A Merry Afternoon

As I was cycling home this afternoon, the bells of ChristChurch of Spitalfields were on full blast. There was to be a Christmas Carols mass, and for some strange reason that happens once in a blue moon, I decided to participate. I usually only ever go to church at odd hours when it is eerily quiet and resounds with the echos of my steps. But a bit of Karaoke seemed alright for a Sunday afternoon of Xmas shopping.
And as the violin played, and the choir did its tremolos, and the old and young, and babies, and fathers and teens and bright young ones sang with their croaky voices, with photocopied Bethleem lyrics in hand... i was touched. I was touched because I realized that not once since school did I ever stand up and sang dedicatedly with a hundred others. Not since Independence Day in Beirut, not since Singing classes in Primary classes, not since the school plays of my 5ème... Never does it ever happen that we sing with strangers with the will to hit that note right and melt in the masses.
It was heartwarming for the first two songs, and then I said Amen, and went home, all relaxed and yoga-like, and cooked myself some Tesco Kiev.

++ MISSING ++

Someone stole my white leather gloves tonight at a pub. They were dirty and grey from all the smoking and general mis-handling, but it still pissed me off. Who'd so desperately want a grey pair of white leather gloves?! I had to cycle back without them, and now my fingers are blue. I really need a new pair of gloves. Gwen doesn't work in this weather without them... Shit.

UAE to London

You know when you have so many things to do that you end up doing nothing. I've been very lazy lately, especially with blogging, but i'm hoping to get back on track starting as of now! So i did go to Dubai and my conference talk went extremely well. I was a bit nervous beforehand about speaking to such a large audience, but i have to admit the minute i was up there i enjoyed it so much (i think i may secretly love the limelight) and it felt good to be sharing my work with everyone. People were very much intrigued by the research and the blogging phenomenon in these 3 countries that it went to two newspapers and a local TV (this better not be my only 15 minutes of fame, i swear!). Anyway, the conference in general was interesting, some views were a little extreme and a little disappointing, but there was definitely a general sense of enthusiasm and interest in new on-line movements and journalism, and their projection on our societies. It was a very short trip but also my first time in the Gulf and a relief to be away from freezing London for a while.

0800-Self-Employed

I like being Self-Employed. It means that I can never be Unemployed again. It's technically impossible. If I have no projects to work on, it is because "business is slow".
I still have office hours, but I set them myself: 11.00am to 8.30pm, with a 2 and a half hour lunch break. I can work in my pyjamas and lick my plate with one hand while I type with the other. I can put Brel's Amsterdam on repeat and no one can object. I can scream curses out loud. I can give myself a pedicure while on the phone with a client. I can -and will- claim tax-back on any book or magazine I buy, and that includes OK!, Marie Claire or Harry Potter, because they are my "source material, my inspiration" as a publication designer... Hey, I can even claim tax back on bike mileage: 20p for each mile!
Including unpaid projects (and that accounts to 60% of my workload, but that's OK because they're great projects), I have never had as much work as when I stopped being employed with that demon... I am now working for a clothing label, three magazines, an insurance company (OK, curtesy of my father...) and a jewellery designer (SCHRmm, for that matter).
God damn, I loooooove paying my own taxes! Because they're mine! ALL MINE!!

Sunday Bloody Sunday

Yes, This is how I feel today.
Multiple full-frontal stab wounds from a Hegellian British boy idiocy, but still looking really sleek and design-y...
It would make a wonderful Xmas present from me to me, especially that there aren't actually any sharp knives in my house, which leaves me to slice up my bread loaf with a spoon.

1920s

I was lead impromptu to a little private function at a traditional English pub, where it turns out, the theme of the night was the 1920s. Not being in the least twentified, I convinced myself and others that I was a chambermaid of the time, wearing the ragged old clothes passed on by my rich mistress, a tatty skirt, a grey ageing jumper (which I bought second-hand anyway), and a friend's red lipstick applied in haste to bring on the pout. Oh, and my name was "Gazelle of the Desert"; much more Kamasutra than Surrealist, but I've started to get bored of "Like the country?" at the sound of my name...
In any case, it was all pretty fun, seeing the length to which people fit the glove of the theme. I could imagine a dusty part of their Millenium closets from which they whisk out the feathered head bands, the sequined dresses, lace gloves, bowties, tweed vests and bowler hats. Everyone looked very authentic, and played the part perfectly as they tweaked their accents to match the clothes. Apart from a couple of stray futurists, everyone was very Moulin Rouge. The Three-Piece-White-Suited Count who flew the glass of white wine out of my hand even gracefully replaced it with a shiny white smile and bow of the head. Perfect 1920s manners...
The only fault to the seeming perfection was the anachronistic breakdown of class segregation: the paperboy flirted with the Madam, the mine worker conversed with the Courtisane, the chambermaid (me) with a Baron named Marcus...
Oh, a perfect world...

Hello Unemployment!

I haven't blogged in ages, and an hour after having quit/been fired/being made redundant/driven my boss to insanity/been driven to insanity by my boss/decided I hate design studios/mutually agreed on personality clash - or whatever you want to call returning to unemployment, I had the most uplifting revelation of the year... WORK DRIVES US TO INSANITY.
My mind was sucked into the FullTimeDesigner9to6MonToFriThenWatchAMovieBeforeBed sleep mode and nothing else in the world ticked me, thus the lack of blogging activity. Very simple math, really. When you hate your job/boss/chair/studio music, it becomes your only obsession, and everything else is void. A very sad thing indeed.
Actually, some author -whom I will shortly try to recall- wrote a whole book about the subject of Stupidity, of which a chapter highlights the dictatorship by which earthlings are forced to comply to a life of automated routine into the full-throttle mode of Highest Productivity. "I Produce, Therefore I Am (Worthy)". Anything else, seen as laziness, is abnormality in the Capitalist state of things and beings (the text does run along those lines, but I have allowed myself a little freedom of interpretation, bless me)...
Yes, unemployment now feels bliss.
Actually, my boss was a psycho-tette. Heavily threatened by my presence, and resorting to agressivity and abuse of "boss" power, she loved a smirky comment (and a nervous twitch of the neck). And that little guttural giggle of the mid-life crisis pitch! I tried to play dumb employee, I swear I did! But I realized along the way that I am not dumb. So after being confronted with yet another display of Boss's sentimental bicker and over-zealous anxiety yesterday, I did the undo-able and snapped back. Sha-BAM! I reached the point of no-return, and unemployment was scheduled for 6.30pm. Which felt great... and not... but still great.
Horrible how money and the allure of a paycheck makes us settle into bitterness. Because, even though I was miserable and driven to madness by that Mary-Poppins laugh, I was Productive. I was Employed.

Actually, I wasn't technically employed, and it turns out she is unethically bending the law and liable to a big fat fine, and I to a little compensation, which might be a nice thing to investigate now that I have free time on my hands again.... HA HA HA (my rendition of evil laugh).

And Hello Again blogosphere. It's good to be back!

Blogging in one word/sentence

As you all know im preparing for the conference which is in about 10 days and converting an academic thesis into a lively presentation is definately not, as ive tediously gathered today, the easiest job on the world. So to liven it all up, maybe not the best of ideas but hey i will give it a shot (anything to keep me away from actual preparation), I would like your feedback: If you had to describe blogging in this region in one word or a very short inetersting sentence, what would it be? Im expecting the award might go to Schrmm given her wild imagination but i have faith that all you bloggers are quite the intellectuals and creatives that came about in the results ( a little hint: 42.9% of all of you are educated to a degree of masters or higher and 38.5% are in design, art, journalism and multimedia). So lets start rolling them in....

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.