On women's day

So it is women's day and I have to say something about women, except that I don't want to say anything about women right now, this only reminds me of school days when you are asked to write an essay about freedom while all you feel writing about and all the ideas that come to your head are about friendship for example, so after one or two sentences about freedom, you start talking about friendship and from there on all you write are arguments trying to convince the teacher that the two topics are actually connected and that the teacher should keep reading because here it comes, here it comes, and two more pages on friendship then time ends up and before they snatch the exam paper from you, you manage to scribble: In conclusion, unless you appreciate friendship, you will never know what freedom tastes like. Happy women's day.

Never?

How often do you hear someone say: I am just an ordinary man, there is really nothing special about me.

Define awkward

There are moments when you say hi to someone and intend to keep walking but then they hi you back and keep staring at you with nothing to say... You want to tell them: okay, now you can go back to staring at whatever else you were staring at.

Maybe I am just a bad listner

Am I just a bad listener or am I surrounded by people who have nothing interesting to say?

Post-Modern God

The idea of God, as created by whoever prehistoric man who thought about it first, needs to be recreated to make sense to the post-modern man. Tell us for example that on judgment day, he will distribute iPads and show us our life on Youtube or that in paradise we will have non stop high speed free Wifi and that at least we will have the choice between Gin, Vodka, Arak, Whiskey, or Beer. It is highly possible after all that some Irish, Scottish, or Russian people, will also end up up there.

Don't fight it...

One without enemies is one without character.

Mondays

No, it's not one of those days! It's just another Monday.

The Dictator: Intellectual Crisis

"The Dictator" is a play currently being performed in Beirut, Al-Madina theater. I really am not an expert of any kind of this performing art, not even close to being one, and this is not a critique, but if you care to hear the opinion of someone who happened to watch it, someone who by no means represents anyone else who happened to be there, and someone who left the theater hearing the masses parroting: wow, beautiful, genius, the best play ever, and other words that only bounced back as they touched my ear, and despite that remained someone who left the theater with the feeling that if a torture ritual can heal you and wash away your sins, then I am definitely a re-born person now, and if that was the purpose then the play is indeed a great success, but I have to say this: I found the acting to be good, but between us, this is not the most difficult genre of acting, and the set to be okay, because there wasn't any, I mean it could have been performed in my living room and it wouldn't have made a difference, but the most annoying part was the script, which is by Issam Mahfouz, the guy this play is intended to honor. I am not going to say more especially that I respect the Director Lina Abyad and I have watched and liked some of her other plays, but I advise you to go and watch it and maybe you could tell me if it is the play itself or maybe just me being in a cranky mood. It could be. But before you judge me tell me if this particular genre of drama is an elite art that is addressed to an elite audience then no need to sell tickets widely and next time perform it in a smaller theater and if it is something beyond the grasp of the layman then spare us the torture of feeling intellectually inferior because not everyone is going to cheer what they find hard to appreciate. But if this is a play addressed to us, the masses, then allow me to say that I just don't like it, and that it is most probably not my problem.

P.S. Most people in the theater did like the play, so do go and watch it. I told you others did find it stunning. Here is the trailer, and here are some photos.

Brainwashed

Sometimes my mind becomes numb from constant exposure to conflicting brainwashing ideas. Can you please brainwash me one at a time?

Luck

If you apply the concept of probability to luck you will find that it simply does not apply. Luck is not random; it always falls on the wrong person. Luck is not a fair game. It is a game that only gives you the illusion that the likeliness that luck will happen to you is the same as everyone else. The longer you live, the more you could prove to yourself that if you are an unlucky person, the likeliness is that you will never become any luckier. You can hope, but hope is the weapon of the unlucky. Lucky people don't hope, they just wait. Albert Einstein should not be famous for his theory on relativity but for saying this: at any rate, I am convinced that God does not play dice.

Shame

I watched this movie "Shame", a kind of controversial film if you ask me. People either hated it or loved it. I am not going  to judge the movie myself or tell you what I think of it, but I am just going to say this: the movie is about a sex addict and here is the full synopsis: there was once a sex addict. The End.

Beirut Hotel: Waste of time

I watched Beirut Hotel. Again, I think we started to see some Lebanese production with a good script, good acting (especially Fadi Abi Samra and definitely not Rodni Haddad) and good shooting techniques, but does that alone make a good movie? I mean come on, where is the story? The movie claims to be a spy movie or a thriller; I wasn't thrilled at all, not even for a second, throughout the whole movie. I didn't laugh, I didn't cry, I didn't feel anything, I didn't think about anything, it just wasted two hours of my time. When is someone going to come up with a Lebanese movie without all those cliches about Lebanon and without all those "this is Beirut", and "this is how we live", and "I am Lebanese, if you lie to me, I kill you"? what does that have to do with you being Lebanese? The main idea of the movie which was bluntly and explicitly mentioned is this: "if you think you understand Lebanon, that means it wasn't well explained to you". So here is another Lebanese movie that reinforces all those cliches about Lebanon, the complex country that is beyond explanation, beyond the grasp of humankind, the unique (in a bad way this time but still unique), the exotic, confused, complicated, different, etc. well, you know what? Lebanon is not so complicated and if you find it hard to explain it maybe that's because you don't understand it yourself so how about you don't make a movie about something you do not understand, because to me it is simple. Complications in Lebanon are no less than in any other country, you just think your country is special, and complicated in a special way. The problem is square and simple: Lebanon is a racist, sectarian, selfish, hypocrite, fake, and pretentious country with people who whine all day about miseries they brought upon themselves, who misread their history and keep recreating it, who victimize themselves to shy away from facing what they really are: racist, sectarian, selfish, hypocrite, fake, and pretentious people. What are you trying to tell people here Danielle Arbid? You want to make a spy movie with unnecessary sex scenes, go ahead, but I still don't get the point. So now instead of the virgin woman living in the village, you bring the sexy liberal woman who lives in the city? how creative! Now the movie should never have been censored. But again, was it really censored or did Arbid sign an agreement with the censorship committee (funny there is such a thing) which she later violated? The censorship committee gave her permission to shoot the film on condition she doesn't mention the Hariri Assassination to which she allegedly agreed. Arbid should have made her case against censorship back then and refuse to sign but instead she produced the original script ignoring the condition and later made her case against censorship. It was stupid to impose such a condition by the committee in the first place but it wouldn't have made any difference if Hariri was not mentioned. But forget about all of that, say you are not Lebanese and you are watching the movie without any background about Lebanon, say you are a Vietnamese watching it, assuming you get through the first few minutes and you don't switch to something else, unless you are just waiting to see some boobs as someone mentioned to me, you would be watching a movie that tells you from the start that there is a conspiracy going on, and so you wait till the end of the movie to see how all of this is going to end (is the French lawyer a spy? is Abbas an Israeli agent? does he know too much? or was he just a victim of a bigger conspiracy?) only to realize after two hours that the conspiracy, the riddle you want to see solved, will never be solved, and you will never understand anything, why? because this is Lebanon, one of the characters tells you in case you didn't realize that two hours had already passed and there is no more time to give you answers. You would end the movie with one thought: Thank God I am Vietnamese.

The Debt

I watched this movie "The Debt", a Zionist propaganda film that intends to show how humanitarian, good-hearted, and well-intentioned the Mossad is! Now the movie is bad in all respects so they get a very good cast, but even with that the movie is unbelievably boring. What is funny though is that despite all the propaganda, you could still see how incompetent, stupid, deceiving, and hypocrite the Mossad agents are. That at least is true.

I can't help it

Two persons make me laugh, real hard, and I am one of them.

He wasn't good at Math

The weather forecast has been announcing for days now that the storm will hit Lebanon today. I wake up this morning and put on all my clothes. Everyone in Beirut had done the same: people have emptied their closets only the storm did not arrive. Someone must have made a small mistake while calculating wind speed in relation to distance. It happens, here, only all the time.

P.S. Someone commented on this saying that someone just wanted to sell some umbrellas. It happens too.

Typical

The Lebanese people take pride in reading and sharing anything that is said in the West about them, even if it were something mocking them. They think that simply because they are mentioned in Western media, that means they have some importance or that they are unique somehow. Show them this video for example, and they will tell you it is cute or funny, they will laugh themselves, and instead of changing a certain behavior, they will adopt it even more and make it part of their identity and uniqueness. In short, tell a Lebanese you are a donkey and they will start making donkey sounds.

De Niro's Game

I just finished Rawi Hage's "De Niro's Game", a must read novel about the Lebanon civil war in the context of East Beirut. If you have seen the movie "West Beirut", then you would certainly wish to see this book turned into an "East Beirut" film. Rawi Hage is an excellent novelist and storyteller and you will appreciate the bald use of Arabic style in his English prose underneath every sentence, very elegantly crafted to the smallest detail. His images are so vivid, modern, and creative. The book will hook you from the start and will keep you holding your breaths until you have finished it. Then you will rush to open the second book he wrote "The cockroach" also breathtakingly beautiful. I liked "The cockroach" more but that's maybe because I read it first and was impressed by this very perceptive novelist. You will also not miss the influence of Albert Camus' "the stranger" on both novels and the similarities between Rawi Hage's main character and narrator and the protagonist of the "the stranger" which he refers to in "De Niro's Game". What also made me appreciate Rawi Hage even more is that although he writes in English, you will not get the impression that he is writing to a Western audience. Both novels can be described as universal by all means, but you will enjoy reading them more if you are an Arab, particularly Lebanese, and especially if you know and appreciate Arabic literature.

Basic

You are not smart enough until you know how to be stupid a little.

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.

Hesitation

When I hesitate I remind myself of this: better regret something you did than regret something you did not do... That usually ends with: crap!

I will never drink again! ever... ever...

Among the very common phrases you hear and say on the morning following New Year's eve are: "Oh... my head", and "what happened last night?" (usually while your hand is still on your head), and "where do all these bruises come from?", and you could say "where am I?" and "who are you?" but the winner of all time is "I will never drink again".

Happy New Year

Let me tell you about my last year's resolution. I closed my eyes, squeezed them real hard, and pledged to blog more in 2011. This is what I got: 116 posts in 2011 as opposed to 226 posts in 2010 (although I was unemployed for the most part of the year) which means in simple mathematics that I need to make 110 posts between today and tomorrow (almost as much as I blogged this entire year). Even if I had a factory of ideas, I won't be able to achieve that. But still, this blog did survive somehow and it is now 3 years old. You can close this tab now and come back next year. Oh... and Happy "New" Year!

P.S. Some progress: 117 posts if you count this one!

New Year resolutions

Every beginning of a new year is an illusion of a new start. It is not hard to see that in reality it is not. Making resolutions is the silliest thing you would do in this case especially if they are of the kind: I will lose 5 Kilos, I will quit smoking, I will become a vegetarian, and the sort. Just remember the resolutions you made last new year, it is very unlikely that you remember what they were in the first place, but you know they were pretty strong. Then tell me about your progress on that one before making new resolutions. Woody Allen has a beautiful saying about that: If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.

I mean, seriously?

Seriously, if you feel the urge to tell me the story of your life, write a book, a memoir, and I promise to read it. And since you have such a talent of remembering every single detail of your life, making links to other tiny details from your days on earth, describing where every furniture in your house was placed and where you bought it from, and opening parentheses and closing them a hundred times per minute, then you should seriously consider writing that down, because, it is very unlikely that I will listen to you beyond the first sentence. Look, summaries would do just fine here, give me room to imagine the rest, I promise I will decorate the setting you describe myself, beautifully too, not exactly as it is in your head, but does it really matter? Let's make a deal, if we are conversing over a drink, the story of your life should either end before I finish my first drink or let me lend you a piece of paper and a pen.

I am serious.

Dear Hamra hipsters, it seems, in case you have not noticed, that Hamra street has been lately invaded by very ordinary people, unlike you of course, and as I care about you and your uniqueness and coolness, I must warn you and draw to your attention that you probably need to look for a new virgin street to occupy in 2012. Try Karakas Street.

P.S. Thanks Ralph for the inspiration

Have a life!

There are women out there who tell you: Oh, my boyfriend, husband, lover, whatever, loves me so much, and cares about me and is so attentive to me, he even accompanies me to the hairdresser!!, and I wish to tell them: dears, dears, that he comes with you to the hairdresser is not a sign of love but a sign that he actually has no life.

Not even in your dreams

This is one of the most hilarious stories I heard recently: a single guy who recently turned religious and stopped having sex told that his biggest frustration now is that in his dreams a sexy woman would appear and ask him for sex and he would say: sorry ma'am but I can't do that anymore! then he wakes up and starts banging his head against the pillow shouting at himself: it is okay in the dream! it is okay in the dream!

Seriously?

Music can make you dance and nothing surprises me about that. It is somehow evidenced. But if it does make you orgasm too, then please tell me how, do share the knowledge please, because until then I will think that you look ridiculous.

Another same irony

You don't question the meaning of life when your survival is at stake. Ironically you start doing so when everything in your life starts making sense. There seems to be meaning in absurdity and the real is what makes you wonder.

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.