Colonization

Every time I check the origin label of a tshirt, jeans, or pair of sneakers, and find it's Made in Cambodia, or Vietnam, or Bangladesh, I freak out. I imagine little children with shiny beady eyes stitching up the hand-made work on that blouse. I imagine under-nourished, under-paid, mistreated women who stitch up my jeans or pair of Converse, for less than minimum wage, just to feed their families of shiny beady eyes..

Then I feel infinitely guilty for being part of this humanity. Being part of the colonization.

On a lighter note, I do not feel that when my item is made in China, because I think of it as little oompa-loompa robots doing the work.. I think of it as "internal" rather than external colonization; which somehow makes it better for me.

Am I helping the children or the colonies by buying? Am I going to help them by boycotting? How can I change such a sad sad reality? Is "Fair Trade" a reality or is it just a label we stick on our products to feel less guilty drinking that cup of coffee or wearing that beautiful handmade item?

Jealousy

"Hatred seems to operate the same glands as love: it even produces the same actions. If we had not been taught how to interpret the story of the Passion, would we have been able to say from their actions alone whether it was the jealous Judas or the cowardly Peter who loved Christ?"

~ Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

Gypsy

I had forgotten how much I loved this song and how much it meant... Melancholie..

You come from far away
With pictures in your eyes
Of coffeeshops and morning streets
In the blue and silent sunrise

But night is the cathedral
Where we recognized the sign
We strangers know each other now
As part of the whole design

Oh, hold me like a baby
That will not fall asleep
Curl me up inside you
And let me hear you through the heat

You are the jester of this courtyard
With a smile like a girl’s
Distracted by the women
With the dimples and the curls

By the pretty and the mischievous
By the timid and the blessed
By the blowing skirts of ladies
Who promise to gather you to their breast

Oh, hold me like a baby
That will not fall asleep
Curl me up inside you
And let me hear you through the heat

You have hands of raining water
And that earring in your ear
The wisdom on your face
Denies the number of your years

With the fingers of the potter
And the laughing tale of the fool
The arranger of disorder
With your strange and simple rules

Yes now I’ve met me another spinner
Of strange and gauzy threads
With a long and slender body
And a bump upon the head

Oh, hold me like a baby
That will not fall asleep
Curl me up inside you
And let me hear you through the heat

With a long and slender body
And the sweetest softest hands
And we’ll blow away forever soon
And go on to different lands

And please do not ever look for me
But with me you will stay
And you will hear yourself in song
Blowing by one day

Oh, hold me like a baby
That will not fall asleep
Curl me up inside you
And let me hear you through the heat

Et pourtant si douce

بداركم مشمشة وبدارنا خوخة
يا شجرة المشمشة مالت على الخوخة
حاجي تروح وتجي من تحت هالطاقة
يا رب رشقة مطر والأرض مشتاقة

Imaginary Conversation

"I miss you. Come back."
"But we just spoke for one hour, and we were just together a couple of days back."
"I know. I know, but I miss *you*."
"Hmmm.. okay, I don't know what to say."
"Nothing. I just wanted to acknowledge that I missed you."

INFP

"Under stress, it's not uncommon for INFPs to mis-use hard logic in the heat of anger, throwing out fact after (often inaccurate) fact in an emotional outburst... They focus on the way that the conflict makes them feel, and indeed don't really care whether or not they're right. They don't want to feel badly. This trait sometimes makes them appear irrational and illogical in conflict situations."

lol

Do you think I can refute these claims based on hearsay?

Beurk!

So, thanks to round-eyed Nunu, I can now be disgusted in French!

how cool..

Pessimism..

Diwan Heliopolis

The upstairs cafe on a Thursday night..

A girl in her 20's sitting with 3 guys in their early 20s discussing some business or group of a sort.. I'm a couple of meters away from them so it is -as always- easy to eavesdrop. Apparently the girl represents some company that recruits salespeople who work from home and get paid only on commission based on performance by end of year, etc.. Something that sounds too fishy and slightly too good to be true.. For some reason, she is only addressing one of the guys. The other two seem like they are the guy's friends, but also like they are already in the girl's team somehow.

The guy -as all guys do- is trying to act 'fetek'. Like he is asking all the "right" questions, and what if this, and what if that, and what guarantees, etc. But it also seems he's game..

So in the middle of it all, I hear a sentence that was going to make me laugh out loud.

Girl: so, f aswa2 el zoroof, you will have 10 contacts.

Guy: tayeb, howa fee aswa2 men aswa2 el zoroof?

Girl: Enta motasha2em bardo?

I thought they called it aswa2 el zoroof for a reason..

des lettres qu'on ne poste pas

"When that anger sets in, WRITE IT! Write the letters. But don't send them. You never want to leave concrete proof of insanity."

~ Jane Fonda

Software Ageing and the Single Girl

So, while AN was studying for her midterm in Software Maintenance, she came across this one and felt it was too good to pass..

"....The software has aged even though nobody has touched it. It has actually aged because nobody bothered to touch it."

Fascinating how women are just like software..

The End of the Affair

"The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belong to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity."

~ Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

p.s. Can you smell the air in the photograph too?

Monochrome

"I began dividing life in absolutes... Things and people were either perfectly bad, or perfectly good, and when life didn't obey this black-and-white rule, when things or people were complex or contradictory, I pretended otherwise. I turned every defeat into a disaster, every success into an epic triumph, and separated all people into heroes or villains. Unable to bear ambiguity, I built a barricade of delusions against it."

~ J. R. Moehringer


p.s. Thank you Nerro for the stolen quote.

Si méchante

Paper Dreams escaping Surreality

Soñar despierto no deja de ser soñar, no deja de ser maravilloso.

Ma Chèvre

Few things in life make me feel as good as chèvre cheese does, one of my favorite gastronomical delights..

Crazy female hormones

Testing for pregnancy in Llamas

"Spit testing". Bring the potentially pregnant dam (female llama) to an intact male. If the stud attempts to breed her and she lies down for him within a fairly short period of time, she is not pregnant. If she remains on her feet, spits, attacks him, or otherwise prevents his being able to mate, it is assumed that she is probably pregnant. This test gets its name due to the dam spitting at the male if she is pregnant.


hmmm... Or she might be just pissed at his attitude.

As Cosmo as it gets

So, if you know me well enough (or if you are the poor guy working in Germany who gets me this from the airport every time he comes and knows that I prefer the British edition to the American one and yet never reads my blog anymore!), then you would know that I really like Cosmopolitan magazine. Not Marie Claire, not Company, not Vogue, just Cosmo (although I have previously on several occasions bought Vogue for the fashion content).

The question is "Why?".. Why would I like a magazine that 1) speaks fashion language to such a fashion-educated, yet bohemian as myself, and 2) positions men as the core of everything, even when they are empowering women, it is -in a way- to get more men.. Men magazines, on the other hand, mostly talk about gadgets, cars, and sports, and yes -sometimes- fashion and women.. but never in a way where it is imperative for their existence.

Answering this, I dont know.. I guess I just like the mindset and mood it puts me in, i like knowing whats up in fashion, and -I have to admit- the relationship articles aren't all shallow or bad.. in fact, in last month issue they discussed Female Genital Mutilation among African families in UK (never knew it was such an issue there)..

Interestingly though, I remember a few years back a guy commented that he found it really weird (and somehow disconcerting) that a single (or let's say unmarried) girl would read Cosmo, and that it would open her eyes to stuff that in our culture and community girls should not know about (namely the physical relationship aspects). Yes, Cosmo is to blame, because there isn't enough media around us to do that!

So, why blog about it? basically, because the secret I shared above was in this week's postsecret and it resonated with what I thought.. also, because it's one of the cool things I like about that crazy friend of mine but never thank him for, and finally, because it is one of the little idiosyncrasies that I have and my little shallow pleasures.

Requiem

The crucified planet Earth,
should it find a voice
and a sense of irony,
might now well say
of our abuse of it,
"Forgive them, Father,
They know not what they do."

The irony would be
that we know what
we are doing.

When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the Grand Canyon,
"It is done."
People did not like it here.

~Kurt Vonnegut

Once upon a time in a tube

"On ne revendiquera rien, on ne demandera rien. On prendra, on occupera."