I am a boy

I always feel sorry for young boys who call Radio Stations and are addressed as girls, sometimes as grown up women. The host would say: hello Madam, and they would suddenly stutter and say: my name is Hassan. See? it is not easy to be a kid.

Yes and No

Thirty is a tricky age at work; you are not young enough to always say 'yes' and bear the consequences nor old enough to comfortably say 'no' without bearing the consequences.

Too late

There are moments when I think that there is no use arguing with old poeple when they can easily die before I can convince them. It is too late to argue with a soon to be "the late".

To those counting...

When I was a kid, I used to sit in the back seat of the car and watch trees move backward. The faster we drove, the faster trees moved in the opposite direction. Now, I think that time, like those trees, is still, we are the ones moving. You can't say, time passes or time flies, for what seems a reality here is no more than a distortion of your senses... you can only say, I moved forward. Knowing that, there is no harm in allowing yourself to believe this illusory perception, do what you have to do, but stop counting the trees moving past you.

Moods

I am not thirty yet and I feel that I am ready to retire in a mountain house with my books and a garden I take care of, where my grandchildren come to visit from time to time, and I can follow some of the Syrian-dubbed Turkish series, why not.

My gray hair talking

Today I also thought that Life is short enough to endure its sufferings and long enough to forget them. But I might change my mind tomorrow.

The taste of gray

Cooking and gray hair. Those were my two latest discoveries. They do not necessarily go hand in hand but they did in my case. There isn't supposed to be any correlation between the two or any cause effect relation, and there wasn't, they just coincided, or did they? Cooking for me is some form of yoga and spirit lifting. It gets me thinking (sometimes just singing). I also do it for fun and get to boost my ego when people like my food. There is something magical in that. I am not flattered when people praise some of my traits (I do have many), but when they say "emmmmm", I find myself saying "isn't? isn't". I now do that so often that I guess many people are afraid to tell me sometimes that my food wasn't so great!. And I got to understand why my parents talked about how delicious the food is while having lunch, while I used to take that for granted. That was fine until the first gray hairs started mushrooming on my head. Everyday, I discover a new one. I have no feelings towards them, or more precisely, I don't know what to feel. I do care but not negatively, nor positively. Something is changing in me. It feels like a new age phase and it doesn't at all give me the impression of any signs of more wisdom. I am just naturally thinking whether I should dye my hair or leave the natural whiteness invade the rest of my youth. It is so sudden a change that I am reluctant to accept it. Maybe growth should have some intermittent phases, preparatory ones in between age eras. When gray hair seemed to be a very far away concern, I tried all sorts of hair colors. I dyed in red and black and I was blond for a while, until I screwed it all up and was relieved when my hair finally regained its natural color. But now that it has, I have to start dying it all again? dye it to its natural color? or the closest I can get? I refuse. Anyhow, this brought with it a whole new dilemma: how to address some people. As you grow up, you often find yourself not knowing if it is more appropriate if you keep on addressing certain people with "'ammo" (or uncle) or "tante", as you used to, especially with a particular "breed" of them, those "tantes" who are age freeks, often believing that they do look young, sometimes even acting as teenagers, and who get annoyed if you hint in anyway to their age. "Do I look to you like a tante?" they would say, although you grew up addressing them this way. This also applies to many men as well. As you approach thirty, many people in their fifties or sixties start looking at you as a peer, and you feel truly uncomfortable addressing them by their names, you are not used to it anyway, take your parents' friends for example -some of mine are truly following Benjamin button's growth pattern- you end up avoiding some sentence structures that corner you to address them. With gray hair the matter becomes worse. You have more gray hair than they do! Now cooking only complicates matters. You are sincerely interested in learning from their cooking experience, but they want to talk to you about liposuction, of course! They also insist that you should dye you hair and remove your belly, because the way you are makes them look fake. The whole world should change for them to seem natural. You are still bewildered whether you say their name upfront, you hesitate and you remember that woman who dyes her children's hair blond so that no one doubts that she is a natural blond, even when her eyebrows and hair roots betray all her goals. Then you remember the first time your mother bought you a bra and how proud you felt wearing it that you wanted to show its laces off, to tell the world that you are no longer a kid. You are a grown up. You go to the kitchen, smell your almost ready food. It maybe smells like your mom's. Then a short glance at your first gray hair reminds you that maybe they did bring with them a little more wisdom that you thought.

Of Plastic and other surgeries

"The more you become like what you have dreamed for yourself, the more authentic you are." Pedro Almodovar

cooking thought

Older people often see in the positivity, vigor, revolutionary spirit, and ardor of youths a kind of stupidity. "One day you will grow up, you will mature, and you will understand how stupid you were," they would say. In fact, maturity, as commonly understood, is either a negative thing or otherwise is an attribute of the youth. When they grow up, some people don't mature, they despair.

That was not so long ago...

I realized recently that when I say "ten years ago, I ...", I wouldn't be referring to my childhood, not any more. Before children get to grasp the notion of time and be able to predict how long a 10 minute is and if 1 hour had already passed, they would ask you "when are we leaving?", "in 30 minutes," you would say and after 2 minutes, they ask you "is it 30 minutes already?". Somehow, you grow up and get a sense of time length, and when someone asks you how old is your father, you wouldn't raise and show him ten stretched fingers any more to mean a lot, but one day, you realize that those ten fingers wouldn't do you much and maybe you would start saying "as many hairs I have got on my head" but the truth is you would still have not yet grasped the notion of time and never will you because time also grows old, faster than you do.

Motherly clock?

Most of of my dreams lately involve a baby. I have never experienced that before. Only once the baby was mine in the dream. I am told that it means that my clock is ticking and I am not quite sure if such a clock exists and where or when it functions and why. I have for some reason always admired Abou al-Alaa al-Ma'arri's saying - or what he requested be written on his grave- "that is what my father doomed me with and I have doomed no one" (My translation or interpretation). I entertain the idea that humans' (and animals') bodily functions are all devised to serve the purpose of procreation. Somehow, human beings are doomed by their own nature.

Grandparents

Parents turning into Grandparents for the first time tend to become passionately obsessed with their new grand-parenthood. I believe their aging or wiser -not sure which one- subconscious tells them: there is no way s/he will hurt you, let alone judge you. They are not capable of.

About age

I was telling my father once about a man who had just died. "How old was he?", my dad asked. "He was old," I answered, "in his mid sixties". "And how would that be old?" he said, with surprise, or maybe with fear, I couldn't tell. My dad is 61 years old. How wise, you might wonder, but that made me think how relative the perception of age is. My younger sister once told me about a woman who is single and depressed. "How old is she?", I asked. "She is old," my 24 year old sister answers, "she is 29." I am not age-phobic but I also had that same weird look that my father had and I asked myself: when do we stop growing and start aging? Even my grandfather who is more than 80 years old, once said "poor guy, he died too early. He is only 85". Is it death? denial? or is it that people just feel eternal? What is the right age to say that someone is old? I do understand that it could be relative all throughout life. But then give me a number, 90? a 100?

The dormant beast

When I was a kid, I used to wake up at night to sit under the Christmas tree in the corner of the living room. I would feel an inexplicable sweetness and joy as I watched the twinkling lights and the reflection of colours all while dozing at the sound of peaceful Christmas lullabies. Those moments used to fill me with an odd feeling of serenity. I don’t particularly enjoy sitting there anymore but those songs still fill me with joy. Despite all the changes that might hit someone’s personality, beliefs, or thinking, one can never break free of some sweet childhood memories. They glue to the brain and inhabit the soul like a dormant beast only to upraise again in a sudden like a splash of an old odour.