As We Digress: Photograph at the Studio

This experience never ceases to revolt me each time I'm at a studio for a personal photograph; this time, it's a graduation photo. Those trips depersonalize the whole beauty of a portrait of you. You're there with a complete stranger who wants to make you look good the way he/she wants. A beautiful photograph should capture the essence of you, not capture the way the photographer thinks is beautiful.

A photograph is the still you, that's why the photographer should know you personally, and that's why the most beautiful photographs are those taken by people who know you intimately, or by someone who knows what you're like. At least that's the case with me.

So, since there's graduation-photo traffic (because the university only gives the graduation gowns to one specific studio) I had to leave a studio-full of students yesterday (a minimum of 75 students) and come back first thing in the morning. 8 in the morning is not the best timing to have your photograph taken, because not only have you just woken up, but interaction with a complete stranger with a camera just wouldn't get you anywhere.

So there I am, with make up on (the very least possible, only enough to define the sleepy eyes) at 8 in the morning, sitting in a dark room, with the photographer asking me to change about 3 different gowns because none of them zip well, and I ran out of patience trying to fix the stupid zipper when it finally works. I sit on a stool, and the photographer holds the camera and says: "okay, now smile" without one drop of emotion spilling out of his voice, and I throw in my very shy smile, and he takes 8 other shots, asking me to tilt my head to the right, then to the left, then give him a bigger smile, to which I obliged hatefully (it completely showed on my face as I viewed the shots later). After he finishes he asks me if I need to throw in other poses or props, to which I hastily replied with a sharp no. Ok, it was sharp in my head, but came out nicer. The reason I'm against the whole photo thing is the following story.

These graduation pictures are supposed to go on the year book, which I wouldn't really mind had not this thing taken place. A friend of mine had her picture on there too, and on a summer day her mother got a call from a lady claiming to have pulled out their number from the directory. The reason of this call was that the lady's son wanted to propose to my friend. A complete stranger wanted to visit her in her own home with his mother tagging along so they can ask for her hand, out of nowhere. This, my friends, is the reason I don't want my photo on there; not because I'm afraid people would call me up and ask for my hand, as freaky as that might be alone, but it's the mentalities of those people viewing this year book, which is supposed to be a book with the main events of the academic year of 2009/2010.

Eventually, I went for the very first shot the photographer took of me. I wonder how it's going to turn out.

As We Digress: The Weaver's Anniversary

Yes folks, it’s been a year since I started this blog. It was a very interesting year, lots of emotion and intensity, but lots of successes and minor failures. But today, like every day, we will digress.

Work ethic in this country seems to be ever-deteriorating. Thinking that you might be working, or training in my case, at one of the country’s best “Global Professional Services” companies, whatever that may be, you would assume people are more motivated, more carefully-picked and much more professional. Not people who spend endless hours in meaningless talk, calling gynecologists, cutting their nails, or showering themselves with cheap perfume before heading out to a meeting, leaving the rest to suffocate.

It's a shame that no one really cares about whether or not they do their jobs right, or whether or not they do their jobs at all, and even if they do them, they wouldn't be doing so wholeheartedly. I know, as people get older they get sick of their jobs, they get bored, it's not the same for them anymore, but it's different if they feel that way and still like what they do. I mean after you've been doing what you're doing for 5 years, working in the same place and seeing pretty much the same people, you are bound to get bored, but at least you get bored doing something you know you're good at, someone else perhaps may benefit from it, you never know. The problem is I am certain that those people I've seen work are not bored because they've been doing their job for a long time, but because that's how it's been for them ever since they started, that's because it's all about the money they take at the end of each month. It's wrong. Yes, we all want money, but we don't have to die getting money. This kind of attitude can absolutely kill you, suck out all the life from your soul.

Boredom is one aspect, ethics are another. People have no proper work ethic around here, the less they do the more they want to get paid, the less the get paid the worse they do their job. It will never end for them. Thinking that something may come easily to you is down right foolish. And to those for whom this actually worked, well, I hope you're happy, I know I am because I finally found my nemesis. People who lack ethics, morals, and do not take responsibility of failures they brought on themselves are my personal enemies.

The upside to all this is that people who think they have so much time on their hands while they're at something their employers call a "job", there's a lot of room for jokes and laughs. Today a couple of hilarious ladies wanted to marry off the tiniest girl in the office to the morbidly obese accountant in the neighboring cubicle. The morbidly obese accountant then refuses to help out the lady that cracked the joke with one problem or another. And all the while I was so cracked up I couldn't breathe, tears came streaming from my eyes, and this all doesn't sound so funny because it can't be without their faces.

On a lighter note, vanilla is one of nature's greatest, most valued gifts to the world. It's fragrant, and it makes things like ice-cream taste a lot better. I wish I could add a little vanilla and brown sugar to my life. I'd like to see my mind paint a picture of that...

As We Digress: Life is Elsewhere

I do not intend to sound the least bit racist, but I'm going to state a fact that has been concerning me. There are two girls who attend classes with me who wear the niqab (or burqa), but that's not my problem, I'm pro-choice. I'm just a bit confused when one of them comes up to me and says hello. Because I only came to know their names this week, and it takes a great deal of effort for me not confuse their names so I won't offend them by implying that all women who wear the niqab are the same to me. I really do not intend to make fun of those ladies, or the way they practice religion, I'm just saying I'm confused. Another thing that bugs me is writing identical P's; I never get this right. If I want to write any word that has two P's, like apply, there's no way they're going to be identical! I want to know what an expert would say about that. But enough about school. Today I won't be talking about school, or complaining about school, or all the things I dislike. Today, I reflect.

It's one thing to vent, regardless of the manner with which you vent (whether it sounds too dark, or disappointed because eventually, you know exactly how it's going to end, but you vent any way)and another thing to be dissatisfied. One of the things that perhaps really get to me is how some people suffer from chronic dissatisfaction. I admit, I personally suffered from "understandable" dissatisfaction, simply because 4 years in college have never been a challenge in my life, except for my very last semester, and I had too much to offer to a place that didn't need me to do anything. This is understandable dissatisfaction. The dissatisfaction I cannot understand, not even remotely, is how people who have certain things that they know are good, and perhaps cannot get any better, are always looking for something else. People who sit with you in a restaurant thinking of other places they could be right then, married people who have a good thing going (I'm aware that some married couples made colossal mistakes choosing their spouses, obviously I'm not talking about them), I'm talking about the type of relationships our grandparents and some of our parents have/had, 40-year anniversaries and such, people who, whatever they have going for them at the moment, are always looking, tirelessly, for other things to do. This hollowness I do not understand. Nothing seems to fill them up, so they always look for what they don't have, thinking their happiness, or satisfaction lays there. It's like someone who found water in a desert, not an oasis, just water, and sees mirages, and follows those mirages, only to find that they were nothing but mirages, moving on to other mirages, and so on. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not for sitting on our asses doing nothing to achieve successes, or strive for a happy life, this stuff doesn't come easily, I am aware that they are causes worth living for, and causes worth dying for. I'm with wasting our lives on worthy causes, be them individual, collective, or universal causes. Hint: mirages are not causes.

Money and happiness, and the way they are associated or dissociated; I think our lives would've been different if money was measured by how much it weighs. That way, you can get more for less. I am not, by any means, a materialistic person, and the things I buy are sold by people who want to make profit, so sometimes conformity with the system is the only way to go. But sometimes I wish we still lived in a time where countries or individuals exchanged things. If I had a farm and had lots of chicken that produce lots of eggs, what's the harm of my going up to a cow farm and exchange those eggs for some dairy? Of course, the things that I need are neither dairy nor egg. They're mostly pieces I like to keep for the rest of my life, and as a legacy for my offspring, if I ever procreate. And from this, stems my need to buy certain things, things that I think will somehow enrich my life, or perhaps give me emotional reassurance. Suddenly, the act of buying things has a more profound meaning, because now it's not the urge you get to buy things all the time, it's what you want to buy and what value it adds to your life.

On a lighter note, I think cab drivers who complain about how traffic-jammed the way to your destination is are flat out assholes. If you're going to your job or class, you're also stuck in traffic, and there's a good chance you're going to be late, I wonder how it would make the cab driver feel if you start complaining about how late you are going to be, or how ugly your job or major is. People do not seem to grasp the mechanism of how things work. You do your job, I do mine, and everything falls into place. Fail to do so, and things are not only going to be out of place, but all over the place.

And for those Milan Kundera fans out there, yes, the title is a tribute to his book.

As We Digress: Food for Thought

Long days make you become numb. Those long, hideous days where you cannot stop and think of things you like, listen to your favorite song, talk to your friends, or even sleep will make you lose a shred of your humanity each and every day. Life as a bum definitely sucks, but life as another head behind a desk in an excruciatingly small cubicle isn't the answer either.

The morbidity of people around you emerges after the mask of nicety melts off their ugly, ugly faces. Only when certain things happen do those faces appear, usually they're the same moments that help you discover genuine, nice human beings.

Psychosomatic disorders are disorders in which mental factors play a significant role in the development, expression, or resolution of a physical illness. Can there be psychosomatic disorders for emotion? Just because you feel it, doesn't mean it's there.

Disappointment, and other forms of grievance, is caused by fellow human beings, not things. Similarly, happiness depends on your human surroundings, but first and foremost depends on you. Be the source of your own happiness by loving yourself, and this will all come back to you when you're the target of your own happiness; direct your happiness inwardly. If you don't think you deserve happiness, no one will strive to make you happy.

Just because you feel it, really doesn't mean it's there. Emotional psychosomatic disorders.

We strive for happiness, some people die looking for happiness, it's a cause worth living for, and a cause worth dying for.

There's always room for re-evaluation and re-assessment and getting things right, but not all of us have the courage to do all of this. Actually, most of us are too lazy to fix broken things in our lives, but for once perhaps one should pluck up the courage and face things as is. Yes, the brutal truth will then stare you in the face like the scary monster you feared was under your bed when you were a kid, but this time it's real, it's materialized and your parents aren't home for you to climb into bed with them, they're not home to tell you it's all going to be alright because they know that you're the best kid out there and you'll do things and go places, although one wishes it was that easy; the genuine, unconditional love, the security and reassurance, but eventually we all leave "the nest" and fly on our own, and most of us make it.

It is a real blessing to be surrounded by human beings to whom you matter, it's something some may not quite grasp because they have never felt it, but to have someone to care for you unconditionally is probably the most priceless human type of relationship.

It is true that happiness is a cause worth dying for, but people don't die of their own accord. The road to happiness is paved with ugliness, lies, and hardship, it is no lie when people say that someone has died looking for happiness, this stuff can kill you.

Will humanity outlive happiness?

This, perhaps, is not new to you, but it certainly is to others. It may not make sense, or sound too idealistic, but that's because one needs to fully realize these truths, to have gone through a good deal of, well, a good deal of trouble (although a four-letter word comes to mind) to come to such conclusions. But the truths are laid out for you to examine and to re-examine, to see if that's what you want, or if you want something else out of life, or to see if you don't want anything out of this life, or if you want to watch the world burn, it's all a matter of perspective. Personally, I like to believe there are martyrs who die for happiness instead of wars, countries, gods or religions, I believe happiness is a bigger concept in which we find god, religion and home.

The Trip Diaries: The Time We Did Beirut - On the Way Back

And just when you think you eluded one messed up driver, who incidentally sent D 2 text messages and called her to try and talk us into going back with him, you end up going back with someone worse: he gets all kinds of gifts, clothes, vegetable and fruit from Beirut and Syria, fills up the trunk with this stuff, makes a 100 stops an hour, and talks non-stop, the Arabic expression to this would be: بالع راديو.

As we headed out of Beirut, towards Dahr l Baydar, we needed to be pacified because we were in the middle of a snow storm; the streets were filled with dirty snow that goes up to half of your wheel, not to mention the persistent and not so-easy snowfall. It was dark that morning, and the driver reassured us that he took some precautionary measures that I'm not sure I understood, all the while we were listening to the radio and the piece about that Ethiopia-bound plane comes out, and suddenly grief took over me, simply because the depressive nature of hearing about disasters which human beings are part of but can do nothing about makes me feel helpless.

Now. Smoking. The nastiest thing of all, as the driver on the way to Beirut also did; smoking in a car that has no windows open. And of course there weren't any windows opened, only merely cracked, with the speed he was going at. Smoking in confined compartments is simply a retarded and ignorant thing to do; the wish of the smoker not to die alone, but to split his death, with others, half-half (while the Cuckoo Judge would laugh).

After we left the snow at both the Lebanese and Syrian borders, we encountered lots of sunshine throughout Syria, after which, we encountered lots of rain upon our arrival in Amman. I thought, "at least I got to see the snow this winter, I've seen it, smelt it, heard it, felt it and tasted it". Although some people find snow unpleasant, I find it very pleasant, but only the way it snows in Amman; it's like rain, but it's snow. It doesn't imprison people, doesn't stop us from going out and getting on with our daily routines and it still looks like little drops from heaven. But the way I encountered all kinds of weather, from scorching sun to frost-biting snow in less than 6 hours, is just not right. The Middle East needs this one thing to top all its troubles... Global warming, let's all die of weather.

I think these trips are a healthy way to maintain our sanity.

I've got nothing more to say about this trip, except that I can't wait to see where winds will take me next time.