Almost Back...

I am still in Beirut, still trying to make sense of the chaos, though I have to admit it was quite a beautiful slap in the face. It is my last weekend here, and I have yet to squeeze a coffee here, a lunch there, and soak in as much sun as my skin can take before I head back to the quiet life of London.
There is so much to say about Beirut, about the youth enthusiasm, and lack of it, about the social/political situation, and the general nonchalance of summer, but as long as I am here in the midst of it all, it remains hard to define.
Yes, it is hectic in the political sphere, but I was selfish enough to bypass it all, and curse my denial of Lebanese politics if you wish, but seeing my president sunbathing in the mountains on a Friday morning, wearing a clingy speedo and innocently spreading his legs to maximize the tan on his crotch, made me a bit weary of it all... Between the "Tsuna Mi-chel Aoun" and the "I heart Geagea Kteer" and the Hariri Father and Son embrace, well...
I preferred the cozy smell of coffee and jazz music of Torino in Gemmayzeh, where, I have to admit, I spent at least 4 hours daily, sipping on wine, and seeing the familiar faces of my extended family. I know it sounds all corny, but dammit! i love that neon sign flickering at the window! My epileptic sigh of relief...

One WEEK to GO

Ok Bloggers, one more week to go for survey, im closing it on the 20th August. So to those of you who have not participated or know anyone who hasn't, shido el Himi , im relying on your grassroot efforts and on getting at least 60% of the total make-up of bloggers in area.

Click Here to take the survey

Countdown to Beirut

In 4 and a half hour, a mini-cab will be picking me up from home straight to Heathrow... I am going to Beirut. My mind has been empty for the past week, already transported to sunny Atlas beach, and the comfort of my Broumana home. No mice, no pantry bugs (yup, a new infestation...), no chicken shop smell, no draft beers, and flat tyres, and no more Zindibad phonecards. I've waxed my bikini line, stocked up on rollies - smoking 2 packs a day when on Gitanes! - bleached my tummy hair, plucked my eyebrows, gotten the familia their gifts, bought sunglasses, and packed my suitcase 5 hours ahead of time.

I've been a carcass these past days... can't wait to be home.

Apparently I'm a Geek!

I got emailed this: London Girl Geek Dinner, with the title 'Thought you might be interested'. So to all you geek girls out there, be proud, as from the list of the other geeks attending, it seems pretty awesome to be one!

"Can I get a lift, love?"

I worked my shift at the pub last night, and the Staropramen lager tap exploded 3 times in my face, which drenched me in what I refer to as piss foam. But that's not what ticked me...
120 poured pints and 6+1/2 hours later, I ammassed a generous 75p in tips, but that didn't tick me off either.
It is the drunken bastard who decided it was funny to sit on the luggage extension of my bike after my shift, and who flattened my tyre, that really pissed me off.
Who knows, I may have been the one who got him drunk in the first place.
75p and a flat tyre... thanks, mate!

Lobster, yum?

I had lobster today, for the first time. It was actually half a lobster, chopped smack down the length-middle. The cut was so perfect, they could've used a chainsaw for all I know. The weird thing is that I'm not sure if I liked it so much, even though I ate all that I could scrape out of it, and left nothing but it's beetroot carcass. And that's precisely the thing that made me all queasy... The carcass! It's actually half a lobster, with its dead eyes, and legs, with the little hairs on the end, and humungous claws, and all the joints and cartilage still intact. I used the appropriate tools (pliers and a claw-like poking device with fangs) and I scraped the inside out of a carcass that still stared at me, and ate it all. I played with it all the while, opening and closing its claw, and examining the way the transluscent joint slid up and down as traction played its biological part... A giant spider.
Basically, it's like being served a delicious piece of sirloin steak attached to the cow's head on the plate... no one says it's not still a delicious piece of meat, but when you realize the liquid is blood, the red stuff is muscle, and the cow's eyes are staring back at you, it's hard to swallow properly.
It was nice, but I won't be doing it soon enough...

Sometimes I wish that I were anonymous, so that I could scream, without the need to find the right words, without resorting to political correctness, without having to justify my prejudices with any form of argumentation or back-up statistics, but simply out of pure subjectivity and personal vendetta, that
1) german women are sluts
2) cigarettes are pure bliss, and all non-smokers are just jealous of seeing us suck on something with so much passion
3) a pint of Staropramen lager looks like a pint of piss
4) relationships are a poor excuse for a selfish ego-boost, and God bless homosexuality
5) graphic design is a sell-out job, and all philosophy around the subject is masturbatory: we make ugly things pretty for money, and that's that.
6) men are sluts too (all nationalities included)
7) I HATE small-talk, so leave me alone, especially if it's dark outside, or if i'm not drinking coffee
8) Clubs are overrated, and shifting from one foot to the other is not dancing, it's just pretending not to be bored to death, so drop the act and go home.......

But I'm not anonymous, so I'll shut up.

"Stuff On My Cat"

This site is kind of stupid, but it made me laugh on this very blue (sun)day... I know that if I tried to put stuff on my cat, I'd get a good thorny slap on the face and a hiss.


But I know she would still love me...

Notting Hill Gate Tube Station 'Advice'

Hangover Update

Wine belly, my ass! It ain't the wine, it's the shitload of food you eat throughout the next day to try and drown the acidity of the wine and the pasty taste of too many cigarettes... Feel I'm going to burst after today's late lunch feast (a colourful mixture of spicy chilli con carne and rice, aubergines, hummous, tzatziki, fries, feta cheese, bread and butter, couscous, and 1+1/2 cumberland sausage). But, as my fellow hangovered feast friend rightfully said: "It's that little piece of Willy Wonka chocolate we ate at the end of it all that's gonna tip the scale and make me puke."
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.
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Yes, I'm a sucker for movie marketing products. Johnny Depp as Willy Wonka... in a chocolate factory?? YES PLEASE!!!

An Ode To Wine

Another morning, another hangover, EastEnd induced this time...
I had never been an alcohol-drinker before coming to London, preferring the bitter taste of a Virgin Mary. But I have finally been broken in, and have slowly raised my non-existent alcohol-tolerance to featherweight status. From using the word "tipsy" too long, I now admit to "being drunk." It took me a while to accept it, though, having always imagined 'drunk' to be a vomitif state of utter embarrassment. But, no, for some months now, experimenting with alcoholized behavioral patterns has become a little past-time of mine.
My eyes become drunk more than anything else. I find it hard to keep them open, and prefer the obscurity of dancing in blindness. It's always a little trip, where I find myself being led in a tango or a dizzy twirl by strange male hands on the dancefloor. I feel vulnerable, yet empowered. And, oh my God, it's true that inhibitions get washed away with white wine! Not that I resort to vulgar flashing, but I do feel that I am contained in an expansion of me that floats in a mass of stroboscopic neons and blurred silhouettes. Individuals are washed away and bodies become accessible playthings: a little smile there, a little touch here, and millions of little words exchanged in the haze. People become enjoyable, and a smile can drown anything...
I reached my limit yesterday of a whopping three medium-sized glasses of wine. I think I will platform at that for the moment. I did need a healthy serving of fries with garlic sauce and a samosa at 1am to cool myself down, and I am not ready for a wine belly just yet.

S & M

On her blog, Eve recently posted a link to something she found on the web, which is one of the most entrancing piece of uselessness I have ever come across. Like her, I sat still for ages, totally fixated on the falling figure. But, it struck a chord inside and I now find it to be right-on-target revealing about the Human Condition...
I'm not sure if this wizardry programming of the human body freefalling in abstract space touches upon our inner masochist... or sadism. I completely believe that we are all made up of a combination of both Masochism and Sadism, and that the balance between both-or lack of it- drives our relationship with things and the world around us.
The reality quotient of the body (which is female, of course, I have to note!) and the lifelike movements of her joints makes us scrunch our eyes with the intensity of every blow and twist of the figure hitting the obstacles; but it is the inertia and apparent indifference in her expression that arouses the dormant masochist in us. I almost wished the figure had mid-length brown hair, green eyes and smaller boobs, so that I need not project myself in her, but actually see myself mangled and puppetted around.
However, a few minutes later, I clicked my mouse on her and realised that I could control the fall: so I started bashing her around, left and right, propelling her against the bubbles... or curving her fall so as to avoid the obstacles. But, yeah, mostly thrashing her around the screen and seeing her bend about like a dead fish.
Amidst all the wierdness of the net, this is a jewel. Thanks Eve for sharing it with us... The perfect example of the human's twisted mind.

Highlight of my lunchbreak

Was just walking out for my lunch break today and i happened to stumble across a small demonstration that was taking place right outside of Scotland Yard, against the 'shoot to kill' policy. Anyway, the minute i stepped out, a young woman happened to be walking past and got really hysterical at the demonstrators and screamed at them (and i have to note here that they were mostly English), ‘’if you don’t bloody well like it, then go back to your own fucking country’’. No comment.

Untitled Street

Bahi Ghubril, an ex-expatriate Lebanese, has been long working on a street map 'atlas' of Beirut, to combat the lack of any formal indexing of our labyrinth city - which is a great idea for tourists, returning Beyruthians maybe, but feels kind of dubious to me. Not that I wouldn't mind knowing how to navigate through the maze with far greater ease, but I seem to have a deep-engrained love of our total road anarchy and organized chaos.
The Daily Star article rightly tells of the spontaneous absurd conversations between lost driver and well-meaning aider when pinpointing directions; and I love, as a designer, drawing a crazy map of my Broumana home for a party, complete with "turn left on traumatized tree at red gas station corner" to "shift to first gear on very very steep dotted lane under olive trees." A stamped & posted letter even managed to find its way safely to my door landing, sporting the hilarious address of "2nd floor, orange-brick building, behind Bellevue hotel, Broumana" or something of the sort.
In a way, for confirmed Beirutis, the street index would be a precious reminder of what we do not really need, but would love to know: Cleopatra Street?! A sort of 'funny' formal, yet miscellaneous, layer beneath the more confirmed navigational landmarks of "ALBA university roundabout" and "nazlet Pharmacie Berty". I believe it would take another decade, and at least a couple of new-generation drivers, before referring to tarmac roads as "Xxxx Street". I would still definitely get one of those A to Z, though, for the sake of laughter, that of History (probably the mentionned 2nd updated edition, then), and to maybe find the new traffic-beating shortcuts before they too become bottleneck avenues...

A Prayer for Clerkenwell

www.je-sus.com ?

The Design Observer has posted an article on Signs of Religion in the American South, which is a very interesting read about how religion takes its toll on sanity... Excuse my cynisism about over-zealous religious piety, but with the rising fear of Islamic Fundamentalism taking up everyone's time, who's monitoring those people?
And I thought I took the Lord's name in vain when I cursed...

Post-24/7 Blues...

It's been one of those days when all your mind can really focus on is: "Right, what am I going to cook for dinner tonight?" when it's barely even lunch yet. I was asked to tag along on a shopping-spree in Primark, which I happily obliged to, and bought myself half a dozen rainbow-colored panties. Primark is tailor-made for bingeing on useless underwear, especially while the mind is busy concocting a recipe using that lone courgette in the fridge that might have to be soon thrown away, if Tesco's expiry date is to be trusted.
I finally got to dinnertime and revelled in cooking myself pseudo-chilli sin carne. I'm not a vegetarian, but despite the day's calculations, I had forgotten to defrost minced meat.
And, now, my stomach is so fat and big that I feel like I may just give birth to a whole honey-mustard roast chicken in time for tomorrow's lunch. And people still insist my little non-pregnant tummy is sexy...

24/7

After 9/11 and 7/7 there was 24/7.
It poured all day, so the Greenwich field-trip went down the drain.
Instead, it was all massive breakfast-binge, wet sandals, organic fruit juice, a panty-revealing short skirt, bee sunglasses picture-posing, Cluedo, wine & pizza, Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, tingling massage and... more Cluedo. And I got to be Miss Scarlett both times!
Felt good to be a spoilt brat.
And tomorrow begins the first day of the rest of my life...

Happy Birthday Me!

I am officially a quarter of a century old!
I hope this year will bring me merry copulations, a jolly-good salary, the ability to fit back into my jeans, and the fulfillment of having those exquisite cushions from Coco de Mer! ...and the Sophie Calle book! ...and that cabinet from Unto This Last! ...and a cockroach-free appartment to put it in! (hint hint)
...and World Peace, of course.

West End Hangover

Have treaded to the Far West of London last night, to a party in Mayfair (!) too far for my bike to escort me. I let myself be dragged past the borders of my beloved EastEnd, to mingle with a new crowd, rightly described by a friend as "Very rich kids, with careers on the side". So, the tube it was. I can't say I wasn't a bit edgy, but that's not the point of this post.
I just wanted to note how daunting it is to live in a elevator-clad building of such minutia that I would not be allowed to hang my mismatched socks to dry at the window, with a rooftop patio overlooking the precious US Embassy, illuminated flag at half-mast, and spotless iron fences that discriminate my 2nd-hand shopper bike with a hefty "Bicycles Found Parked Against Or Chained To These Railings Will Be Removed Without Further Notice." Suddenly, my landlord's Perfect Fried Chicken shop under my flat has never felt more cosy, even if it does send the mice and cockroaches up to us.
At least I have gotten my first ever hangover today: I finally feel like a normal person! And I have the West End boys to thank for that...

On another note, London police have approved a "Shoot to Kill" policy against suspected bombers, pub-filled Monnot Street in Beirut was bombed last night at 10pm on a Friday night, and it's my birthday tomorrow. Cheers anyone?