed, offered to re-explain it to me and encouraged me to ask question with anything I find trouble with. She's a very passionate professor, one of the few left who really care about their job, how well their students are doing and how innovative their lectures are. She's made it a habit to celebrate random people's birthdays in class with a custom made cake that's personalized to depict whatever it is that they mentioned they liked in one of the many conversations she had with them. She somehow manages to balance the whole being professional and still remain a kind human thing. Today, she did this: 

I've never been sent flowers before. Nobody ever really cared that much, especially at uni; I've been having trouble with the whole attendance fiasco and missing classes and none of the other professors or kids were that understanding (let alone civil), and I was left to pretty much extrapolate what it was I could have missed and materialize it out of thin air. It made my day. There should be more people like her in the world. Her kindness confuses me; I don't understand it. 

On the other hand, I got a call from two of my friends, who I haven't really heard from for two months and who haven't noticed me falling off the social grid or getting sick or all of that, claiming that they saw me with a stick up their ass complaining why I didn't call and tell them I'd be in the area. My HIMYM city doppelganger was stuffing her face with sushi when they 'drove by and saw you but couldn't really stop the car', because apparently the brakes were off and they were on a high-speed car chase with the CIA on a top secret mission to locate and exterminate a south Korean spy. That pissed me off, and I let them have a piece of my mind about making an effort that they found 'not cool.' Another friend dragged me into a social skit and thought it was okay to fake hostile conversation then put on an act of social power play for a good show. I got back at him with a Game of Thrones spoiler, and now he won't talk to me. Three ex-friends later, adding up to five ex-retards this month, let me put on my grandma monocle and wonder what's wrong with kids these days, because I'm honestly done with their pretentious ass shit.

Conan the Barbarian Giving Life Advice

Of Loopy Toys, Weddings & Derelict Beauties.

I've got a long work day ahead, which scientists have found to be 3 times shorter than a normal day yet goes by a rate that's 1.5 times slower than a mid-week dentist appointment, so naturally, I've sworn not to start it on the wrong foot. Allow me to properly procrastinate.

My friend is getting married later this week, and despite how much I loathe the institution of marriage and want to drag him out of it kicking and screaming for his own good while calling him barking mad, it's still making me go all whadabadabadoo for him. Although it's still a week off, I found myself obsessing about what I was going to wear, since my wardrobe consists mainly of makeshift fan merch and hand me downs that I embezzled from my dad, and it took four emergency messages to come to the conclusion that I need to go shopping. I'm rather clueless with girly things you see, and my first instinct was texting the groom who, unsurprisingly, was just as clueless about wardrobes as I was. It took a brief and very futile re-inactment of the opening scene to Narnia for me to realize I had to speak to a girl about this, so I texted three hoping to work out an average or a common denominator or whatever it is that makes girls' opinions legitimate. Hence, the shopping. I'm not excited about that part, although I am excited to see the look on my friend's face when he ties the knot, so it's worth the trip to the darkest pit of the hell that is the mall.

I spent the morning psychologically treating cuddly toys on a twisted German flash game online called paraplush, successfully cured three patients and was working through the mental knots of a particularly difficult stuffed penguin who made it personal by putting me on shock treatment twice when a power cut had me lose my progress and made me wanna positively cut a bitch. It's a sad game. Dumb humans, hurting things that can't fight back just because they can.

Speaking of which, I spent the evening with a friend last night, it was a night of shared head spaces, comfort zones and wonderful conversations, a much needed reprieve from all things fake and forced. I was too tired to keep up the conversation at many points, so maybe conversation isn't an accurate name for it. It was the first time I'd gone out since I got sick three weeks ago, but even then the stories - that's an accurate one-sided name for it - were interesting and unlike what people fart out and call conversation these days. There was another power cut, which brought this beauty to my attention:

It got me thinking, why are all neglected things beautiful? Is it because humans destroy everything they touch? A lot of optimists would interject and denounce the flagrant generalization I've made against their kind, so let me share a couple of other examples that'll prove the sample is unbiased before I get back to this.

Exhibit A: An architect friend of mine is basing her project on an old recreational park whose glory days date back to the 50s called the Merry Land. Now, it's not that safe to visit because it has more or less turned into a drug dealer's den, with most of the attractions in a state of disarray, breaking down for lack of maintenance. She's had a lot of trouble working there since it's a chore to go on your own and hope to leave the place with most of your possessions and your hymen intact, let alone with all of your blood supply - and, dare I say, organs - uncompromised. However, nature seems to have taken over, since no budget is spared for gardening, and now it looks like this:

Exhibit B: These shots are from a random corporate front garden that has seen better days. Albeit trampled and littered with its own refuse, this patch of shambles is artful chaos.

And last but not least, Exhibit C: I was waiting for the university shuttle bus one morning when
I came across this little miracle, a flower grew straight out the concrete. I don't know how this was physically possible, but it happened,and it was there for all who cared to see.

It's all around us, so let me make the connection for you the way it was subconsciously made for me. Is it possible that in choosing to care for things, humans ruin them? Funny creatures, humans are. But I digress.That accidental candelabra has more than meets the eye, you see. On the other side, where the picture doesn't cover, the glass of the bottle has been broken in by the heat, and is held together by the creeping mass of wax that built up over time. The candle, on the other hand, would break if you try to yank it out of the debris, and is held together by the bottleneck. Nature has a way of reaching equilibrium against crushing odds that humans still haven't learned, equilibrium that knows no compromise, as opposed to the ways of men. There are a couple of things to see for those who know how to look.

I was taken by this chaos and the two revelations it's given me, so I've decided to make my own little reminders. Recreating chaos beats the point, I admit, and they'll take time that I'm more willing to invest in inanimate objects than plants, that I can't keep alive if my life depended on it, or humans, that I can't understand if my life depended on it. This is my little project, they'll take a couple of months to turn into the their own unique shambles of neglect, but they're worth the wait.

There are two more little perks to this project, other than being a tangible notification for the revelations I had about human nature, that'll come in handy in days to come: The Baileys bottle was a gift from a friend who's made entirely of good things and had a little stunt that took a lot of effort and care to plan. The second is that these will put a smile on my face during the numerous power cuts to come as our governments struggles to be a government. Here's to the little things.

I watched How to train your Dragon recently, and it's by far the best animated movie I've seen in a while. It's got vikings, dragons, a message against violence and lots and lots of flying. It deserves a rant of its own but it won't do it justice to spoil it for other nerds, like myself, who need this custom bundle of happiness. Go watch it!

Of Headless Chickens, Nearly Headless Nick & Overall Head-Shaming.

This post has been a while in the oven, and true to the metaphor it took too long for I'm helpless in the kitchen. My friend's been pushing me to get back to writing from the heart, and a couple of days ago I stumbled upon an article about Terry Pratchett, one of my favorite authors and a full-fledged SciFi god, and found out he lives with dementia. You don't get too many excuses with that in the back of your head. Tis the season to be jolly and all that falalalala.

I got a little confession to make, I ran away from an injection last night. And no, I don't mean it metaphorically where I got all giddy then tightened that upper lip and took it like an adult homosapien, I mean I bounded across the room and threatened to bite then got bribed into it with candy, and it wasn't even legit candy, it was sad millennial candy that took the form of a diet pack of biscuits and a light beer. I got another little confession to make, I am 21 years old. Growing up sucks, it does, and I'm starting to think all those other people who look like they've got it together are undercover CIA operatives, or a race of clones that have always been that old.

And what the hell is up with nurses? Angels of mercy my sorry ass (quite literally, my ass is sorry), they descend on you like demon monkeys and pin you down to the nearest bed then poke at you with such zeal, an inter-dimensional observer might mistake them for banshees. When did they get so vicious? This is not the rant of someone who's merely butthurt, my dear readers, I'll have to take one of those every night this week and right now it feels like I was shot in the ass with a fire-thrower, and it's bad enough that the stupid shot I'm taking has to be mixed with anesthesia because even the pharma overlords admit it's napalm goo. I've come to fear the daily shot as pathetically as Barney Stinson once feared his slapsgiving quota, for pretty much the same reasons.

And much like the repercussions of Barney's one-time bet, all I can do is wait for an impending giant Marshall-sized hand every night in horror, which has made my plots to kill the nurse more creative by the minute. I've pledged to cut the harridan's butt, stick it on her face and gouge out her eyeballs with ginormous needles. I've taken an oath to turn her intestines into hospital chow. She ain't getting no hannibal gourmet treatment, nu-uh, slimy backdoor cuisine she was and slimy backdoor cuisine she will be. I've sworn that by the time I was done with the waif, she'd wish she were nearly headless Nick as she haunted the halls of the cafeteria. I could go on, but it sounds less friendly and a lot more personal as I go along and the TV show references dwindle. Do nurses sleep? (Read: Can nurses be killed in their sleep?) Stay tuned.

However, just when I thought that this growing up thing doesn't quite run up my alley, I turned down a paid internship at a call center for an unpaid internship at a feminist organization. It was one of those light bulb moments, when you tune out the lady on the phone and weigh your options amidst the all-singing all-dancing pots of noodles that'll make up most of your meals from now on, past the fields of paperwork where you picture yourself running errands dressed up as a German maid, up the have you lost your bubble gum drops creak and into the screaming goblins in patchy little suits dancing around your social life. It lasted for a couple of seconds and then I informed a surprised lady the CV in my outbox is heading at the back of another white collar's head. I'm doing it clean-for-Gene style, changing the system from within the system.

Which brings me to another little rant that's been giving my Adam's apple a run for its mortgage claim, that internship at the call center was sent on our university e-mails, and I got a call from their HR department without actually applying for the position. I seem to be the only student who thinks this wonderful opportunity is downright preposterous, and here's why: For a stuck up private university that manages to flush down the life-savings of thousands of middle-aged blokes every year, you'd think they'd get us a better chance in the big bad world than a call center, don't you think? They're begging for people to work there, that job is at the bottom of the food chain, taking in people out for a quick buck only to have them run out at the first taste of a fat paycheck. I get it, it's an entry level job that a dimwit could do, it inks the first blot on many blank CVs, it channels students into the unquenchable monster that is the call center business and nobody minds a little extra money in the summer and a good excuse to stay out of the typically miserable middle-eastern house on a 9-5 basis. It's win-win situation for all those involved, but honestly, you'd think they'd have it in them to set up a couple of internships at some decent start-up corporations with that big-ass name it pounds on the educational scene, or NGOs even, but nooo. Why should they use their contacts to start up their own students? What's worse, the kids are excited about it. They all got sparkles in their eyes when they opened that e-mail, they all eagerly applied and signed off three months of their precious summers into a contract that'll have them say 'Hello, how may I help you?' so many times, they'll forget they never learned how to help them in the first place. Stellar service.

It's shit like this that gets me wondering how it was that dogs never got disillusioned about human nature if they've got good instincts. Dogs can tell if a person means malice. They're irreplaceable on drug busts, they dig up bodies and can find their way back home from miles away. Hell, dogs can smell cancer, google it. Yet, somehow, they still think we're dope.

Some things never change. Humans are on the top of that list. The fact that humans confuse me is a close second, and it regularly roundhouse kicks the former and sits cross-legged in first place when they change sometimes, or make you think they did, only to have you find out much later that they never did, but you keep it in first place nonetheless because in a convoluted way that proved its claim.

Case in point: the government recently gave a statement that the clock is to be set forward an hour for daylight savings for a month, then set back in Ramadan to ease the fasting, then set forward an hour again for the aforementioned reason. That conveniently confused people for a couple of days, especially that it was released on a Thursday night. The funniest to behold was Saturday morning. Dad and I were sipping coffee at the window as we watched a bunch of freshmen realize a little too late that they've missed the university shuttle bus. First they patiently waited for 30 minutes, doubting themselves a thousand times and making a dozen calls to mommy and daddy to update them about their Geo-locations. Then they spent 15 minutes furtively looking at each other, waiting for someone to make the first move, checking if they're the only idiots around or somebody else did something wrong so that they could march saint-like into doom with the comfort of not having fucked up alone. Then there was a lot of walking around and running up and down the streets like headless chickens as a couple of initiative souls scouted the streets for any sign of a magical orange school bus. Then came the sedan procession; and it was the same scenario with every poor kid, the parents would show up, seem to be yelling at their kids who in turn seem to be defending themselves that "they just didn't know but that's okay because look at all the other people who didn't know too!", parents would scowl and look around the street in superman poses then lead the freshmeat back to the car by the back of the neck and drive off into the bus route.

Dad and I don't remember laughing so hard in a good while. The only creature in the vicinity that wasn't thrown off balance by the government change of the people's sense of time - sounds omnipotent when put that way - is our neighborhood 5:20 morning songbird. I've mentioned him in older posts, but I'll write about him again all the same. Dad noticed him first, being the hopeless romantic that he is and always has been. Every day at 5:20 am, this songbird, who always stands on the same branch, would always wake up before all the rest, and would always wake up all the other birds. He became an inside joke to dad and I, since we're both diligent night owls, but not in the sense of a conventional inside joke, but rather about how he draws a smile on our faces every morning in the same way one would smile at an unanticipated act of kindness by an asshole or at a rude joke quipped by a child at the expense of a great injustice. We'd always wonder if that bird knew how important he was, we'd always think what would happen when that bird eventually dies, and we'd always get into an argument about how maybe every bird is different the same way every human is different and that other life-forms aren't necessarily lesser than mankind and how maybe it's not all down to genetics after all, which would always get us talking about how maybe life forms exist that we don't understand and we'd trail off until dawn breaks and the songbird's tune gets drowned out now that he's successfully bugged all of the others out of their carefree slumber.

Now here's the punchline: That songbird now wakes up at 4:20, to the second. Knowing that, I'll bet an arm and a leg that having a face now makes your face flush.

So I Talked To My Idol Today...

Of Running At Things & Running Out of Things.

Whoever said we start at the beginning has never lived a day past 12. And that's the thing, there are no beginning or ends. You spend your whole childhood clinging onto ground and solid objects, people and memories, ideas and beliefs until you pick up a few digits and learn the hard way that growing up is an act of letting go. It's all a balancing act, you're bouncing on soap bubbles through space, bursting that one to get to the next, and if you're a second early or late you'll lose momentum and be stranded. In a weird way, grownups' power comes from how they acknowledge their helplessness, and children's helplessness comes from their sense of invincibility. It's all a balancing act, and not all of us can move as fast. I know I've always been a klutz.

This hasn't been a good year for me, in more ways than one. A lot of constants were shattered for me to learn that lesson, and I really can't learn it often and hard enough. But it has also been a good year for me, because there's truth in that, crippling hard truth that I can see and feel and work with, and possibly fail at, but it's there nonetheless. You can't fear what you know, even if you're just starting to know it. I came here to pour my heart out about all the good things that I'm looking forward to, because I haven't allowed myself to hope for things for a very long time, nor have I allowed myself to pour my heart out fearing the many times I started only to have someone eagerly take a pinata bat at it in full swing. I think I'm okay with that now.

I found out that I'm very sick today, and I'm not ready to talk about it yet. I don't think I will be, and I don't think that matters.

Today, however, was an excellent day. I spent it typing my fingers away at a job that I love, that

drives me absolutely crazy. I write up story lines for games. Starting up small still, but it makes me feel alive, like the sky's the limit, although it's really not. I don't have as much creative freedom as I'd like, it doesn't pay nearly enough to cover a decent bill, and it's a freelance project that will soon expire, one that I know I shouldn't get attached to, but I am, and I always put my all into it and it leaves me absolutely exhausted and empty, in a way that leaks my presence into my work only to have it slowly recharge as I sit back and call it a day's work, squishing the enter button real nice. I'm also looking at an internship in UN Women's rights branch over the summer, which I know will be as fulfilling as it will be time consuming and challenging. It intimidates me, and that's exhilarating. Don't get me wrong, I'm free of UN illusions, I even wrote my freshman paper - back in them glorious rebel days - on the neocolonialist vice that is the UN's true body of work, but it still makes a small change, even if that change is mere placebo effect, and more on the giving side than the receiving. I can't wait to start, all the things you learn when you're given all the gritty work, it's like reconstructing a machine's blueprints from its dismantled wreck. What do people do with themselves when they run out of things to run at?

I'm looking forward to these things, as much as I'm looking forward to a graphic tablet that I saved up for and will be getting in a couple of months. I'm not great at sketching, but it makes me happy. It's work that can frustrate me into untroubled sleep, one that I can spend hours learning without retracing on the clock. Isn't that what life is all about? Well who knows anyway, and who gives a rat's ass. I've never felt more at home than when I feel when I'm learning something that has to do with graphic design, running my ankle joints to shreds, playing piano or writing up a good heartfelt piece. 

It has always been these four things. Life is simple, all you have to do is find your things, then keep finding them in other things as they get taken away. 

I guess that's why people feel lost when their things are not within themselves, or that are other people's, or are other people even. You can't find what was never yours, how are you supposed to recognize an ever-changing blob? I felt lost this year because of this, I've lost a lot of people I cared about, they got swooped into their own soap bubble trajectories and I stumbled face first trying to follow until I eventually lost momentum. It's funny how grownups eagerly lose connection, I guess when you get so good at something, auto-pilot takes over and all of a sudden you're ugly Adam Sandler senior lying butt naked on the asphalt groping at your children's backs 30 years too late, the child part of me resents that.

Sophomore year is by far the most hectic I've had, although it has nothing to do with the work load, it's been trivial. Now that I'm on sick leave and have had to miss even more than what I already missed when I didn't feel like going because I thought I had better things to do, it's turned into a countdown to the apocalypse. We dine in hell, baby doll. Somehow, knowing all of that, I know I can handle it still. Although I recognize this time that other people pay when one makes mistakes, and it's usually the people one cares about the most, who also happen to be the ones who care about one the most. You just realize that a little too late, and it shits on your parade. You don't care that you can handle it anymore, you just start wondering why you ever made them go through that kind of shit and call yourself a dumbass while you're at it. It's no celebrating matter, there aren't any Barney Stinsons fixing their ties and theatrically dubbing it a challenge accepted as you swoosh in and spitball your rubble into a minty fresh work of art. You do it anyway, but there's no flare to it. Do people ever get the courtesy of taking risks out of their own time and buck? Are there always people tied to the bungee line, poking out at all kinds of awkward angles? I'd give you the world if I can, but I can't. Stop making me feel bad about it. There are so many things to feel bad about in this world, why do the people you love the most insist to be the magnetic core?

I guess the one thing I can't get over with all the change going on right now are the lack of handlebars. We all like to know they're there, even if we won't use them. Those handlebars are the people who want to hear about the good days and care about the bad days. They don't run away from misplaced verbs or serious talks. They're real and down to earth. They also don't exist. I'm not sure they ever did.

I drove myself into a corner again, might as well wrap up before I end up at a worse place, this one's bad enough. A part of me misses a simpler time, and a bigger part of me doubts it was ever real or just a huge figment of my childishly distorted, pink-hued imagination. Cheers, adults. I have no idea how you don't get seasick.