On Olives and Sake

I am not writing. I am less than inspired, and less than content. But it was difficult for me to cross off the nausea this time. You learn to turn your eyes, arm yourself with that tiny bit of hope and that growing sense of detachment, and cross off the “little things.” But little things have greater meanings.

من المقرر أن يقوم مجلس الوزراء بإحالة مشروع قانون بدل الخدمة العسكرية للجامعيين داخل سورية إلى مجلس الشعب خلال وقت قصير.

وتشير المعلومات أن مشروع القانون اقترح عدة أشكال لدفع البدل استناداً إلى العمر أي حسب عدد سنوات الدراسة والتحصيل العالي إن وجد..وستكون قيمة البدل المقترحة 300- 400- 500 ألف حسب الفئة.

The government is proposing a monetary fee for those who want to avoid spending 18 months in Military Service. The proposed fee is allegedly between USD 6000-10000.

Let’s start with the obvious question to all my Syrian readers. How many fresh university graduates who have an extra USD 6000-10000 lying around, do you know? This, in a country where an engineer’s starting salary is well under USD 150. Is it plausible to ask, then, for whom exactly is this new legislation?

There are very few people who disagree about the disastrous state of our armed forces in general, let alone the absurdity and cynicism in our National Military Service program. A program that does little more than wipe off 18 months of your youth. My best friend’s brother graduated with excellence as a civil engineer, and he was shipped to the army soon after. For the next two years, the only stories we heard were of him and his friends being abused/abusing fresh recruits. It might be funny to hear the story of him ordering his infantry to search the yard, for two hours under the scorching sun, for 2 male and female ants. But, is it really?

What explanation do you have for such an outrageous legislation? The poorest people of this country are expected to send their sons to serve this army, which supposedly defends our nation, while the well-off can just buy it off? What logic, what disgustingly blatant and abhorrent discrimination is this? For anyone who still has doubts as to whom this “reform” movement benefits, that’s your answer. A spit in the face of all of them who serve, is what this is.

They used to be able to bribe someone (ironically, for almost exactly the same amount), and the government just goes and legalize it. Only in Syria, you fight corruption by systematically legalizing and sponsoring it.

And it’s not like we have no option. We do, many of them; reform it and make it mandatory (for everyone), cancel this charade, or find other ways where these qualified people can better serve this country.

It’s not rocket science. Community service programs as a replacement for military service are applied, with utmost success, in many countries around the world. We’re not asking them to split the atom.

Yes, we all enjoy a free public school system, free health care (say, what you want about the deteriorating quality, it’s free), and we have to give back. Nobody argues with that. Let us help this hapless place.

I happen to be an only child (and thus, relieved from military service), but if I was asked to spend 2 years after graduation doing volunteer community service in areas I am qualified in, I’d gladly oblige. But, this?

You fasten the triggers
For the others to fire
Then you set back and watch
When the death count gets higher
You hide in your mansion
As young people’s blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud

Bob Dylan – Masters of War

When my evening was about to end, the countdown for the New Year back in Syria was about to begin. I called up my friend and we laughed heartily in the face of that dying old bitch. His plan for the turnover was to head for the bathrooms at 11:59 and take a shit that he’s been saving up all day, and then flush it down the drain with the rest of that year.

***

It’s absurd to think of life or time as anything but a continuum, but without these artificial breakpoints, that same life would become unbearable. The turn of a new year, a birthday, a season change or the sun rise of a new day may all be fake, but they give us the strength to dust up all the dirt and toughen up until the next breakpoint.

***

All I want from this next year is for Bob Dylan to stay alive until I finally get to see him live in March, and for the Azzuri to get their act together and win us another World Cup. Everything else can just make its way to hell, slowly!

***

May you all have a wonderful new year!

Over a drink at a friend’s backyard, Aurelie asked me to teach her an expression that I like from my language. 3younek al-7elween (عيونك الحلوين), I said, without thinking.

Back home, this would be the most obvious answer to any compliment one receives. It literally means, “Your eyes are beautiful”. But its true meaning goes beyond that to say, “Your eyes are so beautiful they can only see beautiful things.”

***

I’d never given it a second thought. You use it day in and day out until you barely remember what it means. But, right then, when I attempted to explain the meaning in English, it hit me. That illusive quality in how it conveys beauty in its most basic form, so subtle yet so magnificently poetic. What’s more beautiful than the Eyes?

Language, much more than God, works in subtle ways. I’d never realized how much I’d missed my mother tongue. The simplicity and warmth of familiar words, tones and images. The way laughter feels more radiating and gratifying in my mother tongue. Even your confessions of love, or your words of wrath feel more honest. That, I had always known.

***

That same day I learned a Russian expression for when you haven’t seen someone for a long time, Skol’ko let, skol’ko zim (Сколько лет, сколько зим). It roughly translates into, “How many summers! How many winters!”

It brought a warm smile to my face. For what more beautiful a way to say you’ve missed someone! Yet, alas, it can never be translated, nor imported. It’s exquisitely Russian, just as 3yonek al-7elween is exquisitely Arabic.

***

I’ve been learning Japanese for four years now. It’s a long and tiresome process, frustrating at best. The language, in a way an expression of the culture, is very frozen on the outside, yet once you dig deeper into the word; a world of subtle and hidden meanings is revealed. Nonetheless, part of the frustration is that that world is completely unfathomable for someone who’s yet to scratch the surface, much like me.

One of the most used words in the Japanese language is Ganbatte (頑張って). In its literal meaning it is asking someone to do his own best. But it’s used in all contexts as a lucky charm, a Good Luck of sorts. To do one’s best, is good luck. I can’t think of a word that is more telling of this culture. Ganbatte, is sympathetic yet unwavering, soothing yet at the same time provocative.

You barely think of these words before saying them, but I have no doubt they play times and times again in the back of your head. They bring poetry and a certain sense of intoxication to an otherwise uninspired daily existence.

***

Human emotions are beyond words, most of the time. But in the few instances where language catches up, it brings a thrilling feeling. Arabic’s grandest word for love is Hayam (هيام). Hayam is simply the thin line between love and insanity, where there’s no way of telling, which is which.

***

“Every language we learn, we become one more person,” – Abu Abu Fares.

Growing up where I did, and how I did, teaches one to remain on the silent side. It teaches you to be cautious, and skeptic. To say certain things in your head a thousand times before you put them on paper, or utter them out loud. It also turns your life into a long, and painful, cycle of passive-aggressiveness. But that’s a story for another day.

I was never as outspoken and self-confident as my parents were, or wanted me to be. It might’ve been that the chronic skepticism I grew up in had found its way back to me and turned the process of formulating an opinion, one that I would be engrossed in so far as to defend it in whatever means possible, into a recursive and never ending one.

***

One of the hardest things I’ve had to do in my life was to deconstruct my own complicated relationship with the place I was born in. It has been the dominating theme for most of my postings, and most of my thoughts in the last two years. I think it’s very important to run through the intricate details of that relationship, to sort out all the rational elements from those that are irrational. It’s important to go down different roads and imagine different realities, for both of you. It’s important to contextualize that relationship and to study it from a point far up in the sky in order to see how it reflects on your other relationships, with people or with ideas, and most importantly how it reflects on your bigger relationship with life.

***

I love that place, its people were the faces I grew used to, its language taught me how to laugh, its smells were the first to evoke my feelings of nostalgia, its sea and the mountains in the distance were my first playgrounds. This love is completely disconnected from the realities of that place, and the feeling, I suppose, would’ve been just as overwhelming had I been born in any other corner of the Earth.

Love is a perfectly irrational feeling, one that evokes and manipulates all other feelings for its own satisfaction. It is inherently irrational, and utterly personal and all I can, and want to, do is to simply embrace it as it is.

The reality, however, is always different. The place I know is a disfigured plot of land with people who are crippled by all the ailments associated with poverty, greed and fear. A place that borrows images from here and there for it has no identity of itself. The place I know defines itself by monuments left of generations long gone, for it has no monuments of its own. The place I know cries out tolerance, freedom and dignity while it has none. The place I know has more prisoners than scholars and more presidents, and monarchs than statesmen. The place I know is the embodiment of hypocrisy and the embodiment of the “scandal”. The place I know is a large and long process of self-deception. The place I know is not proud, but pompous, not angry, but hateful. It reeks of irrelevance and stinks of vanity. A bleak spot, in a bleak world in an impressive universe.

***

Flowers still bloom in a sea of decadent matter, and their fragrance will distract you from all other smells when you bend down to look at them. They still feed on the mould, their pollens still fly and other flowers still bloom. But who’s to say that the scent of a rose is more eternal than a septic wound, and who’s to say that the word is really stronger than the hangman’s hands.

***

Oh, what’ll you do now, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, what’ll you do now, my darling young one?
I’m a-goin’ back out ‘fore the rain starts a-fallin’,
I’ll walk to the depths of the deepest black forest,
Where the people are many and their hands are all empty,
Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters,
Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison,
Where the executioner’s face is always well hidden,
Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten,
Where black is the color, where none is the number,
And I’ll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it,
And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it,
Then I’ll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin’,
But I’ll know my song well before I start singin’,
And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard,
It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.

Bob Dylan

Some days I wake up with a sinister feeling brewing inside of me. I wake up because I could hardly breathe, and I reach for my asthma inhaler. I feel shackled by the strings of my own freedom. My books and my little memoirs from times past along with other, even more trivial, lifeless belongings stare at me with a smirk. The desire for things nauseates me, depresses me and leads me to a round of foggy self-lashing. I feel lost and disrespectful to everything I believe in.

***

Some days I sit on my roof and stare at the sky. My mind races through the names of random stars I can recognize, ones that I remember and can not see, names of galaxies I’ll never see, or the moons of Jupiter. A familiar and stressful thought keeps coming back from as long as I can remember. I have seen too many sci-fi movies that the imagery in my head is completely corrupted, and any attempt to close my eyes and imagine these vast distances and spaces is bound to end with the painful feeling of familiarity, like everyday life. But the thought itself races through my mind, cripples my heart and brings tears to my eyes. There has never been anything more fascinating and awe-inspiring to human consciousness than the Universe, and Death.

The comforting thought of Death is what brings my mind to ease. The thought that I, too, will have a chance to experience these split seconds of consciousness before that moment of death, is comforting and fulfilling. How painful would life be without that thought. How painful would life be if the only thing we could do was to sit on a rooftop and let our hearts explode over our inability to comprehend the very thought of the Universe.

I know for certain that I will have these split seconds of consciousness before I die. And then I shall die. Whatever that is, I will come to experience it fully. The experience of Death has no limits. Be it an after life, or complete nothingness, I will come to experience it. I will never watch the Big Bang, or touch the outside edges of an expanding universe. But I shall die, and I shall touch the outside edge of life. Without that promise of an ultimate experience of the unknown, I would’ve gone completely insane.

***

Some days I feel like I am almost too conscious of my youth. I feel a destructive desire to exploit my body and mind until they break down beyond their limits. It gives me a twisted pleasure to stay up for days until my body collapses over the bed, to drink beyond pleasure and to smoke beyond need.

***

On most other days, I drink my coffee and walk to school.

I’ve been away for too long indeed. Long enough to have missed the glorious festival of the “Blogging Week Against…” I shall catch up!

***

Since I am, as apparent in all my 2 cheerful posts since 2005, a very positive person, I will be manipulating the title into “Blogging Week for…” This week’s cause will be Moral Decay (أسبوع التدوين للإنحلال الأخلاقي).

Furthermore, since you and I know how little online campaigns do, my suggestions are to be applied in real life.

***

On the first day of the Blogging Week for Moral Decay, you shall buy a rock and roll album (preferably Are You Experienced? By Jimi Hindrix), and one of them evil devil-worshippers heavy metal (Say, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath). Get your iPod on, let your hair down, make your red underpants very visible and then go have a little walk.

On the second day of the Blogging Week for Moral Decay, you shall grab a hot tea thermos, a Labneh sandwich and some dessert for your outdoor breakfast at the lovely little park down the road. Make sure to smile back at the gloomy faces of people spitting on your footsteps for breaking your fast a little too early.

On the third day of the Blogging Week for Moral Decay, you shall skip school and stay home enjoying the vast porn directory on the internet. Your plan for the day should include nothing but long sessions of Masturbation. Do get some sleep and some food in between these sessions. However, you are not to go to sleep at the end of the day until your palms start growing hair.

On the fourth day of the Blogging Week for Moral Decay, you shall rest from yesterday’s exercise with some Arak (or your choice of hard liquor).

On the fifth day of the Blogging Week for Moral Decay, you and your girlfriend/boyfriend (Whom you are not to be married to!) shall have to experiment with BDSM, role playing, threesomes, foursomes (or your choice of sexual fantasy).

On the sixth day of the Blogging Week for Moral Decay, you and your girlfriend/boyfriend (Whom you are not to be married to!) will have to go to that same park down the road and make out until your balls turn dark blue, then repeat yesterday’s suggestions.

On the seventh day of the Blogging Week for Moral Decay, you shall pretend that you are God and rest. (Preferably with a joint of the finest Beqaai hashish). And then proceed to blog about your week, under the influence.

***

Now tell me my dear fellow bloggers-who-oh-love-blogging-weeks-so-much: How’s that for sticking my morals up your anus.

***

Disclaimer: I personally have done every single one of these at least once in my short life on this planet, and I stand by every word here in both its literal and sarcastic sense.

“Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something.”

Plato

Kasak Abu Fares, this butt truly is an elegant example of the splendor of creation.

“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

Winston Churchill – 1947.

I think Churchill had anticipated well that the age of Internet, with its blogs and wikis, was bound to come.

It’s a remarkable experience to be a part of an age where a post-democratic system is in the making, virtually.

I’ve been an editor on Wikipedia for more than two years now. And two of the fundamental guidelines that are invoked and cited almost daily state that: Wikipedia is not a democracy, and polling is not a substitute for discussion. The main and preferred way to tackle a dispute on Wikipedia is discussion, and consensus. Controversial topics may take days and months in discussion over every word and articulation until there is a consensus on the issue. A valid compromise is one that guarantees that the majority can’t coerce the minority or bully it, and at the same time, that the minority won’t disrupt the collective effort of the group by being disgustingly brushed aside.

Yesterday, Al-Mudawen, a Syrian bloggers portal, announced the first Annual Competition for the Best Syrian Blogs. A commendable effort taken by Al-Mudawen to bolster a Syrian blogosphere shaken by a repressive internet censorship regime and its own internal rifts. I was honored to be selected as part of the Judges committee which will oversee the evaluation of the blogs that enter. I was glad and quick to accept this gesture, not as a “contest” but rather a collective effort to bring more attention and more activity to this blogosphere.

When the contest was announced however, a condition which was inadvertently added stirred a certain amount of controversy among bloggers. The condition read:

The contents of which [the submitted blog] must not dissent from the accepted mores and morals (i.e. sex through videos or photos, hostility to religions, cussing, swearing and bad taste).

Abu Fares was very quick to hit back, quite elegantly, at these ambiguous prerequisites and their premise, and I received a few emails to inquire about it.

The discussion that followed was an interesting experience. After years at Wikipedia, I’ve learned to always start a discussion while assuming good faith, and this was very much inline with that. And while there was a major disagreement on the most fundamental issues, Omar Mushaweh, the Admin of Al-Mudawen, (and the only representative from the site in the contest, it should be mentioned), was quite courteous in understanding the reservations that I, and other Judges, had on said prerequisite. And he readily accepted to remove it.

Yes, I personally wouldn’t like to read blogs that are of abusive sexual nature, or ones that completely disregard and insult other people who may differ with its point of view (be it religious people, or homosexual atheists). But if there happened to be a Syrian blog which advocated that, I wouldn’t mind having it add itself to the competition, only to be disregarded later in favor of blogs with actual substance. In fact, it only helps to show how low quality (in any sense) writing, is readily disregarded by most people.

It is interesting to note, that while there was no consensus on the issue itself, there was a consensus on resolving the issue. Not to make a big deal out of it, but it is a refreshing incidence in a blogosphire that is growing more and more apart, and more and more bitter.

Personal disagreements aside, today I’ve come out with greater respect for Omar, and this experiment as a whole. It is worth noting that while Syria Planet and Al-Mudawen do seem to represent very different currents in the Syrian blogosphere, with Syria Planet more heavily influenced by English blogs, and Al-Mudawen by Arabic ones. This should not be an acceptable status quo. Tensions are bound to happen, but voices, ugly ones included, should be, and must be,  represented.

Internet is not a democracy, but a more fundamentally free forum, in the most extreme expressions of freedom. And thus should be treated.

Please do add your blogs here, and let us enjoy a little experiment, in good faith.

I share my birthday with the most adorable Katia, and celebrate it one day after Rime’s and Mariyah’s. Images and scents of the loveliest ladies surround and dizzy me, what more could a boy ask for!

August 8th, happens to be my birthday, and I shall reserve the right to indulge myself, and you, my dear readers, in this little trip down memory lane.

April 1987, Beit Jeddo’s terrace. I can’t even imagine what thoughts must’ve been going through his little head.

May 1988, Sanaa countryside, Yemen.

August 1989, Beirut, Lebanon.

August 1987.

January 1st, 1993.

Ssshhhhh! (1989)