Of All Things Haunted.

I've been having nightmares a lot recently. Started out with a recurring nightmare, that lasted for a week and a half, then moved on to the same nightmare with different variations each night. This has been going on for almost two months now and it's thoroughly pissing me off. But it got better, at first it was the kind you'd wake up from in cold sweats which threw a disoriented hue of sadness over the next couple of waking hours, which I tried to escape by not sleeping as much, then it got creative. I don't wanna go into a lot of detail about the actual nightmare, but I will mention the interesting bit. Drum roll please. The nightmare is a good memory.

Yep, you heard me right. It's the exact replica of a good memory I had irl, only it's somehow rendered into a nightmare by my psychological V-RAY engines. I talked to a couple of people about it, and they mentioned that a recurring nightmare is usually an unresolved issue that I'm repressing, and it'll only go away if I somehow work it out. The usual scenario, the only way the ghost will walk into the light is if he gets closure. Since it is a matter that I have no control over, I assume I will remain haunted for a while. It took a while to get used to, considering that I didn't dream before. Or what people keep stressing is "You dream, you just don't remember it." Fact remains, I didn't, so the change is unwelcome and inconvenient. However, I'm pointedly being a doll about it and having tea with my monsters, so the nightly change in scenario is a welcome reprieve.

In lighter news, today I found out two interesting bits of information. There's a forest being grown in Norway set out to print an anthology of books within a span of a 100 years (Read more here), Margaret Atwood is its first signed author. Beautiful initiative. And in an attempt to revive tourism in Boston, they're planning a literary district that maps out dead authors' haunts. That one's definitely going on my bucket list.

Read the full article here.

For a book nerd, this is definitely good news, although I would imagine the aforementioned dead authors wouldn't take lightly to plebs treading their hide-outs. When I put myself in their shoes, I shudder at the thought. 

But I'm not a dead author, so this is going on my laminated itinerary. By the time I can afford to travel recreationally, I'm going there with a camera glued to my hand like a proper Japanese tourist, and by god I will eat every tribute hotdog there is.

I Made Pancakes Without Dying

They're edible too.

To Live & Let Diorama

I keep coming back here from all sorts of places then promptly shooing myself. It's not that blogging has become cumbersome, somehow I still believe that some sort of answer, revelation or relief waits for me at the end of this post, but that's about as much hope as I would millennially allow myself.

My life has taken on an odd sort of pace. I've been avoiding human contact for the most part of the last two months, spending time reading, working, watching stuff and occasionally learning a thing or two. It's a lot easier that way, eliminating the element of surprise is one of the luxuries of the bat cave, a luxury I intend on milking dry for the foreseeable future, until a more seemly option presents itself. A friend smoked me out of my foxhole for an event she was covering for the daily news; a comic book panel earlier this month, and it was bittersweet. I regret missing the workshop, that could have been an interesting experience, although I blame that on Goethe Institut's tendency to frown upon social media exposure. Idiosyncratic of my Rory-ness, we ended up in the wrong panel and missed the first 15 minutes. Silver-lining; I got a baby plant out of it when it turned out that we had been rubbing shoulders with environmentalists.

We looked like tinmen ditching the green event mid-intro and bolting for the right hall, but luckily by the time we made it to the bibliothek, we found out we hadn't missed much because the translation equipment was down and it had more or less turned into a grade-2 cultural soup. The debates were humane and choked with passion, and the artists twitched and convulsed like proper introverts in the eviscerating spotlight. As tempted as I am to record every little detail of the evening, that evening is too special to me to include you all in so I'll stash the particulars in my personal Pandora's box and stick to the bit I fuzzed up to most. The panelists were asked by a workshop participant to share the first job they ever took before they became nationally-acclaimed illustrators in their own right, and the jobs they took were these: A garbage collector, a dishwasher, a waitress, a kindergarten teacher and a museum watchman. I could try to tell you what that made me feel, but assigning adjectives to this memory would be like putting sticky notes on a Rembrandt sketch; no adjectives could do it justice or be worthy of its complete momentum. I was moved, the same way an unstoppable force would move an immovable object if it could. That memory will cozily snuggle up in the back of my head and magnetically gather dust bunnies until I turn gray, along with other cherished memories of that evening that include the  senior polyglot, the ginger that tumbled out of the wardrobe with the lion and the witch, the Jane Eyre ghost that tried to start an underground publishing revolution, the skeletal chocolate-coffee gifter, a trip down a namesake street in a district I've renounced and the illustrator who owns a sketch of us that we'll never see.

What else is new and worth a cyber smudge? I'm now a Redditor. I've more or less given up on Facebook for a real-er alternative. People on Reddit still hold on to their genetically assigned predilection to saying what they actually mean, as opposed to Facebook's current livestock show. I also made an account on Medium in case I have something to say to the world, that I don't reckon I'll be using anytime soon. Oh! And I made my first professional logo, which didn't completely suck. Logo design is one of the trickiest specialties in the field. In layman terms, corporate identity is mafia work; it takes a godfather to make a proper logo and god knows a decade can only squeeze out a handful of don Corleones at a time. Many a designer took on that intimidating challenge only to wake up with a severed horse head in their bed or have their knees crippled by the unforgiving sledgehammer of analytics, but I'm proud of my progress, especially that it entailed my taking on a new program on the Adobe creative suite. I'd upload it right now if it didn't compromise the integrity of my assignment, but I will as soon as I can. Milestone!

Oh, and I started regularly meditating. For a skeptic, it took more than a couple of researches on the effects of meditation on the Amygdala, a comparison chart between the Buddhist and Hinduist practices and a plethora of guided meditation recordings that subliminally sold hot dogs and promoted child labour to the unaware to find my beat. Mindfulness meditation took home the lottery money, with a pinch of imagination thrown into the mix. After all, who can say no to daydreaming? It's been helping with my anxiety attacks and overall stress. It's been a while since I found a practice that relaxed me so completely I couldn't make a fist for 15 minutes afterwards, especially since they installed a goddamn corn dog stand smack in the middle of my jogging route. THIS IS NOT FAIR GAME, PROVIDENCE! But fear not, dear readers, I will not turn into a hippie.

A friend is starting a Ballet club on campus and I got dragged in as an organizer. If I recall correctly, she needs me to write a proposal for the project and help her fluttery pink-shauled self fight off the iron-clad fists of the administration with my experience as an ex-activist and charm them with my unicorn glitter tits into approving our leasing out the gym twice a week to the tight-sporting public. Other than that, uni hasn't changed much, I've antagonized two professors already, the junior workload has proved to be a Thai-food generated diarrhea compared to the sophomore and freshman ferret-sized loads, but it's nothing I can't take on with my waking hours. Oh, and the students are still barking mad.

Fam-wise, what's with grandma calling at 10 in the morning one day to invite us over for a fatta and kaware3 lunch only to greet me by shoving a beer in my hand and an ashtray full of Hershey kisses because "You deserve a break dear", to throwing a dinner party in place of a wake in the honor of a deceased relative and demanding that I undo my dreads, they can never really stop surprising me. I love grandma, she shows me that aging has nothing to do with getting old. Oh, and there's a day in there I spent with dad book shopping, then combat boot shopping, then chain smoking over Turkish coffee in the back alleyways of a bookstore while talking about life till 3 in the morning that I can't leave at the mercy of my goldfish memory.

In line with these updates, I may be getting my long-coveted graphic tablet before the year is done. Fingers crossed, that one's been in the works long enough. I'm looking forward to Halloween, although I might have to start costume shopping a little early since a denim jumpsuit and a velvet top hat might take me a little farther than the good old shop around the corner. I'm working on a design project for a pub owner and it's driving me crazy. Although the bright side is that if freelancing for a pub can't turn you into an alcoholic, nothing will. I'm also planning a 500 miles music video with the local whovians around mid-year break, although locations might be a hassle since it might be a difficult to pack 249 whovians into one hatchback, but we'll figure it out, we always do, it might prove bigger on the inside!

Update: Mute Man

Remember the deaf mute man I keep blogging about on and off? I saw him a week ago. He was hanging out with a friend, and they were engaged in a gesture-rich conversation. They had an understanding that I'm yet to see in people that aren't plagued with their handicap. It made me think about how hard it must be to lie with body language. Is it possible that deaf mutes are more honest by default? Interesting hypothesis, albeit gullible. I'll believe it.

Oh My Gosh, Look At That Banjo!

This song is making me wanna wear a frilly dress and dance around the room with a needlessly long cigarette holder.

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.