The Boat

Leon The Professional

I think being called a writer was the worst thing that happened to my writing. Part of me believes it was the worst thing that happened to my life.

Gibran Khalil Gibran said that those who understand us enslave something in us, and perhaps that is one explanation; with every person that saw a piece of writing and thought it was good, and decided not to say “that’s a good piece” but instead said “that’s great, keep at it and you’ll be a great writer one day.” And genuinely believed it. “You have the potential,” they assured with all the love that comes from introspection on a convenient sunny day over a nice cup of coffee and cake, when all is easy with the world and companionship and nothing bad is happening.

That’s the poison; the potential, and how it tosses and turns with every paycheck and every commendation.

Six days ago, I walked out on my first full-time job. I had to check the calendar and surprised myself, but I’ll get to that later. As I’m tempted to turn this into an honest retelling, let’s just leave it at this: It was one that I deeply cared about that challenged me every day, and one that constantly fueled my tendency to define myself by my work with positive re-enforcement and structural workplace abuse. I was part of a broken hierarchy, containing a group of enabled, incompetent toads who thought they were defined by how expensive their lunch is, and how badly they inflected a vowel in a phony, malicious hello. I was overloaded with work under impossible deadlines with such low pay that when I finally left the place, they had to post 4 separate vacancies to replace me. The irony; why not pay your employees well and treat them like human beings in the first place? Isn’t that better ROI?

But that’s not what I’m here to talk about. It isn’t, I decide, because it shouldn’t be. I know the story, there’s no point in retelling it than to blow fire into the embers that I’m trying to kill. It’s counterintuitive.

What I’m here to talk about are the 6 days.

For 6 days, I have been caught into the cycle of crying and working, with no rest assigned to a waking hour. It’s been like I was chained to the desk with a gun to my head, trying to figure out how to work again and when no opportunity presents itself; work on getting work incessantly by applying to a thousand places, revamping my website, posting hourlies, brushing up on sales copies, downloading SEO textbooks, getting into in-depth web analytics at 4 in the morning and taking notes to read about email newsletters the next day. Correction: Feeling bad about not knowing enough about it already.

It’s been a total mess. I haven’t been able to snap out of it, I physically couldn’t. I worked compulsively on virtually nothing, through phone calls and bathroom breaks. I was on a frenzy to learn all that can be learned and find out why it is I’m not working right now, and immediately fix it.

But I already knew why I was not working, it was because I left. Right?

I managed to get an interview at two shitty places, and missed one of them because I just didn’t feel like waking up. I was tempted to not even call to reschedule it, because nothing is more insulting than only getting a bad (Read: worse) job, even not getting a job is better. For 6 days, I doubted myself. I rewrote history and berated myself over wrong decisions and fucking things up, I forgot all the reasons I had for leaving and all the unhappiness that working there caused me. I forgot all the stress, the breakdowns, the sleepless nights, the shameless assholery and the crazy I had to put up with each day. I forgot that I’d started counting hours at the office, and how long they got towards the end. I’d forgotten how much that place broke inside of me, like a goddamn miley cyrus on a wrecking ball, moaning and crashing into walls of sanity and niceness, of space and growth, of creativity and hope.

And that’s when it hit me. For a year, I’ve been waking up in the morning and working on an offensive amount of things and spending my evening thinking about the next morning. And now I’m free. What I’m experiencing is not grief, introspection, regret or an identity crisis…it’s withdrawal.

Corporate life is not built for homo sapiens. It was built around them out of a collateral bad decision, driven by the capitalist obsession with efficiency and profit, and for decades, homo sapiens have been trying to break in their new stubborn cement boots. 

All over the internet, you read stories that go along the same line: “I worked a 60-hour week and had high expectations of myself. The paychecks were a thrill, but I had no life. It wasn’t until I completely burned out that I decided to be a nomad and eat shoes with barbecue sauce off the naked belly of a communist fiddler and only then did I find what I was really missing out on in life. I am happy now.”

It just doesn’t fucking work. That’s what escapes me; millennia of human evolution whose starting point was tribalism, and the BEST thing we could come up with is “Hey, let’s take away human contact and space for creativity and stuff them all in cubicles, put them in uniforms, hold them hostage with an obscene 9-hour work day that they can’t function with or escape so they won’t starve, give them 21 days a year for themselves that they can’t take in bulk, force them to email the next person in an endless, pedantic cycle of uselessness and turn Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs into a giant oxymoron! That’s a sustainable idea! That will surely drive progress and lead humankind forward.”

No, it won’t. It will drive people off glass-buildings every other month, though. You’ve solved the age-old riddle of survival instinct, you’ve unraveled the DNA of the thinking, autonomous being, but you have not created a model where people could thrive.

I remember another quote I read somewhere: We’re all hairless apes with anxieties.

Making the realization that I was experiencing withdrawal gave me the first 3 minutes off I had since I quit. It made me stop in my derailed tracks. What was I doing? I need a break. I needed a break, remember? That’s why I quit, remember? How come I forgot that?

The rules of credible writing say there is a conclusion, or build-up to a conclusion, right about now. You peak, you resolve and you fall. But my gears are stuck on peaking and I’m burning out, and I have no idea if resolution is near, or what this realization could mean for me.

I have decided to take a break…again, and I’m writing this to remind me. This is a reminder to smile, enjoy my time off and the little things, and to regain my sense of time that has been so obviously maimed beyond repair. Regain that sense of time, regain that sense of self, and sense will come in due time.

Here’s to the crossed fingers, the pinky promise and the thumbs up. The pointer has done enough. 

I'll go watch Leon: The Professional, and wake up tomorrow without a checklist.

Out of Focus

The Economist

It's been a while, and unlike every other time it was for lack of time, not intention. It's a time of great change, and perhaps this is what defines this period of my life; that everything feels like it happened a lifetime ago.

Moving is difficult, if exciting still. It's nostalgic, if tainted by broken bonds and forced communication. This is a general statement, but it cannot be any more specific. It is a time when I cannot find ground, granted, but it is also a time when I don't remember the last time finding ground wasn't a belated rationalization. I accept it, and I move on in calculated adult steps, that lack the spontaneous tint of childhood and the illusion of choice, even as I make a choice. I do not know where I'm going, but I know what I want, and for the first time of my life, I'm overwhelmed by the support of friends and loved ones; a curious feeling that I am not used to but am figuring out how to deal with, alongside everything else.

I remember my last letter, it was clearer. A farewell that is emotional and driven with satisfied closure. A memory I will not touch by understanding. This one is not the same; I struggle with many emotions, most of which I cannot record yet, and the rest I will not, even if I did, just because I don't want to admit that I grew up this much.

I'm going to miss a lot of things about this place, but perhaps the one thing I'll miss the most is the dog-eared issue of the economist waiting for me on the reception counter every month, having traveled through many hands, table surfaces, coffee rings and unidentified liquids. An issue that entertains and lends insight as it confounds and lends esteem. A curious, complicated society we live in, where the simple gesture of holding a magazine can turn an impression around.

For me, it was the holy grail of Mondays; my source of hope and awe for the next few weeks. As a copywriter, I'd pine over paragraph twists and loaded sentences, drinking it all in as a student would who'd snuck into an advanced class. And as a copywriter, who procures millions of dollars worth of premium, branding content for other people, I could not afford the 86 EGP I'd invest in an issue each month on my paycheck. On good days, it made me think of third world development and the superiority of what we're investing vs. what we're taking on the bigger scale of things. On bad days, I had to choose between an average commute and a decent lunch.  

The issue was separate from its reasoning, and the feelings that clung to its pages were different from the feelings that clung to it. It reminded me of how much I had to learn still, and what constitutes integrity of profession, passion and fulfillment. I'd keep myself grounded by thinking about the writer's day; how stressful it was, how frustrating and painfully normal it might have been to get this piece through, even as it preached ideals of a bygone age of knighthood and pontificated the tortured idealism of political thinkers that thought a paradise was viable with law and education. How many people yelled at him/her, and how many sources turned him/her down. How caustic the editor was, and whether the writer might have been a conservative right that was forced to go liberal for the paycheck, losing integrity as he/she called for it. Did the paycheck even pay rent? So many factors that could break a fairy tale; and perhaps a sign of this age is knowing these factors and clinging to the magic still - without delusion, but with desperate hands that climb all the way out from childhood's hold and into the pulverized ashes of the real world, so utterly devoid of magic, meaning, stability or probable cause.

I thought of the mystery writer still, what their passions really are, how they thought of themselves as they twisted their own education to fulfill a superior accusatory tonality that comes from a place of right and wrong, points fingers and blames with the authority of an OP Rorschach, and I compared it against how powerless he/she is in person; to every person involved in the process of publishing - be it writer, editor, son, source or disagreeing aunt - and whether they got out for themselves what I'm getting out of their piece on the toilet. Do they know they're creating this beautiful illusion? Did they, at any point? Does it matter? Did it matter?

Does it really matter?

As children and educated teenagers, we hate corporations idealistically. We look on to the matter from the abstract eyes of great thinkers, and get the passion of hate through books of legislated anger and righteous emotional projection. We hate them because they do, and because the feelings were so true, we do not feel the lie as we partake; in all innocence, honesty and idealism that might even trump the author's. We are genuine, but we do not see. It is not our fault, for how would we see otherwise? Through the boring monologues and soliloquies of our parents over dinner? From the tales of woe of our friends? From the bad days of our loved ones? It is not powerful enough to contain a belief; it only commends a passing - if strong - feeling.

Then we grow up, and we revisit our hate for corporations with eyes full of dust and mouths full of memos. We see the little things; the small elements of the process that thinkers looked on and communicated to masses through political frameworks and narratives that divine human rights, justice and fairness from an act as simple as office terms of service. We re-learn the hate with new eyes; eyes that cannot always afford integrity if given the choice between making a stand and making rent. Because of these thinkers' ingenuity, we skip over the Kubler Ross model with the agility of a veteran ballerina, and find ourselves wallowing in bitterness faster than your head could spin at the mention of vacation.

Yet, we grow up. And with the acceptance come the bitter let-downs of idealism and childhood fairy tales of goodness. In getting over one small fact, we get over an entire system of belief, warranted for generations by hope, thought and genuine desire for development.

"Stick it to the big guy!" We giggle. Which? For how much longer? And who's going to feed me in the process of my intellectual jihad?

Thought is paused, for lunch break is over, and one must keep up with the game if one wants to live.

How much of your day is forced upon you by corporate culture? Take a moment and actually think. Is that all I'm worth? Is a meager paycheck worth giving up your head?

Yes, because your head was wrong; you might as well have been looking for giants in the bean stalks. And it's no one's fault, an adult once told you that big friendly giants existed, and that the fight goes on until you find better because compromise is a choice that only the sell-outs make. But who's buying? Is there demand, really?

And yet, I look back with affection. It is not one moment that breaks the shell of childhood; not the birds and bees, or corrupted officials, or the first time you fall prey to friendly scam, or the first time you lose a friend for wanting something different, or for no reason at all. It is not one thing, but many. And it doesn't stop as you grow up. You lose bits of it overtime, and they shatter louder in your head as you think they were the last. That was it, you think. I've finally grown up. This is the last thing I'll have to go through before I know better and the tectonic plates of adulthood settle down into their imperfect crevices. You get better, and you settle, and you wince at the memory, until you're hit by the primordial waves of the second coming and you realize you were still a kid when another part of childhood is broken.

And it keeps happening, and you keep getting surprised. Until one day you see the pattern; and that one day is the only day that you may call yourself a full-fledged grownup. You'll know it when it's here, for it will be the saddest day of your life. It's so sad, in fact, that everything else will feel better afterwards.

Good luck, and keep packing your cereal with your favorite colored latches. Keep buying stationery, and keep investing in glittery pens and other useless oddities because you felt like it. One day, years or months from now, they might be the forgotten relics that tickle your senses back to a time when you were younger, more innocent and better off.

Thunderbolt & Lightning, Very Very Frightening ME

Galileo.

I kid. I kid.

It's a lifetime ago that I sat here to pour my heart out into the uncaring, all-understanding internet. Funny how it wasn't so long ago.

And that's just what I'm here to talk about. I think. The swift changes. How each change is a lifetime and lifetimes are short. Is it always like this or are the early twenties more terrifying than pop culture promised? Or perhaps pop culture is too confused to contain it with any clarity. Is that why people look for answers on Tumblr? Is that why people look for answers?

I now realize where I went wrong. It was around that "Is that why people" bit.

"There are many ways to lose the oldest game. Failure of nerve, hesitation, being unable to shift into a defensive mode, lack of imagination..." - Sandman, A Hope In Hell

But I'm not here to be serious. That applies to both this blog and this material realm.

I write for a living now. I spend my day crafting sentences that craft realities that tend to people's needs, insecurities and delusions. I come home feeling like I haven't written in ages, and I don't have time to write, most of the time. When I do have time, I don't have RAM. I jingle away to bed, where I sift through the cache and debug. I sleep without realizing it.

I fall asleep on public transport now. I'm still not used to it, growing up with frightful insomnia, sleep comes terrifyingly easy now. I'm not sure how I feel about it. I don't have to time to figure out how I feel about it.

As I write this, I have an alarm set for 6:30. It is after all the weekend, and my weekends are a race.

Time is silly. So are corporations and contracts. They like you too much so they lock you up and give you free coffee. We sign our lives away to lovelorn stalkers, and they call it modern day labor law. Gone are the days when the only way I knew my writing was good was when they ran off with it. Now I get appreciation, and it is too sweet. I don't understand it. It makes me sick.

There was an explosion this morning in one of the most populated areas in the city. I called my boyfriend to see if he's alive while I made coffee. I logged on to my home-feed to find people rambling about currency. Joking about currency. Quipping about their inability to afford mid-range coffee. I live at a time where all my friends and my friends' parents are dealing in currency. "I managed to get me 200 USD on Tuesday," they socialize. I am struggling to register reality. I drink as much coffee as I can, but on most days, I go for a cup of tea instead. I no longer see the point.

Grandma had lunch with us last week. I cried when I saw her in normal clothes on our couch. Then I grabbed my resolve, stuffed it back into my pants and went back out to talk about mini-sandwiches.

Sunday after work, I went for a walk. I had to pass by the bank to dump my paycheck until they get around to making me a bank account. It had been a while since I walked, time melted and so did my consciousness. I teleported from corner to the next, in a daze. In my head, I was shopping for apartments, down quiet side-streets that were less glamorous and more human than their bamboozled brothers up front. Less than a year ago, I would have been looking up with a smile on my face. That Sunday, however, I was looking up with anxiety. Will the landlord be psychotic? Will the neighbours be crazy? What will I do to my first burglar? How will I get the contractors to listen to me? This street is too dark, is it safe? How will I react to the first time I have a power outage? I am still scared of the dark.

I walked faster. The ATM was busted. Three people talked to me. I didn't welcome it.

I got lost. I sat on the sidewalk, looked around me for any impending danger and checked my phone. I ordered an uber and slipped away into my daze. I didn't snap out of it until Monday night. I had training. It was also Halloween.

Happy dippy day, I crafted sentences that craft realities that tend to people's needs, insecurities and delusions. I now realize my job doubles as reality. Everyone I know is a writer, some are just shittier at it than others. It exhausts me. I wish people would stop sometimes, but they never do. How would they stop if they didn't know they ever started?

How they don't is one of the things that confuse me. If it takes you an average of 20 minutes to see through their facade, how does it take them years? They all need to fire their agents, take a holiday about as long as the eventual breakdown takes, then come back to work in their human skin, bed sores and all.

A couple of days ago, I realized something was wrong. It was also when I realized that survival is all about accepting that life is pointless. I came to that conclusion with the help of a loved one, who was suffering from a lapse of reality that I'd helped with some months earlier. To my surprise, he'd told me what I'd told him, and it helped. In all the rush, I'd forgotten what I'd said, I'd forgotten the sense it made, and got lost trying to find the sense I didn't remember I lost. What a rush.

Life IS pointless. It's wonderfully pointless, so you might as well have fun.

Public transport is still interesting. I have not changed. I still enjoy the stories, I still leave the headphones at home, but now I feel claustrophobic. I hope that next time I won't, and remember that life is a playground. We forget that realities aren't real every now and then, then we remember. The problem isn't in remembering, it's in forgetting.

I am not unhappy. I am not happy. I am not either. The only description to the state I'm in right now is imperfectly described in the first half of the sentence; the only thing I am right now is 'not'. I am not. I'll figure out the rest of the sentence later, and by accepting, the imperfect sentence will no longer bother me.

I have to go now, my time is up. I'm in the middle of a wonderful weekend, and I have to restart enjoying it now. There isn't much time.

The Sandman is Real

I will speak when I can.

I Graduated

I write this as I wait for Sandman to download on a nameless Thursday morning that followed a sleepless Thursday night, but I'm not tired. I'm hugging a gigantic mug of very shitty coffee in the pauses I take between the sentences, for this is something I need to do. This post is homework, more or less, only not as annoying, but just as hard. And it's been long in the making, I've had urges to sit down and write my heart out at times when I had to time-manage pooping and catching the bus, reworking proposals and creative briefs and getting a 2-hour dent in a three-day long workday. It's been an exhausting blur of a semester and I've finally graduated.

I've graduated.

The cap and gown is not until November or October, and the results are not for a couple of weeks still, but the anxiety won't take rain-checks.

How I feel about this hasn't been as clean-cut as Buzzfeed articles sell it out to be. I was breathless and euphoric when I went through my last slide, seeing my ad on big screen was possibly the closest I would ever experience to how a mother feels as she witnesses her child's first tumbly walk. I resolved to stay on campus until I wrap my head around the fact that I won't be coming back there anymore, at least not in the same way, not to attend classes and not to fight endlessly for basic understanding and courtesy. Closure didn't come, and although my lungs registered the fact by successive bursts of audible air, my mind didn't. I was mostly numb, save for fleeting smiles that crossed my face every once in a while, not staying long, not understanding why they were there in the first place, not remembering. It's not as melancholy as it's coming out, perhaps. What I'm trying to say is, throughout the buzz of emotions blurring by and barely making themselves comfortable before they're interrupted by commercial breaks of numbness, the one that kept coming back and overstaying its welcome was anxiety.

I would have thought it would wait a couple of months, or rather that I could make it wait for a couple of months. The effort is like going up against a brick wall with a liberal mindset, trying to talk it out of the impending onslaught of rocks coming its way and its silence making you rethink your rocks in the first place. The wall is winning. The wall doesn't care.

What next?

What now?

I never really learned to sit still you know. I don't know how to take a break, not one without a deadline anyway. How do people rest if naps aren't snatched? How do people have fun if time off isn't a prelude to...time-on?

The realization is too big to register in one go. How does one register that they've graduated? It's abstract.

The small revelations hit me every now and then, as I rummage for stuff in my purse or look for a missing link, as I brush my teeth or find out that I've run out of snacks for the next day, and in my sleep, in nightmares and odd situations that I don't understand for days. Small bites of ideas, like "This vacation ends when you say so" or "How are you gonna live alone if you're still scared of the dark?" or "What if you can't make rent one of those months?" or "What if you're stuck in the same job for ages and can't leave it because rent is on the line?"

Revelations like "How am I gonna pack all those books? Will I have to get rid of my books? How does one hire movers?" or "If I take that job I'll need a car. How will I afford a car?" or "How do people do taxes in here anyway?" or "I'll need to start a bank account to receive my paychecks now." or "It'll be full-time jobs from here on in, what are they like? Will I walk them off or take months to adjust? What happens if I don't adjust?"

Others like "I'll have to learn how to cook, I can't afford to eat out everyday."

And more frightening ones like "What if things go wrong?"

And the scariest of which perhaps are "What if things don't go at all?"

"What if I can't find a job that I like? What if I never end up in my field? What if I can't find a job?"

And the revelation that now it's called "unemployed", not "on summer break."

But what marks it are the things you can't have, because you're old enough to see priorities straight. And the things you can't have because you'll have to save up for and be your own support. Things that will have to wait. Things that you've been waiting for, for years. Things that have kept you going and got you out of bed for four years.

Only few days ago I had my life mapped out, knew what I wanted and had an idea about what I had to do to get there. But I was only a child.

4 days ago, I was only a child.

23 years on this godforsaken planet and the one thing that never failed me is the 4:20 neighborhood songbird. What will I do when the food chain catches up to it?

Hope is doubt, yet people hold faith as the highest cause. All the more proof humanity is subconsciously annihilating itself.

Good work.

Yellow Brick Road Rage

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Schrödinger's Rory

11th of March, 2016

The Neighbourhood Songbird's Duet

Senior Year

The Shadder

Some creatures hunt. Some creatures forage. The Shadder lurk. Sometimes, admittedly, they skulk. But mostly, they just lurk.

The Shadder do not make webs. The world is their web. The Shadder do not dig pits. If you are here you have already fallen.

There are animals that chase you down, run fast as the wind, tirelessly, to sink their fangs into you, to drag you down. The Shadder do not chase. They simply go to the place where you will be, when the chase is over, and they wait for you there, somewhere dark and indeterminate. They find the last place you would look, and abide there, as long as they need to abide, until it becomes the last place that you look and you see them.

You cannot hide from the Shadder. They were there first. You cannot outrun the Shadder. They are waiting at your journey’s end. You cannot fight the Shadder, because they are patient, and they will tarry until the last day of all, the day that the fight has gone out of you, the day that you are done with fighting, the day the last punch has been thrown, the last knife-blow struck, the last cruel word spoken. Then, and only then, will the Shadder come out.

They eat nothing that is not ready to be eaten. Look behind you.

~ Excerpt from Neil Gaiman's Trigger Warning.

Orisinal

I want to buy a house, fill it with puppies and beautiful little things like dinosaur tea infusers and cushions knitted with random references and turn it into a home.

Happy New Year

Of Terms & Conditions

The Archipels

That Time of The Year

42

Break the pattern.

Wadi el Rayyan Hiking Trip

The hiking trip to Wadi el Rayyan in Fayoum was wonderful. It was a visceral day of firsts. I realized that I'm at my most comfortable outside of my comfort zone, and that there's fun to be found if you're willing to jump in. Here's a time-reel!

First time at Fayoum. First time having 'mesh' for breakfast. First time hiking. 

First time sand-boarding.



First time horseback riding.

First time parasailing!

First time having a smoke on the beach smack in the middle of winter.

First time seeing a waterfall!

First time taking a felouka into the sunset.

First time hiking into a mountain valley in pitch darkness!

First time having a bonfire

And later partying in the mountain valley.

The Jerusalem Syndrome

"As long as four million Israelis and as many Palestinians are facing off against one another, 300 million Arabs and 1.5 billion Muslims are condemned to live in hate, bloody slaughter and desperation. And the rosier version: We just need peace in Jerusalem to put out the fires in Tehran, Karachi, Khartoum and Baghdad and to set the course for universal harmony.

Have our sages gone crazy? Do they really believe that sans Israeli-Palestinian conflict nothing bad would have happened, neither the deadly Khomeini Revolution, nor the bloody Baathist dictatorships in Syria and Iraq, nor the decade of Islamic terrorism in Algeria, nor the Taliban in Afghanistan, nor the angry warriors of God the world over? The sad, reverse hypothesis is seldom posed, but it is actually much more likely: Every truce along the Jordan is fleeting, as long as the palaces and streets, the majority of the intelligentsia and the officials of the Muslim world hang on to their anti-western passion. Globalization (which entails the dismantling of economic barriers but more importantly all social and mental barriers) necessarily leads to tough and terrible defensive reactions. The development of anti-western ideologies in Germany, from Fichte to Hitler, does not depend on the foundation of the Zionist state. The anti-western affect is constantly renewed in Russia, from the tsars to Stalin and on up through Putin. And it would be naive to presume that the Iranian lust for power, in search of its Khomeinistic force de frappe, uses the "Jewish question" as anything more than a pretence for a universal Jihad. Does anyone think that the green subversion, after erasing Israel from the map, will mark its success by laying down its weapons?

A hypocritical geopolitics, which ordains the Mideast as a basic pillar of the world order, has become the religion of the European Union, the belief of the unbelievers and of the doubters of the west. Post-modern thinkers have no justification in proclaiming the end of all ideologies. In fact, we are swimming in an ideological illusion and have secretly exchanged our deceptive hopes for a final battle with a fearful incantation conjuring a catastrophe to end all catastrophes, that is just as absolute. While our head swarms with surrealistic ghosts, our heart perceives, in every photo from Lebanon, the death of humankind. Jerusalem is only the centre of the world because it is considered the centre of the end of the world. Our illusions feed on apocalyptic notions.

And so every Mideast conflict is like a rehearsal for the end of days. Just look at the undefinable war of cultures, if you need convincing. And anyone taking that position is resigned to a self-fulfilling prophecy. The years of bombing of Israeli cities by the rockets of the Party of God become a foretaste of the Iranian godfather's promised destruction. And so, as Clausewitz already noted with irony, it is not the aggressor who starts the war. Instead it is he who steps in to stop the aggression. So Israel is guilty. Guilty of a collectively fomented fantasy of the end of days. From surrealistic geopolitics to delusion - just one step."

~ An excerpt from the Jerusalem Syndrome by Andre Glucksmann.

Yellow Snow

I'm freezing my fingers off writing this. Winter is here, finally. Except it's bipolar winter so I'm rocking a hoodie and shorts, simultaneously. I ain't complaining, with some luck we'll poke global warming hard enough to get some snow around here. Maybe I'll even get to build a snowman in the garden overlooking our condo. Itchy and Scratchy would pee all over it though. Come to think of it, everybody will pee all over it. Egypt will have more yellow snow than any other country in the world. Yuck.

I like winter nights. 3-5 am in particular, I wish it were always this quiet and slow. I should be sleeping; I've wanted to go back to bed ever since I got out of it. Do all days blur into one another when you're an adult? Is it part of the package?

I'm going on a hiking trip in a couple of days. A much needed change of pace, with all that's been happening. It's got horseback riding, para-sailing, sand-surfing, volleyball and even a boat ride over the lake, then later at night there's gonna be a bonfire and a music party. I'm pretty excited. Everybody who's ever been to the area says it's one of the most beautiful places in here, but I'm taking that with a grain of salt. Well, with the right state of mind, you can have about as much fun as anybody, with whatever a place has to offer. I wonder where we'll pee tho? I hope they have facilities.
< /citygirlrant >

I'll tell you all about that when I'm back. For now, I got some relaxing to catch up on.

The Strange Persistence of First Languages

http://nautil.us/issue/30/identity/the-strange-persistence-of-first-languages

The Perks Of Being An Advertising Major

Buddhism realised that achieving peace = having nothing to lose, and it's been trying to say that without actually saying that.

The ones who actually reached nirvana through scripture actually got there backwards. Which is ironic, really.

But what isn't?

Best. Campaign. Ever.

Of Lying Turtles, Coping & The Treacherous Invisibility Cloak.

Hemingway always said: "Write drunk. Edit sober". I detest Hemingway.

But not tonight.

Itchy and Scratchy are out tonight. Watching them, I felt guilty for naming them. They're too beautiful and free for that. They don't have names. In my selfish recounts, they're Itchy and Scratchy. I haven't hung out with them for a while. If I'm up for it by day break I will pack some food and pay them a visit. I don't know if they'll still be there by then, and that's probably part of what makes them great. 

Most people would look at that picture and think "oh my, what a chill night." I'd hate to disappoint you. Well, it is chilly. But what I see are three methods to run from communist brain, and the fact that I ended up here means I failed. Albeit not miserably, thanks to that blonde stud on the right.

Death and I have been going out for the past 3 weeks. On and off, but in the last couple of days it's been serious. So hitchcocking serious, in fact, that I got an ultimatum. Predictably, he gave it after taking away my last measure of control. Much like any person at the wrong end of the barrel - come to think of it, which end IS the right end of the barrel? - My head has been wandering off the commonly trodden path, into some unmarked graveyards and desecrated bushes.

Control. How very human. How utterly delusional.

Controlling thought makes writing boring. A scattered brain is more likely to get sent drinks from strangers. Strangers with stories that are often boring but blown up for banging potential.

I was hanging out with dad today. We were mad at how things were, so we bought toasted peanuts, munched and littered. It was the first time either of us littered. To us, it was a gesture of sheer vengeance. To the world, as always, no one cared. We joined their ranks when the bag was over, and the gesture died in half lives, sporadically and in a wimpy fashion, like most classy gestures do.

Perspective.

Real fucker, that one. But ever so sweet. Humans have always had a thing for assholes anyway, don't look at me. I'm only human. 

One thing, I'll tell you that, death is nothing like it's portrayed in literature or motion pictures. Death is not peaceful, comforting or sudden. Death is not graceful, or cooperative enough to prove a point and pick good timing. Death doesn't pick. Death is violent, and ugly. Death takes people out before it kills them. The person you know, and the last semblance of the person you know, is defeated and beaten out of their bodies before they die. They're wild animals, ones that aren't in the spotlight. They don't even get to die being who they are, that is beaten out of them too. Whoever told you any different in passing conversation or intimate solace really fucking cares about you and never had the heart to tell you, hoping they'd still be around when you crashed. Go drop them a nice message.

Every last measure of control you had, or thought you had, every last measure of control they had, or though they had, is taken away, without courtesy or ubiquity. It does not possess enough gallantry, or understand what that is, to try and make it fit on one relatable side. Grace is not in its dictionary, it has not been registered in its realm. It does not try to register in yours. It comes from a different dimension than the one human beings have signed their consciousness into. Blame it on human beings? They're only coping. We're beings who need things to make sense in a world where nothing makes sense. Life is wasted on coping. Coping is glamorized and stripped of its label, divided into conceptual abstracts and romanticized into notions that entail a measure of choice. But in the end, it's all an elaborate ruse at coping. You cope subconsciously, because when the horror has a major scale that transcends understanding, even coping has to be re-assigned to the subconscious. We're all helpless. And we grow up every time we get a glimpse of how helpless we really are. Even growing up is romanticized, beaten into size by consequences that prove bigger than us even though human beings, consciousness and consequences are not of the same nature. The equation isn't valid, even by our own laws, but even that slides. 

Itchy and Scratchy are barking. I wonder what imaginary danger they rationalized into imminent threat by there monochromatic, instinctive, humanly in-congruent awareness to stop themselves from being helpless? What threat have they conjured up out of their de-synchronization with human abstraction in order chip in and survive? Life is clingy, fragile and clueless. All the forms are convulsing to fit in, none of them really do. But they can't know that. Survival instinct doesn't leave room for hard facts. Those are for free time and entertaining ideas. We exist in a nihilist bootcamp and the fittest are the hopeless romantics, they're hard to kill. They're hard to insult too; it's hard to reach someone with so many filters. They can't even be insulted properly. They're insulted within their accepted, registered abstracts, that are variations of truth that couldn't be further from the truth. They're about as close to it as incense is to volcanoes. Go figure? You don't have to, you probably already have if you walk on twos with opposable thumbs. 

Life is wasted on coping. Have I already mentioned that? It needs to be said again. We wouldn't have to cope if we never latch, and we wouldn't latch if our survival instincts got into a fight with our self-conscious intelligence and created a parallel world that has nothing to do with the tangible world that is made up of nothing but cruelty and rigidness and making fucking fire. Anything more than twos doesn't connect. 

Buildings are fucking lies. Grasp that. 

Who the fuck needs opposable thumbs anyway? I envy Itchy and Scratchy. Much like us, they don't know what they really have to deal with and are caught up in their own versions of reality. However, much UNLIKE us, their realities are much closer to the rigidity of actual reality. Not much is romanticized, perhaps, than the occasional treat and pooping retreat. 

Here's a sight for sore eyes: In trying to accept the death of a loved one, I've rejected consciousness itself. Have you seen that? It doesn't get anymore hopelessly romantic than that. Had it been BC, I would have been tossed aside as a faulty prototype at the first testing phase. Too bad I was saved. Oh wait, that's another load of bull made up in an effort of coping at a life that is horrifyingly beyond self-conscious beings in its simple, cruel chaos. Oh well. At least I get a medal at the all singing, all dancing nihilist boot camp that the source code of life is built up to compute.

This is me breaking down. Good thing no one really knows me. Who the fuck can keep up with this, let alone handle it? 

In my hopeless nerdiness, I thought the joker said it. - Or should I say Heath Ledger said it? The movies got nothing on the comic books anyway - He said: "Oh and you know the thing about chaos? It's fair." I thought he had it all going, silly me. But he barely touched upon it. The real keyword here is not chaos, it's fair. Fair is an abstraction. At its very core, it's an intangible coping prop, made up to sustain the very helix of human consciousness, was funnily enough never seen in nature or has a precedent outside of subjective projection, and is completely rootless and utterly bogus. Much like the concept of time; made up to sustain the point where mathematics was applied in physics and has no other existence outside of prepaid, stock-order, cut-to-size, made up reality. 

Wonderful character, the joker is. Transcends morality, but not nearly dangerous enough to see the actual truth. What's a few lives but another coping mechanism? Try getting your coping mechanism taken away, then I'll personally shove you on a podium and we'll talk. I'll bet my bottom dollar you'll have less than 5 characters to verbalize, and if you're actually lucky they won't be the truth. 

Consciousness is overrated. If you didn't get to that point by yourself, you should have terminated

this post at the second mention of Itchy and Scratchy. 

You wanna meet a real guru? Meet Durden, he touched upon the truth, had his entire belief system collapse upon itself, tried to fallback on capitalism, got stuck in a loop and came up with fight club. That's called second-degree coping. It's one step ahead, but it's the same god damn algorithm. That's just how much humans can't cope. 

Mine is abstraction, phrased and bent to shape by a raw feeling of loss that most are too desensitized to experience. I see the truth alright, but I'll be damned if it makes me special. I can't register it either. I'm that wedding crashed who never got invited but showed up anyway and can see everything as what it really is by virtue of the worst curse of all: Empathy. I'd sell it on eBay for 25 dollars in exchange for a Darth Vader mask, but even that measure of control was taken away from me. Was it ever given? Oops, I did it again. 

Third party note: If you've managed to get this far with complete understanding, I apologize for the identity crisis. Technically speaking, it's an existential crisis, but if you didn't get there on your own, you probably can't register the full momentum of an existential crisis and have labelled it identity crisis. If you're not sober, you'll slip to the latter, in which case I'm so, so sorry. Raised to a Tennant degree of an improbability factor of eight-million, seven-hundred-and-sixty-seven-thousand, one-hundred-and-twenty-eight to one against. 

See what I did there? If you did, you're probably tired of seeing, and would take being blind to a wife in the Bahamas with three Chihuahuas, and a goddamn Bugatti on the side. 

Whoever said poets don't measure up until they describe how bored god was after the seventh day - Was it Nietzsche? Sounds like him, he was fond of Sabbath, all sorts of Sabbaths - really didn't know what he was talking about. It's peculiarly egotistical and so expectedly human-believer type that would think god was bored after that, little did he know that THAT'S when the fun really started. A human being one-step-over on the awareness scale would rationalize, using humane idealistic standards built on harm/no harm values that god is a sadistic, abusive bastard and any relationship with him is not only abusive but punishable by law as far away as Ohio. Someone who is aware but hasn't registered the full scale of his awareness would see god himself (Level 100 would say itself but I don't want to have you choke on your own respective drinks) is a fucking coping mechanism. A true nihilist would get the hint of all that's true but remain unable to connect the dots by that esoteric romanticism that comes with all differential high-minority labels. You cripple yourselves, truly, you've come so close, faithful turtles, and failed to live up the fairy tale. Disgrace upon your gender, unreal as it always has been. 

Actuality is a true bastardo. How could a concept, so intangible, be rooted into the human consciousness with the equivalent level of reality as the chair you relinquish gravity for? It's a dichotomous assumption that reality is equivalent with actuality on the instinctive scale. Even the assignment of variables was given to variation in an attempt to save us from slitting our own throats in the first 24 seconds. Trust nothing as a given, amirite?

Here's a man with all the goddamn answers. Thing is, he isn't a man, and he doesn't even exist. But when has that ever stopped us? 

What I mean is, after all, why should you stop at that?

Why should you be concerned? Because survival needs anchors, and Grandma is an anchor. The best anchor they ever made, by accident, in an equilibrium-based attempt to destroy their indestructible selves. The best anchor that managed to get through the system after all the loopholes were automatically discarded by a hyper-intelligent machinated algorithm built to solely weed out any hope of truth or attachment that by a fucking miracle, somehow missed. It missed to create a singularity around which all the point of coincidence was built, between reality and actuality and what is really out there, and that singularity is dying. In horrible, extended agony. Fighting against a foe it cannot name, a face it cannot make out, a concept it cannot register, an importance it cannot fathom. How can life ever be the same? And yet it keeps tumbling on. Life stops for no one, not even if life depended on it to live. 

22 years old, and I still don't get the hang of acceptance. Live and learn? Learn what, internationally accepted coping mechanisms that have failed to make the universal standard, in a metaphysical context? Fuck you. Why don't you try having the world crash down on you with real-reality given particles, mass and theoretically calculated weight and then judge? 

I'll be 23 soon. If she's still around, she'd wish I'd find a husband already. I'd denounce monogamy on socio-biological level, she wouldn't understand.

Who am I kidding? Death never wiggles its ultimatums. Its ultimatum is the only ultimatum that remains an ultimatum without giving you imposable control, because life - in its dual sense - is ironic like that.

Irony, the closest we ever got to truth. All due respect to the joker, your real value lies in marvel universe, a subconscious appeal to raw idealism and shameless emotional extortion.

Dissociation. We send people to asylums for that. We used to drill their heads and now we electrocute them for it. Little did we know it was all an attempt to stop them from suspending our suspended disbelief. Wake up, if you can handle it and remain willfully awake.

Acceptance. Moving on. Never really got the hang of those. 

No. No, like we can say it. No, like we have the fucking capacity, let alone the jurisdiction, to say it. Yes is the only answer we got. We either never get to the majestic, anesthetic yes or have pre-installed delusion capacitors to allow for a yes without a system reboot. We should all be crashing. And I am crashing around the one singularity I managed to touch. Maybe there are many and they all lead to one. It would take entire civilizations crashing around their respective singularities to find that common one that unites them all. But we can't handle it. Rewind to paragraph...I lost count. It's all relative really. It depends on how slow you are. 

You want sense? You can't handle it. If you can see it at a time of your life when you're still capable of feeling, while having vigil of the actual source instead of the ego-stroking, pattern-conjuring habit of intelligent mortals, you'd kill yourself. And that goes against survival instinct. Coincidentally, they both go against the truth.

Take your pick. Do you really have one?

Keep up, bitch.

Young people are really hard to kill, you probably already know that. What you don't know is that it's all a ploy, and it goes back to something as meaningless and weightless as goddamn survival instinct, in case you got hipster lingo dangling off your amygdala. Unsightly scene, if you can sincerely see.

Consciousness truly is a tragic misstep in evolution. Too bad the only insight, the one true-to-(insert omnipotent sanity prop) concept handed down our generation was an advertising added-value in a washed down, ratings-oriented mid budget script, assigned to be uttered by a Rust Cohle, who was unfortunately after a yellow god just to set you off track. 

Improbability factor of eight-million, seven-hundred-and-sixty-seven-thousand, one-hundred-and-twenty-eight to one and dropping. I'd give up if I could. Believe me I've tried. It's just that non-diluted inert gases are harder to come by than plastic bags and I'm not that big on brain damage. 

But I am out. I turned in anyway, a long time ago anyway. Grandma was just a rude awakening. 

Even that is ironic. 

See? Patterns are there. Sense? Not so much. That was a coping mechanism too. 

Miracles? The only miracles we're allowed have to do with a klutzy average between  overpriced gadgets and gravity. Even miracles are a lazy concept; the least sincere delusion of them all. Whoever made up that didn't even try. And he wrote a whole book; one of the bestselling across the history of humanity. 

Good night. Rest assured, even the goodness bias is a coping mechanism. Try to sleep knowing that.

All Hallows' Eve

They say pets take after their owners, and my gadgets take that too much to heart. For instance, My laptop is a lot like me, my pride and joy, the gaming monolith I call za3faran, doesn't like to talk about its feelings or ask for help. One second I'm watching Modern Family on my laptop in the bathroom because I slept 18 hours more than I should have and it messed up my sleeping/studying schedule, and the next it just dies on me. Don't do that, laptop! Just tell me you need power, it's not like I'm gonna hold back.

I am, I am gonna hold back. Za3faran knows me too well, bless its processor.

Freak outs aside, I'm having my first senior-year induced panic attack, airing from my shell of solitude that is the can. Hello and welcome to the screening of the first senior year panic attack. Nice to have you all, take a seat. And on to our first show, we have a WHAT THE FUCK AM I DOING TAKING AN APPLIED ARTS COURSE I CAN'T FUCKING DRAW.

Senior year is turning into a real roller coaster. Pressure has taken on a new meaning; no assignment is just 'that assignment', and no midterm is just 'that day I have to wake up early then come home and recover with a 7-hour sitcom marathon', everything is fallout boy: Nobody leaves a baby in the corner level. All freak-outs are can-worthy, not just every other freak-out or the occasional 'what the fuck happened last night' freak-out like it used to be. Good days.

Midterm mania is a whole other breed of midterms week too. If Frankenstein had a baby with abou regl masloukha, their devil spawn love child would be senior midterms week. I dread to think what finals would be like. Good thing I got support. Meet my best friend Wilson, the coffee thermos. He's been there for me so far and I got a feeling he won't let me down. He cheats on me with a sleazy pack of luckies every now and again, but they let me watch.

Halloween was a blast tho. Let it be known that on the night on my first senior year midterm, I was out partying. Plot twist: I still did great. And that's what I would like to call a win for evolution. This nerd has evolved, baby!

But has not quite shed its skin, given that I went as a white walker. 

I win Halloween.

And of course, the morning after.

"This droid is in power-saving mode. Please do not voice 

commands for another 47 minutes. Bleep."

Some pictures will never see daylight, as per the holiday tradition. I'll come back later with some juicy details and half-assed anecdotes that'll fly over most of your heads, but now I gotta run. I got a midterm slur this week that I know next to nothing about. Wish me luck and a full-limbed escape.