Religious Harassment.

This happened today at uni and it thoroughly pissed me off.

 

I was sitting alone next to the side entrance of the free clinic where the interns come to practice. It overlooks a construction site on campus so it’s hardly populated, and doctors occasionally come out for a smoke.

 

There I was, enjoying Ayn Rand’s We The Living and a smoke, when I was startled by the company of a patient. She was an elderly woman wearing a black abaya. Without any greetings or pleasantries that would warn me to her existence, she was leaning onto me, inches away from my face, and the following unedited dialogue took place.

 

هي: إنتي إزاي بتشربي سجاير وإنتي بتقري المصحف؟

أنا: حضرتك مالكيش الحق تقوليلي أعمل إيه

هي: يعني إيه؟

أنا: ده مش مصحف حضرتك، لو سمحتي إتفضلي

هي: ماهو لو كان أهلك حاجبوكي مكنتيش مشيتي في الحرام

أنا: حضرتك إزاي تدي لنفسك الحق تكلميني كدة؟ لو سمحتي إتفضلي

هي: تلاقيكي قبطية ماهو أصل كلكوا كدة

أنا: *عليت صوتي* لو سمحتي إتفضلي

 

Now let me tell you what’s wrong with this scenario:

I honestly don’t know where to start, perhaps that she gave herself the right to go up to a stranger and tell them how to live their life, or maybe it’s the sight of a woman smoking that Middle-Easterns just can’t get used to and almost always relate to promiscuity, or maybe it was the violent religious discrimination, or the fact that she thought all Christian women are whores, or that she thought that all women who smoke are whores, or that she thought all women are whores that need to mend themselves and become human beings, or the fact that she thought all Christians are depraved and immoral by default, or the fact that she thought there’s nothing wrong with parents forcefully veiling their children, or the fact that she thought forcefully veiling another person is the solution to depravity, or viable in the first place, or the fact that she thought depravity is synonymous to smoking, or the fact that she thought depravity is a given for all Christian women, or the fact that she thought the bullshit she was spewing was virtuous, or had anything to do with values, or is remotely related to any religion or moral code. Maybe it’s the fact that she couldn’t imagine a woman reading a book that wasn’t the holy Quoran that had her assume the English book with a colored cover was in fact Quoran, or maybe it was the fact that she invaded a complete stranger’s personal space and filed accusations based on their assumed religion, or the fact that she thinks anyone who is not veiled is a whore, or the fact that she perceives my very existence as a mistake that she is bound by religion and society to set right out of her own precious time, or how the way her society taught her how to understand Islam allows her to behave this way to another human being, or how she thinks that’s what Islam tells people how to behave, or how she insulted me on every fucking level possible for a person to be insulted and verbally violated, and last but not least, how she genuinely believed she did absolutely nothing wrong.

 

I don’t know what to say, I was bound by the difference in our ages to respect the elderly, but I have never been thus insulted in my entire life. I am no stranger to the societal difficulties and the unwanted tags that come with being a smoker, I am aware of how this fucked up society perceives the sight of a woman smoking and I have been harassed over it before, but maybe the combination of discrimination against women, Christians and smokers in the span of less than 2 minutes was too much to bear.

 

I am a free woman, and there is nothing that anyone can say or do that can change that. I am not a walking vagina, I’m no less of a human being for being a Christian woman who smokes, none of these three give anyone the right to think of me that way. I am not a whore for having a vagina, I am not a whore for smoking openly and for fuck’s sake I am not a whore for being Christian.

Mark it.

Quand je vous aimerai?
Ma foi, je ne sais pas,
Peut-être jamais,
peut-être demain.
Mais pas aujourd'hui, c'est certain.

L'amour est un oiseau rebelle
Que nul ne peut apprivoiser,
Et c'est bien en vain qu'on l'appelle,
S'il lui convient de refuser.
Rien n'y fait, menace ou prière,
L'un parle bien, l'autre se tait;
Et c'est l'autre que je préfère
Il n'a rien dit; mais il me plaît.
L'amour! L'amour! L'amour! L'amour!

- Extrait de Carmen, L’amour est un oiseau rebelle par Georges Bizet.

"But they need to worry and betray time with urgencies false and otherwise, purely anxious and whiny their souls really won’t be at peace unless they can latch on to an established and proven worry and having once found it they assume facial expressions to fit and go with it, which is, you see unhappiness, and all the time it all flies by them and they know it and that worries them to no end."

– Jack Kerouac, On The Road

Happy Easter!

 

So That’s Why.

Mood Capsule.

 

It’s an Astor Piazzolla kind of night. I’m yet to hear another composer who manages to make time stop in its tracks like he did, quite effortlessly too.

 

I’m at a weird place of my life right now, but I’m surprisingly calm, and I guess that’s all that matters, isn’t it?

 

The crows still come back to the tree where the nest used to be, although the nest is long gone, along with their parents. They don’t have to come back, but they do anyway, and not because they need it, because they want to. I think that’s beautiful. Humans should be capable of that too, but they’re not, because they complicate everything, and it is because they complicate everything that they find it so hard to feel. Feelings are no longer spontaneous, they’re triggers for things they don’t want to go through again, and they think being numb will protect them. Crows are smarter than that, they’re too free to compromise for their own protection. I like crows.

 

My pinky hurts like hell, I’ve been graphic designing for 14 hours on a laptop touchpad, and now I’m considering chopping it off to silence the pangs. Occupational hazard has never been this lame.

 

Every once in a while you come across a wild thing, and you stand in awe to behold it, and try so hard to make it part of your life, but you should have known better because it will never let you. The only way you could keep a wild thing is by being a wild thing. Such a rare commodity these days, people are afraid to think, they’re afraid to feel, they’re afraid to be, and they’re afraid they’ll do something wrong. That’s no way to live, how did we ever get here?

 

I have asthma now.

 

People should really stop dying.

 

Buddhism was the only philosophy that got it right, the only way to get out of this life whole is through detachment, you neither love nor hate, and you’ll be whole. But you’ll miss out on a hell lot, besides, who wants to remain whole if our time is limited? It would be practical if we were immortal, but choosing that when you’re gonna die anyway, perhaps really soon, is the most idiotic thing you could do to yourself next to missing out on a chance to spend a day with Erik Satie or Kurt Vonnegut.

 

Who cares?

 

I got one hell of a week ahead of me, so many midterm projects, midterm assignments and work that would usually take three weeks crammed into 3 days. The first thing I’m gonna do when I’m finally done with that will be to play piano until I can’t feel my fingers. I miss playing piano, I haven’t played in a while and I think that’s ridiculous because it’s one of the very few things that make me feel like I belong somewhere, or that I’m getting somewhere. It’s a very odd sense of comfort, one you’d naturally associate with home.

 

There’s that one bird that usually wakes up before the rest, and it would make a huge difference when he’s finally gone. He doesn’t know that, and I don’t think he ever will. I don’t think the bird understands that without its significant little tune at 4:25 am everyday, none of the other birds would wake up, and mom, dad and I wouldn’t smile in the middle of the night in recognition. Little things matter.

 

I’m lost, and I don’t mind it.

 

Nobody reads this, and it’s one of the main reasons why I like writing here. That applies to more than one department in my life right now. It’s weird growing up, you’ll never have that childlike certainty again. Never again, and most people  hate that. I wonder why. Don’t the people who are certain of everything feel claustrophobic? What’s left to live for if you know the answer to everything?

 

My hand hurts. I think I will read game of thrones now.

Respice post te! Hominem te esse memento! Memento mori.

Roll The Credits.

And who are you, the proud lord said,
that I must bow so low?
Only a cat of a different coat,
That’s all the truth I know.
In a coat of gold or a coat of red,
A lion still has claws,
And mine are long and sharp, my lord,
As long and sharp as yours.
And so he spoke, and so he spoke,
That lord of Castamere,
But now the rains weep o’er his hall,
With no one there to hear.
Yes now the rains weep o’er his hall,
And not a soul to hear.
And so he spoke, and so he spoke,
That lord of Castamere,
But now the rains weep o’er his hall,
With no one there to hear.
Yes now the rains weep o’er his hall,
And not a soul to hear.

Time travels to learn
your secret life
in your mausoleum
And Berlin
is so ugly in the morning light
but with them
I could never feel so right.

This Is My Kingdom Come.

Nerds Will Relate.

Of Our Age.

The middle east should have their own psychology textbooks, with regional updates. By global measures, we're all cuckoo.

But I guess numbness is the mark of our age, we’re a generation that can only truly feel anger and lust. Some feelings died with their terms by the turn of the 18th century; feelings like remorse, gallantry, chivalry, integrity and infatuation. We’re all tripping. The first heartbreak tempers the heart to real life; if you still believe in fairytales by the second then you’re either a hero or delusional. If you feel safe in  your head, you have won the 21st century. Can you still feel your brains swirling in their cranial slums?

 

Life is a funny thing; you have a moral code and you have a survival instinct, they both have a set of compulsive self-imposing rules that follow their own laws, they’re both unstoppable forces, and they’re opposites. People are supposed to go through life, and somehow manage to walk on the edge of both, without snapping one and rebounding to the other. People are blamed if they’re frayed because although they can’t control most things that stretch that rubber band, they’re still responsible for them. You’re responsible for what you’ve been offered, or rather what’s been ladled onto your plate, even though you can’t control half of it, first of which is if the rubber band is in fact a thread. Funny, for creatures of fate and kismet.

 

All vices are a form of escapism, in truth. All virtues are a form of depersonalizations. It’s all about either lying to yourself or running away from it. And when you’re incapable of both abilities, both virtues and vices remain neutral, in the same room, both hollowed out to their identical helix, meaningless and at a complacent state of unnatural peace.

 

They don’t write that shit in textbooks, but then again, introspection isn’t something that is glorified in our age either. Prolific is taken for granted, and the quality – or lack thereof – of all that’s ample is dismissed.

 

World, I get it now, I get what the hype was all about. I also get why the world is fucked up, I get why everyone is confused, it’s because there are no boundaries. People, everyday, are bombarded with so many choices, ones they' weren’t wired to make and ones they can’t make, and the availability and numbing constant exposure drown individuality to a distant hum. Those who hear a buzz are the extremists. That’s why people let go of who they are; it’s because that’s yet another choice they were forced to make that’s not in their books. No one is taught how to handle that, few are given guidance as to how to handle that, even fewer listen when given, and most would rather lose it and find it for a living than decide once and for all only to pay for it for the rest of their lives, whether it’s a good or a bad decision.

 

It’s the same idea as placing circuits in parallel or connecting them in series; in parallel connection, with no chosen path and no particular stand or feeling on the matter, the same amount of energy goes to all, sometimes contradicting, departments. In series connections, it’s given all to one thing, with tremendous intensity. The pros of parallel connection is that if one is cut off, by means of fate or incompetence or whatever it is the decides the stream of things, the rest go on unaffected until that fraction of a bigger thing is repaired, but it never goes as far as that in series, that pumps it all the way and jumps in with all its might. The cons of the series connection is that if you put all of your eggs in one basket and drop the basket, you lose capital and profit; you lose Everything. However, if you put that extra work to shelter it and keep it going, even if that feels impossible at times, it can go so far.

 

It’s simple, in theory. Too bad life is practical.

 

Everything makes sense in numbers, but life is not a matrix; things don’t happen in binary so there’s no longer right or wrong. The binary feelings are rendered useless, the binary thoughts are dubbed extremist, and if binary feelings fuel binary thought, you probably won’t live past 50 without destroying half the population with every fart and groan. This all may have worked out in a different time, an older time when black and white footage sufficed, a time when anyone showing symptoms of sensory overload was institutionalized, not greeted left and right with a nod or a shrug. Our time is looping in on itself, in its mad frenzy and there’s no stopping it if it applies to you, or should I say if you apply to it?

 

I should write more often, writing things on social networks, other than making you lose rights of publication –which blogs do too by the way, but that’s not the point – also short-circuits an idea that could have became something huge if watered, fertilized and tended to, so to speak. The potential of that is lost because no one gives a fuck, and we all so want them to. It wouldn’t be the first time something great is lost to an instinctive urge; Adam and Eve set the precedent. I think that’s what the Adam and Eve story is really about, and that’s why it was used to start things off. It was meant as a metaphor that sets the theme of life for what it is; you lose great things for urges that are put there for your own survival, yet in order to achieve great things, you have to ignore your survival instincts and risk everything. It sets the theme of life to how two contradicting things can be simultaneously true, they can both make sense in the same time tunnel and space continuum. Such is life.

 

What do you do when you have no urges, impulses, or codes? Everything, and nothing. Again, such is life.

I Love Elephants.

Highlight of My Whole Fucking Week.

 

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

 

Karma Is A Bitch.

And yesterday was the living epitome of that statement.

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

Karma is a bitch.

 

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

 

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

 

Earl lied.

 

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

― Woody Allen

Dear Parents. Scratch That.

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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