Return of the Chronic Bronchitis

I know that I am very ridiculous... I have been battling a heavy bout of Bronchitis for the past week, which feels as if I am spewing out most of my bronchiols with every cough. I have been prescribed an inhaler, which is heaven-sent when I am startled in the middle of the night by the sound of my own rasping breath. I am also on maxi-dose antibiotics, and was scolded off to the nearest hospital to get an x-ray for my 2-ton chest. I have insomnia from trying to find an adequate position to fall asleep in, which will not squash my aorta and kill me from suffocation. Not to mention trying to balance the lung-clasp with fraying a position between the protruding springs of my new old mattress. If I walk 5 minutes on flat ground, I need 10 minutes to catch my breath...
And still I cannot even cut down a teeny bit on smoking. I insist on having my morning coffee with a cigarette, even though my throat is barely a millimeter wide, and I have to scrunch up my eyes in pain as the smoke forces its way down to my clogged lungs. If I'm smoking in a cafe, everyone tuts at me for making such a racket with my bouts of coughing.
Between two puffs of smoke, I need one puff of my inhaler. Talk about masochism...
I am ridiculous, yet I cannot stop. The thought is inconcievable. I am irreversibly addicted to nicotine.
And it freaks the living daylights out of me!

New Home, New Flat... New Anxieties

I've finally settled into the new flat, even though I still do not consider it my home. I know it needs time, but I don't like change. My food is in a box on the kitchen counter, because I haven't managed to pin down any of my other 4 flatmates to empty out my cupboard space. There's beard hair all over the bathroom floor, empty pepsi cans in the lounge, not to mention an unwashed plate of dried up and shrivelled pasta next to the sink. I can't remove the blotches of Blu-tak on the wall, because they seem to have super-glued to the paint. The ceiling in the lounge is leaking water (and winter hasn't even started yet), and my next-door room neighbour listens to heavy metal.
But the rent is cheap, the flatmates seem nice (though untidy), and there are neither cockroaches nor mice wandering about.
So I guess I'll give it some time...

And I'll wait til tomorrow to dissect the New Job part, because, yeah, I got the job.

Ugly Brown Closet

I never thought that moving home would be so difficult. I have been trying my best for the past 4 days to send my stuff a few blocks south of my chicken shop flat, but it has proved almost ridiculously impossible. And the reason is pretty simple: an ugly brown closet.
There are two closets in the new room, and not owning a clothes factory, frankly, I don't need the extra storage. But it's obnoxiously there, and there's no way of getting it out of the smack-middle of my new (teeny) room. The house is 4-floors high and Amsterdam-narrow, and the window's too small to chuck it out...
I've been having delirious fantasies of breaking it into a million brown pieces with an axe, but only I managed to shatter my mirror (which is not so bad, cause it distorted me with a few extra kilos anyway). Basically, my clothes, shoes and scanner are in one flat, my bedsheets, laptop and desk are in the other, and I'm in the middle of the road with my wet bike. So I escaped the torment by sitting at the coffeeshop for 3 hours, writing endless To Do lists while engorging astronomical amounts of caffeine to drown the mental paralysis.
I know there's a way to resolve the curse of the ugly brown closet, but til then, I will sit on my wet ass and wait. If I smoke enough roll-ups, it might just disappear...

"A Perfect Day"

Coming to a big screen near you is the new movie by Lebanese film-making duo Joana & Khalil Joreige, "A Perfect Day". I am not going to repeat the synopsis of the film because it's everywhere on the web, and here and here too... Basically, the movie has been travelling around festivals worldwide, has won the FIPRESCI prize at the Locarno Film Festival, and Ziad Saad (Malek) was awarded the Best Actor Award at the Namur Film Festival in Belgium, making it the first time an Arab has ever earned such a merit!

The reason why I am dwelling on this cinematic event is because Ziad is a very close friend of mine, and having attended required Drama classes at college together, I can attest to the fact that he has always been a reluctant pupil, and not a very succesful one for that matter. While I shone in class, really, he sucked... Never had he had any professional acting experience before, and I am proud to have been the first to cast him in one of my university short-movie back in the days when I still believed I could win an Oscar for Best Director. Actually, if I recall correctly, only his arm appeared in my movie, but nonetheless, I believe I do have some credit in his fine breakthrough performance in A Perfect Day.
So the award came as quite a shock for the both of us, and not being jealous in the least of my friend's award (which he was not able to personally collect for absence of a visa), I am proud to be the one to urge everyone to support this movie by your paying presence in festivals everywhere! I will be (finally) viewing it at the London Film Festival next week, and, armed with a cardboard cutout of an Oscar statuette, I will be delivering my speech of acceptance at the end of the movie on the sidewalk somewhere near the ICA exit doors.
Be there in numbers!!!! Thank you, thank you so much!

I like being tipsy. Or drunk, pissed, hammered whatever you want to call it. It proves how weak our human little bodies are: a sac of hormones, blood, organs and secretions that are too easily derailed and lead into momentous havoc. When I am drunk, it means that I have tipped over the perfectly fragile balance inside with my little finger, machiavelic drunken smile plastered on my face, and sent my microscopical hormones into apocalytical hell. Synapses short-circuited and alcohol spilled among my hemoglobins. How strange the feeling that my body loses control, that my eyes fill with blood til the veins almost burst, making the green of my iris blinding. Mary Magdalene blue-green bloodshot eyes, like the most well-composed Rheims INRI photograph...
And that smile. That daft smile of all is beautiful, and pretty and dumb.... Which panicked hormone creates the smile? Not the coy sober smile, but the dumb grin that only my drunken mind finds pretty, but that actually makes me look like a poodle on speed. Not the drunk of the red-nosed Clerkenwellers, not the drunk of the Shoreditch bus-stop pukers, but that private drunkeness, that hormonal state of un-control where everyone is worried because I look much too happy.
I don't really know why I am talking about being drunk. I have not wined enough, or else I would've been too selfishly happy to disgress on my state. I have raised my tolerance of wine too fast in the past year, and only the corners of my mouth curve up. I just wish I did not need to drink to feel the dumb ecstacy of tipsiness. I wish I did not need to poke my hormones and acidify my veins in order to grin like a fool...
I finally got my National Insurance number. I am happy to be a valid i-D number in England. Cheers to barcodes.
Upon re-reading this post, I feel I have spoken the words of an alcoholic in the making... I am just bored on a Friday night, and I do believe I may have some kind of intolerance to wheat, as the pizza has made me bloat like I'm 8-months pregnant.
The mouse has said twice hello to me. It is very small. I think we may have killed its mother. What was her name, Mandy I think? She goes into my flatmate's room and hides under the closet. The cockroaches have moved out, because I am too. I am leaving my chicken shop smells on Sunday and moving to EC1. I think that they may be hiding in my suitcases: they have become so cunning, and planning a stowaway trip with me.
I think I should stop ranting now, because writing this post is making me feel a bit drunk. Stop writing and watch The Madness of King George, which came free with last week's Guardian.
Or was it the week before?

Yes! the news in English...

To all those who suffer with Arabic and Persian but have an interest in the Middle East, a service that summarizes the news of the area in English is actually out there called MideastWire . There is a small yearly charge which I think is highly worth it as it provides daily email summaries of a diversity of newspapers in the region. Also it’s refreshing to see such a project initiated by a few highly motivated young journalists with no hidden agenda but to provide a service that is so lacking in the Middle East and expose Arab opinion and news sources to anyone ineterested. check out article written on project last week in the Guardian

Ich bin ein Berliner

I too have returned from a well-deserved 4 days in Berlin (needless to say that Maha and I travelled together), and I am still in an envious daze.
Berlin is truly poignant in its specificity. Most European cities are quite alike in their topography and structure. Most of them have a busy core center, fast-paced and crowded, flanked by areas of decreasing density and heightened character. Berlin however is quite an exception. Not only is it a huge city, but it works its way in a exploded, un-structural way: there is no center per se. It is spread out, airy and light. Roads are wide, buildings are imposing, and contemporary post-reunification architecture wants itself monumental in scale, but it is all balanced by the fact that the city is fanned out on the terrain, quiet and tinged with history.
Boutiques, pubs and markets are discovered, stumbled upon by chance after a stroll along seemingly residential stretches of buildings. Berlin teases, it presents itself unannounced. It is humble. The perfect city to take a break from fast-paced restless London. Berliners are funny too, in the sense that they don't give a damn. You talk to them in English (hopefully a hint that you don't speak German) but they will reply in German monologues and expect you to understand. They will not make an effort, but you take it in their stride. They will even joke with you in German, all the while knowing you won't understand a single word. They will also raise their butt, and fart loudly, because they need to. And then they laugh (no language barrier there, though)...
And Berlin is so cheap!!! Which makes you buy ten times more on the account of cheapness... And OK, so I fell into the classic tourist rip-off of buying myself something from a tourist stall near Checkpoint Charlie, and then finding it for 10 euros cheaper in another stall five steps away: BUT it is still a 24-hour watch with Stalin's head on it! When it seems 6 o'clock on my watch, it is actually noon! With all the crap they sell at tourist stalls around the world, Berlin has the best crap of them all!
They're still selling remains from the Berlin Wall around the area too, but wouldn't you think they'd run out by now? They even have them incrusted into postcards to send back home to the family...
If I weren't in London, I would be in Berlin. Enjoying wursts on Alexanderplatz and drinking wine on Kastanienallee...
But I'm back in London, with the current obsession of finding a new room to live in, and applying for my Masters degree. I think my Stalin watch will come in handy, now that I've got a full 24 hours to fan out my anxiety...
Tüs!

Berlin Observations…

Just got back from a long weekend away in Berlin, with two friends and it was amazingly refreshing. While I was expecting a cold city divided between eastern communist architecture and western corporate society, grumpiness and the kind of negativity you feel in many eastern European cities. I saw instead a air of vigour where so much has happened and so much is changing that it has a certain kind of intensity to it that I have only felt in very few cities of the world and certainly did not expect it here. Maybe it was the numerous older men with moustaches (reminds me of Beirut) or the angry people and confrontational society but it felt real, unvarnished and earthly. All in all it was a much needed break. I completely zoned out of my reality and on numerous times forgot where I was in my life and confused which home I’m coming back to. This detachment from my everyday has not happened in years. So here you go, my 4 day observation of a city that I definitely recommend to everyone and to myself at least one more time!

Professor Blog

I have been invited to participate in a conference on on-line journalism taking place in UAE in November about no other than BLOGS. It'll be my first time speaking publicly to such a large crowd and I'm super excited and a little nervous.....More to come

Celebrities, anyone?

I have decided that a career change is in hand. Still in my aforementionned two-week trial, I am hard at work on a case of designing sale banners and "20% OFF TODAY ONLY!" cards for loyalty members of a declining high-street store, and when the brief said "Include butterflies and flowers"... well, I realized that something was not quite right.
It's quite an un/fortunate predicament to see oneself at the onset of total professional obscurity. I used to ramble that it was unconceivable that one should choose his life path at the age of 18, and that at least 2 years of post-school experience were needed to make a wiser decision. Now, with the onset of my 25th year on this planet, 7 years were still not enough...
I almost envy those young designers/writers/actors/capitalists/fashionistas that can boast a published interview in some or other magazine about their "exciting young talent!" and "promising breakthrough ingenue!" tags in two-page full-color glossy feature (photo-retouching galore!). But then again, they only make up 0.1% of the worldwide 18 to 35 population, if not less.
Hey, I could be worthy of a two-page article: "Lebanese Designer's CV Twice as Exciting As British Peers... In Only One Year!"
Maybe that's why I have decided to be the boss of my own magazine one day. I would make celebrities out of all my struggling underrated friends, and get ourselves up to 0.15%... One day.

...

On another note, did you know that Kate Moss snorted 5 lines of cocaine one night?! Oooooooh...
Funny how the British need that one story that will get them going through the week, ooohing and aaaahing among each other just about everywhere, from the hairdresser to the bus, to the local pub to the chicken shop under the house. Kate Moss must be proud to have spurred on a long line of new encounters, strangers bonding in her demise (or her iconification, more so), and couples forming in a bat of eyelashes as Ms. Moss is used as the trendy new pick-up line.

AND... What is it with the British always wanting their celebrities "publicly apologizing"?!?! Prince Harry had to do it when he wore the swastika, Jude Law had to apologize to the British people for cheating on his wife, and now Kate Moss is being put under pressure to publicly apologizing to the British nation for causing so much grief and sorrow!
Love to be offended, these British people...

....

Final rant of the day:

Why do the British always put a slice of lemon in their water?!

Drives me up the wall.

I TOLD YOU SO!!!

Turns out that my two weeks trial is exactly just that: a two-week trial.
There was a Japanese girl doing two-weeks trial before me, and after mine, there is another girl doing hers. So basically, we are three competitors for the job, à la queue-leu-leu.
And after the last bitch's two weeks, I will know if I were the better of the trio. And then I might get the job.
I WAS DUPED and I don't have the job (yet).

I have to call the pub and tell them I am not quitting after all, and that I LOVE being a barperson and don't fire me if I called you all bastards behind your backs... please.

I told you I should have tiptoed... (in the study with the dagger).

Cluedo has absolutely positively got to be most riveting game ever invented.
I know that there is a Risk mania out there somewhere, but as long as I never have to learn the rules of it, Cluedo will remain the Absolute.

By All Means A Good Week

It has been one of those great weeks when you start to tiptoe around for fear of breaking the spell.
Apart from working yet again for free at some East End magazine under the title of "design intern" (for lack of justifying the No Pay policy), the good things just kept on rolling:

1) The last two shifts at my pub have brought me a grand total of £17 in tips, as well as a generous amount of flirtatious talk culminating in the expression "salivating over you". It may sound pretty sleazy, but, hey, it works for me.

2) I bought what I refer to as a Monster Bike from some bloke on the street for £25, when it would usually go for £150 second-hand! I do not want to know where he got it from and did not ask... BUT. It is way too big for me (I am one of those short people), so I will remain faithful to my Gwen and sell Monster Bike and make LOADS of profit. Because I am sometimes the most achieved of capitalists.

3) Next week, I will be working a shift at the pub where all I have to do is sit around and watch Cate Blanchett and Judi Dench act a scene from their upcoming movie. I needn't pour drinks, I needn't serve food, my only task being to oogle them and be starstruck for 5 hours, and earn money for it.

4) The phone company made a mistake and send me loads of money in my account, hence covering the cost of an upcoming pair of winter boots that will rival with my 8-year old DMs, as well as a weekend in Berlin.

5) I have been offered... wait for it... wait some more... (I waited 7 months!)... a position at a design agency!!!! I start a trial 2 weeks as of this monday... wait for it... Paid! And then I will wow them with my dazzling skills as an artworker and a brain, and will hopefully land myself a full-time contract and start a new-life as a proud employee, sucked into the 9 to 5 office job where I crave for the weekend, fight post-lunch drowsiness in front of the computer screen, and live off a MONTHLY paycheck (and not the measly weekly payslips of the pub)!!!!!
I am going to start a routine, and I have never felt so good about myself!

And now that I have boasted the week's little perks, I will shhhh again, because I may get hit by a lorry tomorrow, and would've wasted 20 minutes of my time being all stupid-happy writing this post...

(hooray)

As Full As A Doughnut Hole...

A very ambitious friend of mine has spoken today:

"I see myself in the future as either a bum, or a crook --but a good crook."





I love people with a plan...

The Blog Survey

Just found out that my dissertation is currently on one of my professors’ desks being scrutinised before it goes on the desks of 2 more people who will continue to scrutinise( the thought makes me a little nervous!). However rather than wait for correction , which could still take weeks to come out; I’m currently preparing a summarised report of the findings and will be publishing them in a week or so. Thanks again to all those who participated, published survey and passed the message.

Moving house

Like Rasha, I have been a bit off on posting as well. I did finally hand in my dissertation almost a week ago and since then I’ve been blogged down with work and finding a new place to live which any Londoner can testify is a complete NIGHTMARE. I finally found a place and will be making my move on Thursday from the circus courtyard of Hoxton Market to the hustle and bustle of Brick Lane. I’m experiencing a bit of separation anxiety; almost revelling Old street tube station for example which I have to admit is the ugliest tube station in London and has the worst chicken smell early morning coming out of Lennies sandwiches but you know how the story goes… But I’m also looking forward to the move and having SCHRmmm be my neighbour.

True, I have slacked down on blogging since I came back from Beirut, but not for not wanting. On the contrary, I have been desperately trying to shoo the fog of anxiety and tune down my self-indulgence, but my mind has been stubbornly one-sided.
I would love to rant about the demise of the New Orelanders, the sensationalist headlines of British newspapers ("Tesco Put Porn On My Phone!"), my love of filthy Bethnal Green road slackers and the state of my toes after an unexpected downpour in sandals... But it is the realization that I am now battling against the pearly crop of graduate designers from RCA and StMartins, who are going to steal all job opportunities out there, that has won over. I am not jealous, just resigned. They will be waving those lovely certificates of theirs, and stampeding on my efforts.
But it's OK. I've decided a change of career is in hand anyway. Being a designer is over-rated, and making things pretty for corporate greed is not what I had in mind. Isn't it in moments of utter disillusionment that people have bloomed and turned to the unplanned? I am not a labelled worker. As I said in one of my last-resort applications to a magazine I'd loved to join:
"I can write, design, clean, answer phones, make a delicious cafe mocha, i can illustrate, take amazing photographs, i don't do drugs, but i smoke like a chimney, i cook great Lebanese food, can guzzle white wine, need to poop in solitude, i have designed a whole book about my naked body, and own a bike called Gwen."
(He turned me down: Advetising Sales Executive was still not part of my amazing capabilities.)
To Be Continued...

Grenades: Not for Sale

SCHRmm, a jewellery designer from London, is going through with what I consider to be a breath-of-fresh-air project, with all the commercial shit ransacking our impressionable minds these days. I am the recipient of one of the Grenade pieces (and very very humbly honoured to be so!) and I urge everyone to check out her project (see post of Tuesday August 16th).
Too busy vying to be an employee with a salary, I forget that, before begging to sell my soul to the Capitalist machine, I am foremost my own employee... I don't know if the lack of motivation qualifies as laziness (probably so), but SCHRmm shook me out of my self-pitying mode.

Back To Black

I went to the Whitechapel's Back To Black exhibition today, focussed around contemporary Black art, and, frankly, I was quite touched. Someone there remarked that he had never seen such a strong proportion of black people in a exhibition, as opposed to the masses of white intellectuals that usually roam the sterile rooms. And it kind of hit me that I did not know this culture very well. Apart from the commercialized Malcom X, Black Panthers and Luther King, I do not know their medium of expression and their cultural manifestations. And, especially, I wondered if black people themselves were in tune with their art and cultural history.
Stupidly, I could've asked one of them, but I feared it somehow un-politically correct as a casual (white) reader to inquire about such a predisposition. I know it may sound stupid, but there still is a lot of stigma and controversy around the subject of racial black and white, and, as a general observation of my surroundings, they are quite a closed-knit exclusive community. And having lived in Beirut for so long, where the black community is virtually non-existent, I admit that I have only met a handful in my past year in London, and "black" areas on the outskirts of the city always feel uneasy for the whites...
Why is it still a touchy subject? The recent events of New Orleans have angered me in the sense that the degeneration into anarchy is almost exclusively among the black population: that could easily lead into more stigma about black communities being violent and dangerous, anchoring the prejudice against the black. It is the same with fundementalist Islamists creating a distorted view of milllions of 'regular' muslims.
I don't know where this post is leading to, but basically... what the fuck is going on with this world?! And when the fuck is this all going to end?!
Ouf...

From Middle East to East End

So I'm finally back... and the routine is about to settle in once more: CV, application, portfolio... Send.
"To find a job" as my everlasting mantra, I am battling yet again the purpose of my fierce zeal to work in London. Beirut is beautiful, but EVERYONE nags. Out of all the encounters in Torino of my graduate peers, there was only my cousin, back from 4 years of exile in Boston, who was genuinely loving her job and her life in Beirut. Everyone else is either underpaid, overworked, bored AND is made to feel that they should be grateful to be employed as slaves. I am being applauded for choosing to struggle in Europe, even though, on the downside, I have been actively doing close to zero for the past 5 months. Of course, the grass is always greener on the other side, but I still can't decide which side that might be...
So, yes, there is a general umph and ukh about the fresh crop of graduates, but I've mostly hung out with my graphic design friends from college, and there is still a long way to go for the country to accept design as a valid craft deserving of recognition, and not simply as a luxury. My Business or Finance friends seem to be doing alright, though, but that's understandable... The economy is crap for those who don't work in the economy.



Oh, and there was a bomb during my stay there, and I just wanted to point out how strange the reaction when that happened. Fate. Simply fate, and... acceptance? When there is no verified enemy, it is easy to be made to imagine that they just drop from the sky by no one and nothing. They're just there from time to time, and they make a rubble on some empty street. People wave from behind the news reporters, and wonder if Starbucks will be re-opened the next morning in time for their morning coffee. I was told that people were avoiding going out on weekend nights, since most bombs 'decided to explode' either friday or saturday nights, so Torino was busier on Tuesday than on Saturday. But when the last bomb happened on Monday night, the pattern was disrupted and people went back to the normal weekend drinks. When there is no logic, no culprit, or no way of prevention, there is almost no more discussion, simply... fate.

Oh, and I ate a lot of Moujaddarah and Loubieh Bil Zeit, which was was just perfect.



Batroun bay


Site of Hariri assassination


Torino my love...