Of Turtles & Demons.

Much like every other regular blogger out there, you come to the point where a blank post is only a portal through which terrible monstrous creatures can jump in at you from unforeseeable dimensions. I know that because I’m staring right at it, and I can see a couple of imps climbing in.

Another speed bump is that fact that as you grow up, you get a firmer grasp of the fact that nobody gives a shit what you have to say about the world, and that kind of milks you dry. Newsflash, buddy, no one will ever patent your suggestion of adding burgers and ice cream to the kubler-ross model. I know, life’s a bitch.

It usually hits when you’re thinking about what you wouldn’t like to include in, or even how to begin, a blogpost. And just as you’d think about penguins the minute you’re asked not to think about penguins, because human brains are assholes, all you’re thinking about is a way to go around it without betraying the efforts of  playing whack-a-mole with your demons.

That kind of reasoning would rule out so many noteworthy life incidents and somehow an otherwise potential-choked unlimited blank post is fighting with your better judgment for custody of the many temporarily awesome stories that will eventually be filed as junk by your goldfish memory in a couple of years. It’s fair to say that writer’s block is kind of like divorce, in the same way your inventory will always be missing a couple of irreplaceable possessions.

So life, well what about it? I realized that things don’t seem so big once you’ve jumped in. To further elaborate, I saved a turtle the other day from a bunch of senior mofos only to have the campus laugh at me for standing up for a strange turtle’s rights and voicing its severe dislike of heights and being waved around when it’s spent its 3 digit life span a mere 5 cm from the ground. On the bright side, they didn’t look so big while I was looking up at them as I kept in mind how the turtle might be feeling in comparison. The poor thing couldn’t even down my Caesar salad afterwards.

I realized a lot of other little things, like for instance how stroopwafels are the Anglo-Saxon version of good old Freska, the negotiable assumption that dragons could have just been friendly over-sized canines, how the world doesn’t offer the courtesy of walking on eggshells to cater for your withdrawal-induced irritability and will relentlessly produce more people that you’ll see with a target circle tattooed on their forehead, how you’ll never be met halfway because as far as anybody’s concerned you’re just another fart waiting to happen. Other facts include how cookies and corndogs were not made for the purpose of socializing, and no I’m not talking about Twix’s ‘not made for two’ slogan. And last but not least, how coffee-specialized cafes are the worst coffee makers in the world is not the only living oxymoron that will piss you off as a blue-collar in the making.

I’ll come back when I can make sentences. And by ‘when I can make sentences’ I mean when I stop getting the irrepressible urge to cave every person’s face in with a baseball bat.

How Does It Feel Like To Go To College, You Ask?

You Were Paid.

“Each holiday tradition acts as an exercise in cognitive development, a greater challenge for the child. Despite the fact most parents don't recognize this function, they still practice the exercise.
Rant also saw how resolving the illusions is crucial to how the child uses any new skills.
A child who is never coached with Santa Claus may never develop an ability to imagine. To him, nothing exists except the literal and tangible.
A child who is disillusioned abruptly, by his peers or siblings, being ridiculed for his faith and imagination, may choose never to believe in anything- tangible or intangible- again. To never trust or wonder.
But a child who relinquishes the illusions of Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy, that child may come away with the most important skill set. That child may recognize the strength of his own imagination and faith. He will embrace the ability to create his own reality. That child becomes his own authority. He determines the nature of his world. His own vision. And by doing so, by the power of his example, he determines the reality of the other two types: those who can't imagine, and those who can't trust.

By first believing in Santa Claus, then the Easter Bunny, then the Tooth Fairy, Rant Casey was recognizing that those myths are more than pretty stories and traditions to delight children. Or to modify behavior. Each of those three traditions asks a child to believe in the impossible in exchange for a reward. These are stepped-up tests to build a child's faith and imagination. The first test is to believe in a magical person, with toys as the reward. The second test is to trust in a magical animal, with candy as the reward. The last test is the most difficult, with the most abstract reward: To believe, trust in a flying fairy that will leave money.
From a man to an animal to a fairy.
From toys to candy to money. Thus, interestingly enough, transferring the magic of faith and trust from sparkling fairy-dom to clumsy, tarnished coins. From gossamer wings to nickels... dimes... and quarters.
In this way, a child is stepped up to greater feats of imagination and faith as he or she matures. Beginning with Santa in infancy, and ending with the Tooth Fairy as the child acquires adult teeth. Or, plainly put, beginning with all the possibility of childhood, and ending with an absolute trust in the national currency. ”

― Chuck Palahniuk, Rant

Ah Les Hommes..

Story Of My Life.

The Y’s Behind The X’s.

People would stop judging a lot of things if they realized that we’re all the same. The same reason that got one person to pursue a career and lose their loved ones on the way is the same reason some never had a future planned because they thought family is more important, it’s also the same reason some walked out on both and got drunk and high till they couldn’t see straighter than the sidewalk they’re already stumbling on. The same reason people go out and buy stuff they can’t afford or learn things they don’t give two shits about, is the same reason one would suddenly walk out on all of it and break a couple of hearts on the way just to get even. People fuck up, in lots of ways, ways that are a train wreck waiting to happen and other ways that are socially acceptable and somehow lead to furthering their career in their obsessive ways or building their whole life on one person, one idea or one thing, or nothing at all, only to have it crashing down because the foundation wasn’t set in stone. All of these people are the same person, and that person just wants to be happy, and doesn’t really know how.

If you knew that their reason is your reason, would you still judge them so damn harshly? Well, now you do.

You Make Me Go All ..

Why Growing Up Is Poop.

As a kid, you except realizations to come in lightning packages, storming down with a bang that make you stop dead in your tracks and see the world in a different light. As you grow up, you learn to play dead when they saunter by. Little did I know that growing up isn’t as fun as they made it sound when I was a kid, I feel ripped off and the only reason I’m not suing is because I don’t know who to sue and am not grown up enough to know how to hire a solicitor just yet. Caution is advised for kids who stumble upon this post, I’d recommend you keep an inhaler close by because I will not be held responsible or, what you will come to know as being legally implicated, for having a kid think that if they hold their breath long enough they won’t turn into what I shall elaborate as the woes of grown-upsy.

I now know that time travel is possible, and it’s not just because of the fact that I slept for 18 hours that were so strategically lodged in the natural order of waking hours between Thursday and Saturday to have me skip Friday altogether, it’s the little déjà vus that have you standing there and seeing your younger self getting the same talk or lost in the same problem, only to be sucked into the present by the talker’s baffled face at your utter lack of reaction, which is another pooper, you hardly have any fits because your experience made it possible for you to be ‘mature’ about shit that would have had the kid you swing a baseball bat in the person’s face and not go to jail or be held remotely responsible  for caving it in. For the record, you can’t swing a baseball bat at people anymore either, and I still haven’t begun about the lost fun parts.

I now also know that when grownups say they’re busy, they’re actually busy. It’s usually a fleeting change but if you pay close attention, you realize that kids don’t really know what busy is outside of the realm of not wanting to hang out with that person and not wanting to admit that they don’t wanna hang out with that person. It’s funny hearing myself tell people I’m busy, and actually meaning it.

You also know that you could miss a social gathering because your overworked brain thought it plausible to have a big bang theory marathon just so it can fart around in its folds and not be required to perform the chore of shutting down and letting you sleep before it gets its own playtime, extorting you to yield by convincing you that you’re a Leonard and having you stay up just to find clues that’ll prove to you that you’re not a Leonard. You know that running through sprinklers feels like a dinosaur peeing on you and actually consider opting out for a relevant amount of time that kid you would slap you for, not to mention that you start to not roll down the car window so it wouldn’t mess up your hair. I used to make fun of chicks who did that, now I do it myself knowing that the rush of air at 60 mph would turn my short afro into a bouncy pompom. You’ll also lose your innocent and seemingly god-given effortless ability of spotting right from wrong or good people from bad people because by the time this post makes sense, you’ll have gone through every single thing you ever judged and pointing it out would only have you realize that you just called yourself an asshole.

You learn that the key to understanding personal statements in news articles is all in skipping the nots, you find a chocolate smear on your thigh and it automatically registers as one of the reasons why you can’t get a date when kid you would’ve probably licked it off, you know how to professionally tell a person to shove it and not lose your job, or have a fight at a restaurant over a wrong order without having the waiter spit in your food.

You learn that the whole ‘when one door closes, another one opens’ shit is only possible if they’re connected by relays, there’s a motion sensor installed or the room is pressure-stabilized and the evacuation at one end incurs an equal and opposite reaction at the other.

You learn that Spanish doesn’t have a word for ‘fuck off’, and many other famous cuss words, only to come to the realization that getting angry in Spanish requires you to be fluent enough to form a complex set of elaborate interconnected adjectives that together imply a pejorative context, and the things that come to mind after ‘how do people get mad in Spanish’ are ‘Somebody should have told me before I started learning it’ and ‘It’s a plan so you don’t score any latinas’, in that order.

And the most annoying change of all, when you think before you actually do shit, you start to know better. You don’t walk in some people’s shoes because even your toes knew better and you miss thinking about something only to come up with nothing of merit and do it anyway only to have a great story to tell the kids and something to smile about when you’re an old fart. That’s when things stop being fun, and it’s not because you stop doing things that are fun, it’s because the things that used to be fun are, by a twist of age and experience, not so fun anymore. Yes, kids, you’ll be fun-uly celibate. And don’t google celibate, you’ll only know that exists when it hits you in the face with a pillow and have you grateful for affording airbags.

You also know that everything you think you know now may change in a couple of months, because grownups are complicated, and being one is like being given a contraption that you’re supposed to figure out without the manual that has been lost somewhere down the generations that have manhandled it. People don’t say what they mean or do what they love, and they don’t necessarily do the opposite of that either in case you’re looking for the easy way out. You’re aware that you have no idea what you’re getting into but you wanna get into it anyway, only to grow old and wish you lost your speech functions at goo goo ga ga, and that’s when  you’ll realize that you can’t be a kid again because it’s generally frowned upon once you’ve lost the kid license.

And because you’ve seen it all, you’ll probably never have one of these moments, that you’ll come to miss, again:

You also lose your faith in humanity when you realize you’ve lived long enough to see Snoop Dogg turn into Snoop Lion and read the news because you have to not because you like to see people blow shit up out of the middle east. You have a full-fledged to-do list that doesn’t include decorative slots filled with ‘take a shower’ and ‘download tech n9ne album’ to make you look busy. You purchase books that are convenient for escaping social obligations, meaning the chubby ones that you can look engrossed into enough to have the approacher think twice about stepping into your antisocial bubble, and it doesn’t work half the time and you can’t tell them to go away because you’re not a kid anymore and that would fuck shit up.

And here’s the major party pooper, you actually start to care about what might happen if you fuck shit up.

Word.

‘Shall I tell you who the worst losers are? They are the ones whose works in this life are totally astray, but they think they are doing good.’

How To Handle Nice People.

“This army of clumsy lovers means well, but always manages to drop the ball in the clutch. Worse still, nice people think their good intentions make up for their pathetic failure to deliver. They're the Democratic Party of People.

I suggest a sharp rap on his skull from the reality stick. Try breaking up with him a week before you take a spring break trip together. Then, while he tries to wear the mask of sanity, hook up with a mutual friend. If his dedication to you remains strong, you may have to subject him to a 24-hour bus ride home staring at the back of your snuggled heads.

Sure, it sounds cruel. But believe me, in the weeks that follow, he'll wander zombielike through the most vicious neighborhoods at dim hours, seeking his own destruction. When he can wake up without gasping like a drowning swimmer every morning, balance is restored, and he is now a man willing to roll the dice. Or your new boyfriend will, as Community pointed out sometimes happens to adults who assert themselves, get the back of his head grabbed and pushed through a jukebox. Either way: No scuff on your shoes.”

To Those Who Wear Their Heart Where They Wipe Their Boogers.

I’ve always been guarded when it comes to writing here, I’ve seen people pour their hearts out to absolute strangers and I knew it wasn’t of any good because I’ve done it once and learned the hard way that people won’t help you if they can help it, and you shouldn’t want them to. Most of the time, there isn’t anything to be helped with, and people just want the attention, and they get it, and they don’t think about what the people who helped might have thought of when they did, all the ulterior motives and the things they’ll wait till the right time comes and they can hold it against them. I’ve always believed it was rather pathetic that there were still people who fought the pattern, that there were actually people out there who were gullible enough to believe that writing your heart out would amount to any sum of good in this world.

Then I met these people, and I saw the scars. And it wasn’t surprising how self-indulgent they were. Then it hit me, they’re only that way because they can’t help but serenade their knight, being themselves, the only ones they ever really knew in their retarded little self-centered bubble, the only real protagonist they saw.

You learn to pity such people. And in doing so, you miss the little fact that probably the only reason that bothered you was because their protagonist wasn’t the same as yours, and in that, you’re no better than them. They’re just the unguarded, unpolished versions of you.

It's not a coincidence that the weak and the meek rhyme, they’ll come to learn just as you have that all the cosmic jokes are versed.

School (n.):

Prank CV

Rory the Coffeenommer

She contacts you, you don’t contact her.

Out of sheer courtesy to the general work ethics, the coffeenommer has deigned to hire an assistant munchkinlander, who can be contacted at # 555 – Café

E-mail: caffeinated-coffee@beans.com

 

Career Objectives

Short-term Objectives:

To make coffee the national drink of the Middle East.

To start a monothematic newspaper dedicated to bringing together the coffee lovers of the Middle East.

Long-term Objectives:

To make the aforementioned newspaper an internationally-acclaimed publication outlet.

To start a coffee amusement park, investing all of its profits in the recently certified rehabilitation centre responsible for people with caffeine tolerance, anti-coffee taste buds and tea fanatics.

 

Key Achievements

· Fought for midget rights against the tyrannical top shelf regime.

· Joined ranks with fellow demonstrators against the so-called philanthropist movement of stool per midget.

· Managed to interview book characters as well as dead authors, earning her the medal of multidimensional journalism.

· Was the first to interview Lil Wayne without referring back to an accent specialist or his momma.

· Interviewed Snoop Dogg SOBER.

· Won the international contest on cryptic blog posts that still riddle the Regional Pen Head Committee. (RPHC)

· Monitored the underground private classes’ scene as mole and reported back with insider information.

· Ran the first ninja school newspaper. Copies not available to public and no records of any issue are registered.

· Received the first Google badge of its kind for her researching activity in her senior year.

· Regularly interviewed cabbies to maximize commuting potential, turning it to a worldwide success with dark bitter humor in her column: ‘Word of Turd’

· Wrote a column about the intricate details of national certificate education system that received worldwide sympathy and brought attention to the underground secret society of savage students.

· Got the inside scoop on the controversial matter of the posh spitting tradition in coffyard tastings.

· Was the only conscientious pro-batman journalist during Gotham's turmoil after the penguin framed him.

· Is an honorary member of the coffee appreciation society and first to launch coffee tasting coffyards.

· Worked as a journalist under the pen name of Clark Kent.

· Abolished the worldwide misconception of coffee addiction when she stayed off of coffee for a total of a month.

· Was awarded the Nobel Prize of Altruism for taking on the torturous challenge, mentioned in the previous point, and has attracted Gandhi followers from all over the world who found in her coffee-deprivation a heartwarming reminder of Gandhi’s food strike, and Peace Prize for ending the East-West coast rap feuds and bringing them together over a nice hot mug of coffee.

 

Further Work Experience:

Regional Pen Head Committee (RPHC): (2009 – Ongoing)

· Vice president of the online community after the successful cryptic blog posts referenced earlier.

· Admin of the official online page.

· Runs her own column in the RPHC newspaper, titled ‘Word of Turd’

The Annual Coffyard Tastings:

Ever since their launching in 1998, her tastiness the coffeenommer has been the primary spokesperson, event planner and president of the event, taking on all managerial aspects of the international sensation, bringing forward a turning point in the tradition of spitting by making it possible for participants to take a gulp, financing the extra security measures that ensued herself. Under her charge, there has only been one outbreak by a middle-aged coffee taster who demanded to finish his mug, after falsely claiming he hadn’t taken a gulp several times.

The coffeenommer elegantly solved the security issue by starting a contest for coffee breathalyzers, patenting a young invention that can distinguish up to 97 brands and integrating them in the security measures.

The Coffee Appreciation Society:

· The first Egyptian member, bringing the ancient society to our land after long years.

· The first Egyptian to be elected Mayor of the said society.

· Responsible for many developments in the routine procedures, bringing zest back to red tape.

 

Education:

· High school Graduate of the Coffelation of the United Coffee Mugs School, Class of 2009.

· Graduated with a BA in The Arts Of Coffee in the United Coffelatory University in Cairo (UCUC)

· Pursued her Masters degree in the partner university of said institution in Stuttgart, Germany (UCUS)

Technical Experience

· Well-versed in the art of handling coffee-deprived early morning complaints.

· Is so good on Photoshop that she can turn Mother Teresa into Stalin.

· Has interviewed various prominent figures from the west coast rap scene like Lil Wayne, Snoop Dogg and others.

· Has letters of recommendation from each, with a special reference from Tech N9ne, as well as a hard to come by recommendation from the underground scene from E-40.

 

All references are available on request though denied because no reference is needed.

How Going To College Really Feels Like:

“My uncle ordered popovers
from the restaurant's bill of fare.
And, when they were served,
he regarded them with a penetrating stare.
Then he spoke great words of wisdom
as he sat there on that chair:
"To eat these things," said my uncle,
"You must exercise great care.
You may swallow down what's solid,
but you must spit out the air!"
And as you partake of the world's bill of fare,
that's darned good advice to follow.
Do a lot of spitting out the hot air.
And be careful what you swallow.”

― Dr. Seuss

ولدى نصحتك لما صوتي اتنبح

ما تخفش من جنى و لا من شبح

و ان هب فيك عفريت قتيل إسأله

ما دافعش ليه عن نفسه يوم ما اندبح

Of Afro Injuries, Man Manuals & Freud Being A Sod.

Pain is shooting through every finger as I type this post, and as much as I’d love to come up with a socially-acceptable explanation or a heroic story where my wrist pops by shoving a fat kid  away from his imminent death on a highway, taking the fall minutes away as the Grim Reaper skives a school bus off its track smack into the poor fat kid, or maybe  how your wrist got fried fighting Voldemort off, the only battle fairytale I got is that I made the mistake of trying to comb and blow-dry my own afro and ended up with a rotator cuff injury. Charming story, great for the kids.Why does everything have to be so complicated in some way or another? Why can’t people just say what they’re thinking and act accordingly? At this point, it just seems like a valiant effort to include myself in the definition, since we all know that being me, life is unfathomable, people are indecipherable and everything is insufferably more complicated that a Japanese nuclear reactor. I mean, it’s bad enough that I had to deal with the disappointment of manuals not being handed on arrival – I gotta add, for something so elaborate as life, it’s almost humiliating not to include a brochure, I’m so not using this service again – but I also had to be deluded to think that people get the hang of it as they go along. But no, I’m me. Lady Gaga comes along and sings about how somebody ate her heart and people don’t think that’s weird, but I do. I THINK IT’S WEIRD! And people don’t think it’s weird because they’re people. And you’ve reached an impasse, trying to fit yourself into the people definition and it’s just a round peg in a square hole with an instruction manual that’s available in 97 languages except the ones  you speak.

So you think to yourself, ‘You know what? I’m just gonna watch Gilmore Girls till this one blows off.’ And guess what? You’re watching a season a day and it’s still there, and then you run out of seasons and everything is still the same way it cryptically is and there are no alternatives or visible solutions. And that, my friends, is how shows like ‘House-swap or ‘The Real Housewives’ get fucking viewers. Mystery solved. Glad we’re done with that one, now setting it aside and back to the problem that, yes, is still pretty much right there.

And you try another approach, opening up with a heartfelt declaration that from now on, you support zombie attacks, unfriendly alien landings, mutating evil scientists and door-to-door Adventists just to piss people off. You cross your heart and hope to die if you don’t personally finance pinky and the brain's evil plans and sponsor Dr. Evil's research in hope that they all perish. You hit a couple of road bumps of how you barely have enough to cover your college funds and proportional supply of noodles to keep you alive as it has done to many other college students, and that of the realistic slap on the face of how the odds of Dr. Evil or the slightest hope of mini me showing up to any of your pleading summons is less than that of having space junk dumped on you, which is quite sad since the statistic on that is a billion to one.

Then you get bored, try to comb and blow dry your own afro, cussing at Freud under your breath only to have a very tangible proof of his righteousness in the form of a panging strain for a reminder, and you can’t reach in there and rip the notifications and sticky notes right off of your cranial walls because again, reality is being a constraining clingy parent, limiting your arm’s reach to exo-skeletal areas.

That’s when an audible ‘Aha!’ comes bearing news of why words like ‘Bummer’ exist, which you carefully file next to your reality show ratings. An army of minions rush in, like how nobody says hello when they’re goodbyin’ except when they’re Hawaiian, which increases your tolerance towards coconut bras and grass tutus only to disappoint you with yet another confirmation of how Freud was right about the defense mechanism parts as well. That two-bit whiny sod.

And just when you’re down in the dumps and thinking it couldn’t get any slimier, you get a friend request from someone whose recent activity shows that they’ve ordered mosquito forceps and are quite happy with the purchase, not to mention that their information box says: “A potato.” And you think, you know what? I’m alright after all.

Life is funny, you just gotta have the nerve to laugh it off at the end of the day .. and an emergency kit in case it hits a nerve.

Beautiful Interpretation.

Of Sylvian Fissures, Time Tunnels & The Nuts Roaming Our Midst.

I’ve been wanting to do a lot of things lately, and had the energy to do absolutely zilch. I think this somewhat imposed transition phase and the sheer monstrosity of college and career debates have forced an ephemeral psychological bubble where time does not exist. Numb is the word, and in the nothingness there is surprising nicety. In retrospect, I would have killed for the luxury of being able to sit there and not have to do a thing in the world  a couple of months ago, that should be satisfying enough.

I was watching a documentary earlier on Einstein’s brain, suggesting how the neurons have nothing to do with the actual intelligence, the name escapes me since I was never well-versed in the science department, bringing in some sort of an interactive fiber cell that seemingly wears off with time to be the true catalyst of his intelligence, annulling the entire research and putting forward the possibility that he may have been autistic, and the result of his intelligence was because of a peculiar ability of intense concentration that bred his mathematical section of the brain like a muscle, causing it to enlarge to 15% more than the usual human’s. I could be wrong, the scientific terms were confusing translated, but the idea couldn’t be that far off. The interesting part about that documentary was a couple of fleeting remarks on completely irrelevant matters to the actual dissection and reassembling of Einstein’s brain though.

I was having a conversation a couple of days ago about music interpretation and how some people are able to visualize a plot being told through the music, intensifying their enjoyment with the musical piece, and how it sometimes is advanced with certain people to render the timeline into actual sentences. That is how ballets and operas are made, how stories are told through music and driven into an obstacle course to direct your cognitive abilities to the predetermined plot in the brochure. I was wondering if that actually existed as some sort of a rare ability to a certain select, considering that some people are completely oblivious to the mechanism and only hear music, just music, without an intangible story formulating simultaneously, and frustrated by how my friend didn’t hear the poppy freshman’s distracted first day in the piece I was showing him, suppressing my piano monster shortly afterwards and petting it with a Shostakovich cookie.

Apparently, in my limited understanding of all things biological, there is something called a Sylvian fissure, that generally exists in every person’s brain, following two paths on the lateral right side and forming a miniscule island that is not connected to any other part of the brain. Amongst the many biological disparities that they found in Einstein’s brain, one of which were the non-existence of that Sylvian fissure. Scientists suggested that it may have caused a certain connection between the different factions of he brain, resulting in his having a more wholesome web than most people’s head network, so to speak. On further researching that genetic anomaly, it was found that people with a similar case are able to link auditory and visual stimuli, meaning that they would actively imagine a picture or an event on hearing a certain tune. They interviewed a pianist who claimed that her Wednesdays were yellow and had choppy edges, and reacted to a momentary composition in G major by picturing flowing gold. Not only does this phenomenon exist and is scientifically explained on the basis of neuroscience, but on my quest to figure out whether I am actually insane, I’ve found tangible evidence that my brain may be slightly deformed to hear a divorce in Yann Tiersen’s La Traversée, a blissful amnesiac’s struggle in La Noyée, the Kubler-ross model in Rue des Cascades and an old couple reminiscing in Schubert’s Serenade, but not enough to make me a virtuoso, which is a whole new level of unfortunate, but enough to be joined by a few others who are endowed with the guilty pleasure of  hearing something that is not really there.

Another giggle-inducing discovery was that Einstein had a theory that the regular human’s perception of time could be altered while working on his relativity theory, suggesting that time and place form some sort of a four-dimensional world that could be manipulated, hence all the efforts put into making time travel possible. The elaboration of which  included a man lying in the middle of a highway facing immediate death which explained why time seems to slow down when bad things are happening and speed up when we’re having fun. Up till the age of 9 I thought it was because Santa’s helpers stole time to make it possible to deliver all those gifts around the world and putting them randomly back in the form of minute deposits in your dentist appointments and school days.

Most of you wouldn’t rejoice at the discovery like I did – I nearly jumped off the couch when I linked the dots – but then again the occasional musical post isn’t meant for everybody, which shouldn’t offend you since most posts aren’t meant for anybody to begin with. If the child in you hasn’t been sufficiently murdered by now, you’ll find a way to amuse yourself with these recounts. Now if you’ll excuse me, the National Geographic channel is covering dolphins’ self-consciousness levels by their reaction to mirrors. Toodles.

FML

A Passing Muse.

“The point about fairy-stories is that they are written not merely without a moral but without a morality. They take place in a world beyond good and evil, where people (or animals) suffer or prosper for reasons unconnected with ethical merit--for being ugly or beautiful respectively, for instance, or for even more unsatisfactory reasons. A little girl sets out to do a good deed for her grandmother and gets gobbled up by a wolf. For all this is related by the fairy-story tellers without approval or disapproval, without a glimmer of subjective feeling, as though their pens were dipped in surgical spirit to sterilize the microbes of emotion. They never seek to criticize or moralize, to protest or plead or persuade; and if they have an emotional impact on the reader, as the greatest of them do, that is not intrinsic to the stories. They would indeed only weaken that impact to achieve it. They move by not seeking to move; almost, it seems, by seeking not to move."

C. M. Woodhouse wrote in the Times Literary Supplement.

Now the real question here is, doesn’t that make life a fairytale? Doesn’t the juxtaposition prove redundant if they’re the closest thing to life yet the farthest in definition?

Of A Hair-Roller Friendship, Majors & A Party Beetle.

It hasn’t quite registered yet that I’ve graduated, and the vacation has been more or less a series of ambiguously connected days separated by the missing hours for when I pass out every other day. Believe it or not, I haven’t gone out yet, and I don’t quite feel the need to, since the career debates have taken over most of my cognitive abilities. Choosing a major is harder than one might think, that is when you put into consideration how you’ll be stuck with the choice you made at the myopic age of 19 for the rest of your life. I got a whiff of how unjust capitalism can be, when the choices in the private sector where limited to a pattern that seemed to appeal to my paranoid side. The choice isn’t really a choice, but rather an act of elimination between predestined odds that are only few fractions apart and more or less lead to the same dead end. Researching doesn’t seem to make those odds any better, and a friend’s theory about how democracy is an illusion, custom-designed to give the proletariat a wrongful sense of control started to seem a lot more tangible in effect. Not that it matters anyway.

I was getting my hair done the other day, and while stuck halfway down the waiting list, the sight of a couple of children amused me. Bored by their mother’s constraining schedule, what seemed to be a 9-year-old girl and a 6-year-old boy struck an odd sort of temporary friendship. The girl, who looked more sheltered and introverted, completely absorbed in her little utopic bubble of French Disney movies on her new, laminated laptop, didn’t seem to acknowledge the existence of the more lively boy, who acted rather vulgar and was very loud and undisciplined. The boy indulged in elaborate conversations with himself out loud, ones that didn’t make sense to any intelligent and evolved creature outside of his little distracted mind, making comparisons between dogs and towers, marveling at how colours sounded alike but looked different, touching everything within an arm’s reach turning it into a rubble, was circling the area where the girl was complacently absorbed in her own world. She didn’t seem to understand why he was the way he was, nor find it more amusing than the Rapunzel movie at hand, but instinctively adjusted her seating position to allow him more access to her laptop, surprisingly inviting him in her introverted comfort zone to enjoy the movie alongside. The boy, intrigued by the colourful set of hair rollers in a nearby basket, put them on his fingers and tried to attack the girl with his newly-installed claws. The girl watched him the same way she watched her movie, a little blankly and without any recognition to his extra dimension. She then calmly took them off his fingers, and made an elaborate tower with the help of hair pins to fix the helix intact, and presented it to the boy, who, in his more neanderthalic age limitation thought it was a downright act of sorcery. She tried to explain the mechanism but he insisted that he knew how to make it.  He went around the place pretending it was indeed he who made it, then tried to sit on it and ended up in a ball on the floor when his pedestal collapsed under the weight of his ignorance. The girl, again, was rather amused, congratulated him on his craftsmanship and presently went back to her movie, forgetting he existed in the convenient two-minute attention span peculiar to children, leaving the boy staring at her with a vengefully helpless look that reminded me of the boy on ‘The Omen.’

Watching from a distance, I entertained thoughts of Simone de Beauvoir being  more amused by the live metaphor at hand than most of those she could have drawn on to give her theories ground. The boastful male marking his territory and claiming right to everything around him while remaining stubbornly ignorant, the more intelligent female who although more qualified would give up credit of her work in response to her gender’s societal demands. I wondered how many times that happened in the adult world, how many times that could have been avoided if this 7-minute-review of life, the universe and everything was shown on huge screens in a behavioural science lab.  The irony of gender inequality unraveling in a hair salon. Ha.

On an irrelevant note, since my first car will most probably be a beetle, I have decided I will settle to no less than this:

One Day Schimmel Pegasus, Just You Wait For Me.