Kids

I remember the days when I liked slides and parks. Then I started liking swimming (after overcoming my fear of swimming with no orange thingies). Tom and jerry kicked ass. Pink Panther was the shit. Captain Majed was mesmerizing. Grendizer rocked. And it was all about Mousercising too. Scrabble was awesome. Bingo was awesome. Monopoly was awesome-er. Cluedo was the awesomest of all. All that was followed with Ninja Turtles action figures, GI JOE action figures, Action Man action figures (one of mine had hella-cool war paint lines that appeared under the sun). The Atari was sublime. My Sega Megadrive II was the coolest thing on the planet. Computer games were awesome. Sports in school were awesome. I loved my BMX bike with the backward-pedal brakes that made for some sick-ass skid marks in the garden. The same garden that had my basketball rim, table tennis table, and dart board that looked like swiss cheese when I was through with it. And oh my god let's not even get into the opening of Fun Time Pizza. And the best part of it all was sharing all the above with family and friends.

Ah yes, the sweet old memories of being young and having fun.

What the fuck happened though? It's like the entire concept of being a child morphed into this twisted, unedited scene that you would see if Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Wes Craven, Quentin Tarantino, and Stephen King joined forces to make a movie worthy of being awarded the "fuck-me-I-can't-watch-this-shit" award. I shudder at the mere thought of such a movie. It probably looks a little bit like this:

As old as this may make me sound, I'm talking about "kids these days". What the hell happened? Why are kids these days so, for lack of a better word, fucked up? How do they know so much about things that they shouldn't know about till they hit puberty? I have 3 examples to mention here:

Example 1
A friend of mine was telling me a story of how one day, while visiting Jeddah, she was sitting next to the pool in her compound, tanning and doing her thing, and she was joined by her 11 year old neighbour who looks up to her alot. And so a conversation ensued where the little girl was explaining how she and her bff are no longer bff's. And when my friend asked her why, the response was: "Because she called my other bff a lesbian".

Why does an 11 year old know what a lesbian is? As supportive as I am of girl-on-girl action, I didn't know what it was till I was like 15!

Not this kind of girl-on-girl action though.... This I don't support at all.

Example 2
Another friend of mine was telling me a story of how she was at a friend's place, and she was talking to her friend's brother or something like that who is maybe 12-13 years old, and she asked him how school was, and he said that he doesn't like the school, and when my friend asked him why, the response was: "Because all of them drink and smoke and stuff."

First of all, hats off to his parents / teachers / older siblings that did their job in making him understand that these things are wrong for his age (but I will later be touching on the fact that sometimes, good parenting isn't enough). However, the fact that this even happens is quite fucked up. Now I don't want to sound like a hypocrite, I have to admit that I had my first cigarette when I was 13, and my first drink when I was 15-16. But I was so bloody scared everytime I did it and hid it from everyone because I at least knew what I was doing was wrong at my age, and I just wanted to satisfy a curiosity. That's normal. But what is NOT normal is when it is blatant and a even a habit at that age!

It just makes me wonder, how much of a good idea is it to bring a child into this world? I love kids, and I definitely want to have some. But when I think of the challenges that I'm going to have to face as a parent, challenges that my parents certainly didn't have to face, I have to admit it freaks me out on a level compared to the thought of Rosie O'Donnell and Donald Trump bumping uglies and having offspring. And I can't imagine why anyone would even want to picture that. But unfortunately, someone did:

Example 3
Around a year ago, I was in Beirut for vacation. It was just me and my younger sister at home. I was sitting watching TV in the living room, and I heard the doorbell. My sister opened the door, and I could hear that it was a friend of hers.

Friend: "Is anyone else home?"
Sister: "No just me and my brother."
Friend: (with enthusiasm) "Really? Your older brother is here?"
Here, I started to feel weird.
Sister: "Yeah he is"
Friend: "Can I meet him?"
I felt even weirder. So a girl walks in, looking like she just came out of Skybar. She was dressed in a black top that showed off a good amount of skin, skin tight jeans, black boots, and full make-up. Had I seen this girl in a club I would have tapped that, because the way she looked I would have assumed she's at least 21/22, but I knew she wasn't since she was my sister's friend. So she comes up to me, and she extends her hand the same way the Queen of England does (her palm facing downwards), and she says in the most seductive voice she could pull off: "Hi, Rasha." I gave her a quick hand shake along with a very cautiously spoken "Hi, Raif". Because on that day I didn't really feel like going to jail for being a pedophile.

Rasha: "It's nice to meet you."
Me: (cautiously) "You too."
Rasha: "So umm, how old are you?"
In my head: "Old enough to be your father you freak!"
Me: (cautiously) "25." (at the time)
Rasha: "Mmmhmm... Well, it's nice to meet you."
And she began to turn around and walk away, but as she did, she gave me a look that's too difficult to describe. But it looked exactly (and I really do mean EXACTLY) like this:

And by the way. I later asked my sister how old slutty Rasha was. She's 16. And that's simply not cool. I'd love it if she gave me a call in 4-5 years though. I'd love it even more if the girl in the picture gave me a call in 4-5 minutes.

So what can we blame this deteriorating sense of innocence on? The internet explosion and the growing ease of accessing mind-corrupting filth that shouldn't be accessed at a young age? Parents becoming more open minded towards how they should raise their kids and what they should and shouldn't be allowed to do? I'm all for partying and doing crazy stuff and going to extremes and messing around and all that, but there's an appropriate age for everything.

Let's side-track a bit. I recently saw a movie called Orphan (2009). This movie is fucked up in every sense of the world. I'm not much of a horror / thriller movie-goer. But this movie was deeply twisted, and I just couldn't stop watching till it was done. It talks about a family that adopts a child called Esther (played by Isabelle Fuhrman who was 12 at the time). For those that have seen it, they know exactly what I'm talking about when I say deeply twisted. (WARNING! The next paragraph ruins the movie, but you should consider reading it anyway).

In the movie, Esther appears to be a 9 year old child, but in fact she's a psychotic 33 year old and just looks that young because of some sort of growth deficiency. Here are a few of the twisted things she does: kills people in front of her step-sister "Max" (played by Aryana Engineer who was 8 at the time, and is by far one of the most adorable kids I have ever seen), threatens to cut her step-brother's dick off, breaks her own arm and makes it look like her step-mother did it, tries to burn her step-brother while he's in his tree-house, kills a woman working in an orphanage, tries to shoot her step-sister and step-mother, tries to stab and drown her step-mother. At one point in the movie, she tries to seduce her step-father. And by seduce, I mean she waits till he's drunk on wine, puts on black dress, a fuckload of makeup, sits next to him, and starts kissing his neck. And when he doesn't respond positively, she ends up stabbing him to death. Now I don't know what's more disturbing. The fact that the parents of a 12 year girl old allowed her to play this role? Or is it the fact that the parents of an 8 year old girl allowed her to co-star in this movie and witness enough horrendous shit to scar her for life? I swear to god, when I watched little Aryana reacting to the things that she saw her step-sister do, it was like watching real emotional trauma in the making. She looked deeply disturbed. And I don't blame her. At 26, even I was deeply disturbed, enough for me to repeatedly say to myself throughout the movie:

And that, dear friends, is a fucking understatement.

However, let's ignore the horror for a while. The concept of the movie itself, as twisted as it may seem, represents the reality that somewhere in the world, there ARE some kids out there that are psychotic killers at heart. And I am a firm believer that every concept portrayed in a film (apart from sci-fi) is a representation of something real and very much possible.

Now picture your child in the same school as Esther................ Yup.

So how do we protect our to-be borns? You don't need research to realize that kids today are subject to the influence of so much more than just you and your wife/husband. If anything, I feel that in this day and age, the influence that kids have on each other has just as much of an impact as their parents have on them, if not more. And if you happen to enroll your kid in a school with Esther-like psychos, that makes for a severe FML situation. Let me pose a few questions to bring this little baby home:

What do you do if you found out your 10 year old kid was offered a cigarette by their friend, and smoked it? And liked it?
What do you do if they were offered a drink, and drank it? And liked it?
What do you do if they were offered any one of a million different drugs, and snorted/smoked/injected them? And liked them?
What do you do if your 15 year old son got a girl pregnant?
What do you do if your 15 year old daughter was impregnated by some overly hormonal fuck in school?
What do you do if you found out your 12 year old daughter was making out with another girl behind the bleachers? And liked it?

These aren't rhetorical questions, I'm seriously looking for answers here. Because I will bet money on the fact that you can be the best parent in the world, and your child might still do all of the above and then some. And that may have nothing to do with you, although you WILL spend the rest of your life blaming yourself and thinking that you have failed as a parent. But in reality, because of the way the world has become, some kids are beyond parental or even professional help.

And to think that people question me and look at me funny when I say that I believe in hitting your kids when needed. Now don't be all like: "that's child abuse!!!!!" Fuck off. Child abuse would be if I put my son in a corner and Mike Tyson his ass to the ER.

I'm talking about a much less severe form of beating. The one that hurts much more emotionally than it does physically. And sometimes, you don't even need to hit, a little scare can do the job. When I was a kid, I remember my dad removing his belt and doing a scary snapping sound with it because I intentionally didn't do my homework. It sounded like an alligator snapping it's teeth at me. It was enough to scare my puberty away. But it worked. He didn't even have to hit me, he just had to convince me that he would.

I know for a fact that I'm going to be a good father. And I also know that there is no way I'd marry a woman that won't make for a great mother. But like I said before, even that, in certain circumstances, may not be enough. I'm praying that my kids never reach that extreme level of insanity. But if they do and all other methods fail, I guess that maybe, for their own sake, we need to dust off those boxing shoes, tighten up those shorts and gloves, and go a few rounds to beat some sense into them. Because the thought of my son / daughter turning out to be a 15 year old sex-crazed and immoral alcoholic druggy regardless of what my wife and I do is the most severe FML situation of them all.

Enough with the Hypocrisy

Recently there was this forward that made its way to my blackberry from around 10 different people. Something about forwarding this message to all my friends if I truly loved God. First of all, I'm amused by the fact that more than 1400 years ago, religion was communicated to us through the Prophet Muhammad, and now it's through blackberry. Glad to see heaven is up to speed with technology. Hope they have good internet there.

I responded to everyone who sent it to me with a lol. Some people ignored my lol. Others asked me why i lol'ed. Some people were even insulted and asked me if i didn't love God, or if I didn't even believe in the concept of a God in the first place. And I just had to laugh at how ridiculous the world has become. This is a conversation between me and one of the people that forwarded the message:

Person: *forwards some mess about forwarding the message if i love God*

Me: lol

Person: what?

Me: the thing about God

Person: everyone is sending it

Me: so u just sent it cuz everyone else is doing it?

Person: i have nothing to lose although i don't believe in it. and so i don't feel guilty

And I told the person that I'm choosing to stop this conversation there, because of the fact that I was going to be brutally honest, and this specific person can't handle brutal honesty.

Now there is so much that is substantially wrong with this entire conversation, but let's start with this: If you need a message to remind you of God and the fact that you love him, then something is wrong with your "belief". And if you give me an excuse like "everyone is doing it", then that makes it even worse, because it shows that the primary goal you had in mind was to belong to the fad, not to show your love for God. And then, the finale: "i have nothing to lose although i don't believe in it. and so i don't feel guilty." Are you retarded? So you needed a message to remind you of God, then you forwarded the message because it's the hot thing to do these days, and now you're telling me that you don't even believe in it?

I'm not exactly the most religious person, but at the same time I'm an extremely logical and unbiased thinker. I don't NOT believe in religion or think it's bad, and I certainly don't consider people who are religious and hold on to the meaning of faith as ignorant or mislead. To each his own, it's a free world, and everyone should live his life in the manner that he/she finds convincing. But what I do not tolerate is hypocrisy. And therefore, I cannot stand people who claim to be religious (when they are actually not), and then only remember religion when they receive a message like that.

They're not sending it out of wanting to pass the message along. They are sending it because of the guilt trip that they would go through if they don't. That alone tells me that they don't really care, because someone who is truly religious wouldn't have a reason to feel guilty.

What I also hate is how religion is being taught in some countries. This happens actually mostly with Islam. I feel the way Christianity is taught is generally so much more sensible, and the method that they use tries its best to make sure that you love religion and God, and for the right reasons too. When I think back to the teachers that taught me Islam, I remember three things that I believe were huge douchebag mistakes on their part (and I'm sure MANY people will relate):

1. I was always taught to fear God, I wasn't taught to love him.

2. The consequences for not doing my homework or learning my lesson in Islam class were punishments that, as a 10 year old, seemed scary to me. Therefore, these teachers killed my eagerness to learn my religion, and instead made it this thing that I HAD to do just to avoid the punishment.

3. At the end of the day, holy books are the "words of God". And certain things are left open for interpretation and to the person's own judgement. Therefore, it is completely wrong for me to learn the meaning of the verses of the Qur'an through someone else, because all I am getting is that person's perspective, which is a function of his teacher's perspective, which is a function of his teacher's perspective, and so on and so forth, until we arrive to the first teacher of the Qur'an, Prophet Muhammad. Assuming the average length of a generation is 30 years, that means that the meaning of the Qur'an that I am given by my teachers who got it from their own teachers (etc...) has passed through more than 45 generations. Quite frankly, that's alot of filtering, and I really question how much of the meaning was lost in interpretation. And this concept applies to all religions with scripture and books.

All this makes me wonder how the world would have turned out if people were given enough education for them to be able to at some point pick up their respective holy book and read it for themselves, and understand it from their own perspective rather than someone else's. After all, isn't that the point of religion? To find a connection with God that is your own and no one else's?

Food for thought people...

Muse - The Resistance

If you are a Muse fan, hats off to you. If not, you are missing out on some of the most powerful music of our time.

I came across Muse in 2001, a friend of mine let me listen to a song called "Micro-cuts". As I heard Mathew Bellamy's signature falsetto voice rip apart everything in its path, I was left in awe (and maybe even nearly in tears) by the sheer raw power and feeling of their music. Being a musician-by-hobby myself, I heard more than just a unique voice, I heard highly complex and technical music structures. I heard intricate timelines and progressions. I heard music literally being redefined as just three guys from England managed to find a way to blend progressive rock with space rock with alternative rock with glam rock with hard rock with electronica with indie with classical music. The result of this amalgamation is some of the greatest music to have ever graced our speakers. At least, that's the way it sounds to my ears.

In light of the above, recently I finally found time to listen to Muse's latest album (2009) called "The Resistance". Critics generally regard Muse's previous album "Black Holes and Revelations" (2006) as their greatest work to date, and was even considered a flawless masterpiece by some. IMHO, the new album has blown the previous one out of the universe.


As much as I consider myself someone who is well spoken and is able to express himself quite effectively, what I experienced is incredibly diffcult to put in words. The infusion of different musical elements all at once is sometimes so overwhelmingly brilliant that, if you have what I call "music OCD" like I do, it forces you to rewind and listen to a certain section or part again. And again. And again. Just so your mind can comprehend what you heard.

I won't bother going into an analysis, because no matter what I say, it won't do justice to the brilliance of this album. The songs that stand out are, well, all of them, each for their own reasons. But I will point out that "United States of Erusia" and "Guiding Light" are exceptionally powerful songs. Also, the last 3 songs in the album ("Exogenesis" Parts 1, 2, and 3) represent some of the most tremendously mind blowing music I've ever heard. They are an absolute perfect ending for a sublime album. I already want more.

Dr. House

As much as I love the show and actually was addicted at one point, I have to point out the obvious fact that every episode follows the exact same pattern:

Scene 1
The episode's opening scene is a park. Kids are running, playing, screaming, shouting, falling, crying, getting kidnapped by strangers with false promises of candy and ponies, you know, the usual. A mother and her friend are watching their children play as they talk about their feelings. Then one of the mothers starts to cough uncontrollably. Her friend becomes alarmed and asks her if she's ok, handing her a bottle of water. The woman drinks, and apparently seems fine. Then we hear screams, and the camera shows that her kid has fallen off the swing and isn't moving. So we understand that this was a genius move by the story writers to make us think that the episode will be about the mother, but her coughing fit was a deliberately created diversion from the real subject of this episode, the boy that fell off the swing. People watching the episode are so excited now, it really is beyond description. Then the mother runs to her son, who finally sits up, and apparently has a little gash on his leg, doesn't even require a plaster. As the mother breathes a sigh of relief, we hear more screams, and the camera shows a man walking out of a bank who just had a seizure and collapsed. And then we realize that this was a double-deliberate-diversion. The story is really about the man with the seizure. Oh my god, the excitement is unbearable...

Scene 2
So the guy is now in the hospital, and apparently he's dying because of liver failure, but no one knows what's causing it. Dr. House limps into the room, insults everyone along the way (usually some comment regarding their utter incompetence). Then he asks the patient a completely irrelevant question like "do your nails grow at a rate of more than 1 mm per day?" Before the patient answers, he goes into a seizure.

Scene 3
The patient is subjected to every possible test known to mankind (justified or not), and something has to go horribly wrong during one of the tests, like the patient would suddenly start bleeding out of his belly button during a standard MRI scan. And then he would have another seizure.

Scene 4
Random scene where hot female doctor and blond fruity-boy doctor talk about their feelings.

Scene 5
House and his team still haven't figured things out. The black doctor dude is pushing for the most obvious course of action, which is to get the patient a liver transplant. But House refuses due to some obscure medical reason that we will never understand. Black doctor dude gets pissed off and storms out. And the patient has another seizure.

Scene 6
All they have up until now is a board with a list of unrelated symptoms and a dying patient. Then House would have a conversation with a janitor or a garbage man or some other random character (as he displays some completely useless skill that he learned over the years like balancing a small ball on his walking cane), and the random character would say something like "yeah, I guess that's why the French decided to build the Eiffel Tower", and then House would get that focused look on his face as the camera zooms in on his facial expression (patient has another seizure) and he repeats the sentence slowly to indicate that he is in the process of finding the solution. House also learns that the patient is about to have the liver transplant against his orders. It was approved by hot doctor boss after black doctor dude convinced her that House is an incompetent asshole who is only interested in his ego. What a douche.

Scene 7 - The Finale
House crashes into the operating room to stop the liver transplant, much to the dismay of all doctors and nurses, who point out House's overly unorthodox methods and total unprofessional behaviour (which is stupid, since after so many episodes, they should have by now learned to shut the hell up and watch House do his thing). So then he takes a syringe and sticks it into the guy's testicles and withdraws some odd looking liquid, and then explains how the guy has some 56-letter word disease that only one in a trillion people get if they had gone to the moon and had sex with a meteorite. He also proves that the liver transplant would have killed the patient, and the black doctor dude hangs his head in shame, because the score now is House 87, black doctor dude 0. Of course, there is absolutely no explanation as to how the reference to the Eiffel Tower in the previous scene allowed House to reach his conclusion. But I guess he's just cool that way.
==============================================

And by the way, this show also turns almost everyone into a hypochondriac. I've seen so many episodes to the point that every time I cough I expect to either go into a seizure, rupture a kidney, or start bleeding out of my nose pores.

But for some reason, I still continue watching the show. Go figure...

Mental Sedation

Amidst the chaotic world we live in is an inner peace that few of us find these days. The world isn't chaotic only in the sense of living in a metropolitan city versus living on a farm. I'm talking the about the kind of chaos that distorts your view of the world, and distorts your view of the things that you love, want, and need.

Our problem is social conformity. After thousands of years of civilization, we have arrived at a set of (global) socially acceptible standards that guide our lives on a day-to-day basis, from the moment we wake up till we fall asleep, and most probably in our dreams as well. But social conformity is a double-edged sword.

I don't want to take away from thousands of years of experience and trial and error on what works for society and what doesn't, but I can't help but stop and think that maybe we are living a life that is guided by too many "rules" to the point that we now willingly submit our right to free thought and just go with the flow. I'm not saying that all principles and values stressed in our society are bad; killing is certainly bad. Stealing is bad. Willingly hurting people is definitely bad. And beyond the obvious bad things, there are many standards and values that are specific to a culture. Even with the westernization of the Arab world, many Arabs still tend to be less open to the idea of sex before marriage (not necessarily because they don't want to, I feel it's just a matter of compliance with what the Arab world considers as "right"). A Westerner might consider this a laughable idea. But the Arab may also look down on the Westerner as being shallow and sex-driven. In such instances, clearly there's no right and wrong. All we have is what simply "is". The Middle East is more conservative when it comes to sex than the West. And there is nothing wrong with differing views and cultures.

The hidden problem that so many people experience (and very few see) is how they live their lives. On all topics, big and small, our opinions and values and standards tend to be a function of how our parents raised us, how our friends influenced us, the experiences we went through, and what society believes is generally "right" or "wrong". Some people may feel that that is how things SHOULD be. We SHOULD be thinking and processing and analyzing within those rules, otherwise we may come up with opinions that break the norm, and we would be considered as weird, or worse, outcasts. Does that seem logical though?

My problem with the world is that I look around and see people consume all sorts of information from all possible sources. Among this information we find many opinions and views. And what tends to happen again and again is that people would take the opinion of others and run with it like it's what they believe. But what happened to your own opinions? What happened to thinking? Why are so many people so mentally sedated to the point that they are very much like a herd of sheep: told what to eat, how much to eat, where to eat, where to stand, when to sleep, and where to sleep? The area that the herd stands in represents the boundaries that we should stay within at all times. The dog represents the forces (social norms? religion?) that put (or is it scare?) us back into place whenever we try to break out of our boundaries. And then of course, there is the shepherd, the ultimate force (puppetmaster?) that guides (controls?) the herd's lives. But there is a key question here: who is this shepherd? Is he real? Is it God? Is it just an idea?

Depending on how that question is answered, the mind is instantly bombarded with a million more questions. And the better portion of those questions will remain unanswered. However, there's no harm in pondering. The point though, is to ponder using your own mental power, not someone else's. Things shouldn't be taken as is just because society has been doing it that way for ages. Even after thousands of years, society can still be wrong. If society was so right, then why do we have so much chaos in the world today?