A New Show: Bored To Death

Lives don't change. We simply become more comfortable with our core misery, which is a form of happiness.

Dr Worth

Bored To Death 

Parting Ways

You will be shocked kids, when you discover how easy it is in life to part ways with people forever. That's why, when you find someone you want to keep around, you do something about it.

Ted Mosby

I Finished It: AGAIN!

I have been going back ,for a while now, to watching old shows and reading old books. Something in me was too lazy -and maybe too old- to connect with new charcaters and new arguments. So a few weeks before going to Cuba - YES dear blog, I did go to the mother of all destinations: CUBA- I started rewatching How I Met Your Mother.

It was on Youtube and it was easy to click on the next episode, and I needed something familiar that would make me think about "matters of the heart'' given that I have abandonded those for a long while now.

By going back to this very blog I found out that the last time I watched the show was in 2014, therefore my memory of the details was so vague and it helped me enjoy it as if it was almost new.

Half an hour ago I finished it again. I really felt abandonded and lonely when the credits appeared on the screen. That is a great show that won't have any new seasons and that I won't be able to rewatch in at least 3 more years so I will miss it.

But the thing is, as I watched it again it held new meanings to me. When I first watched it to the end I was in a relationship that I thought will never end, with a guy that I thought I would never leave. Now, 3 years later I am on my own with a strong inner feeling of "not wanting any of that" and watching how Ted, after many years, a marriage and two kids went back to his twenties flame, Robin, it made me rethink my "Together Forever'' theory. This post is just a pretext to write that one question that I thought a lot about in the past few years: Can we get two good love stories in a lifetime? Can we get what Fermina Daza from Love in The Time of Cholera got? A good marriage and a flame to go back to at the end of her life?

I know how unromantic that sounds. Is does sound like a plan B or a second dish, but what shall I do? At this point of my life I am always weighing the options of being in a solid medium-level love story or being in a turbulent Extreme-level love story. Can we get both? Can we at least get one? Can we?  

A Year Of Driving

Today I conclude a year of driving and owning a car.
I have learnt a lot in this year, here are some things:

1- People are confused, they don't know where they are going until they are at the crossroad. Distance yourself from them until they freaking decide or you will pump into them and it will be your fault.
2- People get confused when they see me singing and utterly enjoying myself in traffic jams. Confuse them even more and discover good music all the time.
3- Fear is real and there is no way around it. If you are afraid because this is all new to you then be afraid, there is no shame in it, focus on calming yourself down rather than focusing how others perceive you. It gets better. It DID get better and driving DID become a second nature for me.
4- People in our streets are constantly trying to commit suicide behind the wheel. They drive silly cars that would turn into a bundle of metal in a simple accident, yet they still think that they are in their own Formula1 show. Spot them and avoid them ALWAYS.
5- Taxi drivers are ruined beyond repair. The streets brought out the worst in them. They can't be that mean, selfish, reckless and harmful by coincidence. I must find their clandestine annual meeting that they probably hold under the title of "How to make everyone uncomfortable on the road".
6- Park whenever and wherever you are comfortable. If the parking spot seems too tight you don't have to park there. Arrive a minute late, park a hundred meters far but don't pressure yourself into an unsafe spot. If you scratch your car you will have to pay for it yourself so don't do that to yourself.
7- If anyone says that men in Jordan respect women I will invite them to take a ride with me and they will see for themselves that men get extra cocky when they see a woman driving and they become extra assholes. I managed to put them in their place and forced them to respect me when I made them realise that I have no problem in pumping them if they dare to get in my lane.
8- It is a skill like any other. Practice makes perfect.
9- I just miss being able to read in my commutes.
10- Music is one of the reasons why we take rides. Music is life and it had helped me back in my fearful driving era, and now it helps me to endure the traffic jams and poorly designed city.

That's that. Over and out.  

Grow Old Gracefully: Roz Doyle From Frasier

Roz: I'm thirty-eight. And I FEEL thirty-eight. Now, I know we're all
supposed to act like perpetual teenagers these days, but you know 
what? I like acting my age. I like being a mom. I like having a 
career. And I like balancing my checkbook! When did it become 
such a bad thing to be an adult?!
Stu: Dr. Crane? Hello?
Roz: Now, don't get me wrong, I had a great time when I was younger, I 
did! But after a while, that way of life just seems...empty. You 
have to go deeper, and commit to things that really matter to you. 
Believe me, when you do that, you'll find out how amazing and rich 
life can be.

Dharma and Greg: Threatening My Friends Boyfriends/Fiances/Husbands

See this amazing line from Dharma and Greg's first episode, when Dharma presented Greg to her friend Jane: 

Jane: (hugging Greg) If you cause my friend any emotional pain whatsoever, I'll punish you in ways you can't even imagine.

I Just wish I had this experience to openly threaten the men in my friends lives. I don't do it, because I don't turn hostile until after shit takes place. I don't attack people unless I know that I am going to burn each and every bridge and I am POSITIVE I will not need them in a near or a far future. 

And - here comes the important reason- Who am I to threaten people? It is so patronizing and it makes an assumption that my friends are not responsible enough to make a sentimental\life decision. 

But again, I look back at my friends men, the ones who stayed and the ones who left, they are equally idiotic misogynists who don't even realize that this IS what they are. 

A friend recently broke up with her fiance, and the first thing I did after getting her a "Birthday Girl" crown is blocking him on Facebook. She was like: Why did you block him? I did not block him, and I was like: You are free to deal with your feeling the way you like, but as for me it is hurtful on its own to remember that such a simple man (and the word simple is a huge insult if you look into it) took a year from your time and energy. 

When friends get married I feel that an honesty channel is blocked between them and I, because then honesty becomes a luxury that we can't afford. You are no longer able to make any "deal breaking' remarks, because that's just mean to the friend. It puts her in a situation where she can no longer share, because we can be as close as friends could be but no one wants to seem defeated infront of any other not even if this other is their dearest friend. 

And on a final note: I think I am going to revise Dharma and Greg now, and I might turn it into a course for "How to Enjoy Life" because Dharma is a real expert on the matter, and I feel that I need this kind of skills. I have been working a lot lately, I still feel like I can enjoy and celebrate almost anything (just like when I was a kid) but I constantly feel like I have less time than what I would like, and that was the main reason why I chose to be a freelancer: to be the master of my own time. 

Yesterday I saw this video by Presidente Mujica and it just depressed me, when he said that we don't pay money in exchange of items, we pay the time that it took us to make this amount of money. 

The Trouble With Prison Is Prison Itself

 In the first week of the "Incarceration's Witnesses: American Prison

 Writing" online course I found this letter. It was written by

 Kenneth E.Hartman from inside the

 California prison system. 

It is written so simply yet so deeply. The writer was

 not only able to look at his own experience, but he was 

also able to perceive the suffering of others around him, 

and I believethat what makes this so extraordinary is that

 people are always able to realize the suffering 

of their equals, but they might not be as sensitive to 

the suffering of people who belong to 

different social, economical and educational backgrounds. 

I have seen the inside of prisons in my work,

 and I was able to imagine everything he said

in this article. Those are people who were given

 no chances, and they have become those 

unrescuable persons who in some moments

 made me wary and reluctant.  

 

You can find the full text here 

This is a part of The Other Death Penalty Project that I

 will get back to in order to read more. 

The Best Movie Scene Ever: Nearer My God To Thee

As it had rained heavily today, and as the city drowned under heaps of brown angry rain, I remembered this scene from the Titanic. It is the best music that goes by with the biggest sense of vanity: When the violinists starts playing because they are convinced they are going to drown anyway.

I saw lately in the internet a meme that goes like this: I am worried that my homeland is a sinking ship just like the Titanic, and meanwhile people are running to jump of it I am still standing there like those violinists.

This is the main idea on my mind: ALL the time. 

Cities that we don't know

Croatia Dubrovnik | photo by @ilhan1077 check out beautiful gallery @ilhan1077 🍰💐

A photo posted by Travelin'man Turkey (@onderkoca) on Nov 3, 2015 at 11:51am PST

I just found this picture on Instagram. I think I am designed in a way to assume that every breathtaking scene should be from Granada or at least any other place in Spain. But No, this is from Dubrovnik Croatia. Do I know anything about this place? No!

Today I was looking for something in my suitcases, and they made me think: I travel way less than I am supposed to. And every time I discover an interesting place the list goes longer longer and it gives me the feeling that the world is so infinite that I will never run out of aspirations and amusement.

Seinfeld: Life Before Mobiles

I am revising Seinfeld again (I think I am too busy to try a new show and spend time "getting used" to it) and I was thinking about the numerous episodes where the argument would have been totally useless if there were a mobile phones with the characters. Today he said this at the beginning of the episode and it got me thinking, what phones have turned us into?! we can not sit alone. 


~'I would say the concept behind the car phone, and the phone machine, the speaker phone, the airline phone, the portable phone, the pay phone, the cordless phone, the multi-line phone, the phone pager, the call waiting, call forwarding, call conferencing, speed dialing, direct dialing, and the re-dialing, is that we all have absolutely nothing to say, and we've got to talk to someone about it right now. It cannot wait another second! I mean, come on, you're at home and you're on the phone, you're in the car making calls, you get to work 'any messages for me?', you gotta give people a chance to miss you a little!'~

Banning Aylan Kurdi's Pictures

When I first saw the video of the Turkish coastguard finding Aylan's body, something drew my attention: He took pictures of him first.

I cringed. I thought: There is a dead toddler in front of you and you are taking pictures of him?
But then I thought, Yes! This is exactly what the guard should do. He should keep a record, he should document that this atrocity has occurred.

We don't honor the memory of the dead if we conceal their death. If he had not taken those pictures, or if he was not filmed by a different camera as he held the small body and went up the beach, it would have been one more story then. A story of those horrifying stories that are so repeated in times of conflict that they stop making any impact on anyone.

Back when I was in Media Institute we had lengthy discussions about publishing "Graphic Content".
I remember an  argument of one of my Palestinian colleagues who said that the repeated publishing of such images causes "Compassion Fatigue" and by that we mean that people gradually lose compassion as they are repeatedly exposed to this kind of content.

The picture of the Vietnamese girl who was running naked after being bombarded with Napalm is always used as the "good example" of graphic content, because the audience could have deeper sympathy towards her given that she is still alive and there is something that could be done to save her, while in the pictures of dead people the audience only feels impotent because there is nothing that could be done to the "subject'' in the picture.

Back then, I embraced this argument and did not go back to posting bloody pictures (One exception: The four Palestinian boys who were killed in an airstrike as they played football on the the beach of Gaza. That was outrageous, I could not ignore it). And now this: the picture of a dead toddler, dead and with his face in the sand and his shoes towards the camera.

This is a graphic picture, Yes, but for a totally different reason. No torn clothes, no faces covered with debris dirt and no blood, he is calmly dead. So peaceful.
This picture throws all of its pain on the viewers given that the subject, the dead toddler, is done suffering, he is just floating like feather, washed ashore for his body to be concealed under the ground once and for all.

I tried to check if the picture was officially banned on Facebook but I found no evidence, yet I have been seeing it blurred or pixelated in different news websites.

More on pictures that changed the world here.