Where are we now?

There is a joke about a man who was asked about the secret of the success of his marriage. He replied that he made a deal with his wife. That major decisions are his job & she gets to do all the minor decisions and that was the last decision he made.

The joke might not be funny. It is sort of funny but I think it holds more philosophy than it was intended to do. Or maybe it is just my mood that makes me see philosophy in such a shallow joke.

What constitutes a major decision? We were all introduced to the “starbucks” decisions in the legendary movie “You have got mail”. It is a series of insignificant decisions that lead to a cup of coffee. A process that makes you feel accomplished but yet not life changing (threatening) in anyway.

So, if the type of coffee you drink to start your day isn’t a major decision what could a major decision be?

Education is a life changing decision which makes it “major”, so is career, marriage, having kids or finding a new place to live. Break ups & investments too. The first that comes to your mind when you think of a major decision is probably a crossroads where you have to decide a turn that will decide your destination. Minor decisions are supposed to be the ones we take down the chosen road just to get over obstacles to get to the destination.

Life changing crossroads is supposed to be clear. You are probably confused while deciding, else you wouldn’t have known that you are at a crossroads. Or even you wouldn’t have felt how “major” the decision is.

Between you & me I think “major” decisions are over rated. It is easy to take a major decision regardless how hard it seem to be. After all & out of being confused a person will do what they will over think all the options, will ask for opinions & will eventually take a calculated step into risk. Crossroads decision might feel hard but they are the clearest decisions you can make. You pick a road, that simple. You decide a destination that you know you want, regardless that knowing what you “really” want is a challenge & a major decision in itself.

You know what do I believe are “major” decisions? It is the decisions we take on the go. The ones we don’t think about. The ones that we think are taken to serve “major” decisions already made in previous crossroads.

Those “minor” decisions are taken without taking risk into account, like when you go order sushi & end up in ER. Your lunch of choice would lead to putting an end to your story. And such minor decision would consequently lead to more minor decisions that could be “Life changing”  in so many ways.

Every step of the way is a crossroads. Every step could change our lives. Even the steps we take thinking will lead to the destination we set at the beginning of the journey might turn to be taking us to somewhere we never knew existed.

Every step of the way is a life changing decision. Even your morning coffee. 

The Dedication

I have been writing that thing I call my book for sometime now. The first thing I wrote was the dedication. I know people usually write books then they dedicate it but in my case I dedicated an unwritten book for the reason who made me thought of writing it in the first place.
I am not sure if I will ever finish it. I am not sure if it will ever get published. The only thing I am sure of is he was the reason.

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To the man who took me to the other face of life, the man who made me taste the sweet bitterness of human relations, the man who drew the first line in the new picture of me, perfected the picture and eventually broke his perfection with a messing line, The man who manipulated the thoughts, the feelings, and the soul. To my guide in the valley of shadows, to the shadow that darkened my life, to a few good days and a rule of misery.
To Hamdy, the friend, the father, the lover, the husband, the playboy, and the enemy.

Thanks for everything and thanks for nothing.

Fairies’ Boxes and Black Tales

Once upon a time, there was a little beautiful girl who suffered from everything in life. She was poor, orphan with a witch step mother. The girl has hidden all her life, trying to survive poverty and adapting to the step mother orders. Till one day a prince showed up, to do all the work and magically saving her days.
That was a typical fairy tale, something that can describe Cinderella, Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood , The Beauty & The Beast or any other tale of the long list fed to little girls.
These fairy tales are mostly characterized by some major aspects. In all these stories the girl is always of rare beauty and people around her are tremendously ugly.
The girl is always miserable, either because of being poor, or because of a horrible step mother, or for any other reason. But misery is a pre-requisite in any fairy tale. And this misery is the source of the girl’s nobility.
The girl will never work to end her misery; the girl is always characterized of being patient and adapting to the surrounding harsh environment.
In all these tales, a fairy will interfere to give the girl the proper chance to meet a prince charming, and if there was no fairy then there will always be a magic well, or a wish to finding someone to love. Some how a prince will show up, and when the prince shows up there will not be any problems. The prince will slay the dragons, kill the dark magic and finally save the girl’s life with a magical kiss. The prince will make a princess of the poor girl, and they will always live happily ever after.
Girls are brought up on these tales, tales that value beauty, imply that misery is noble, induce submission, and promote the idea of prince charming.
A girl awaits her fairy tale; her life is a misery without a prince. Beauty is her only weapon and happily ever after is her only goal.
The girl lives believing that solutions are man made, usually in a form of a kiss.
In real life, there are no fairies. And princes have their own troubles. In real life, kisses are not the solution, but probably are the start of problems. In real life, misery isn’t a state of nobility but overcoming it, is.
Fairy tales explain most of the girlish behavior. It explains the fashion passion. The make up trends, the dancing classes, the weight watch, the nagging, the sad look and the competition. For each girl is doing her best to be the princess who catches the princess eyes.
There is not a fairy tale that describes a princess as smart or wise. There is not a prince who fell for a princess’ mind.
There is not a fairy tale without a misery as there is not a fairy tale without a magical kiss.

If only girls knew that there is no Santa, and that Cinderella filed for divorce.

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Once, I was one of those girls. I had the fairy tale theme running in the back ground of my life. I got into most of my relations opting for the happily ever after end. I waited for the magical kiss that infuses life in the princess veins.
But the princes in my tales were never charming, and the fairies were never skillful. And by the end of each tale, I grab the fairy, the memories and the prince, put them all in big black box and throw them away in a deep dark sea.
I remembered my old fairy tales as Brad asked me which one was my prince charming. He wanted to know if I had the ability to choose, which one of them was going to have the happily ever after life with me.
I couldn’t give him an answer; it wasn’t the first time to be asked that question. A friend asked me that very same question before and I couldn’t give him an answer.
But some how his question made me go through the black boxes buried in the dark sea. I started getting each box out to figure out what was missing to make it a fairy tale.
The first box was too stinky that I couldn’t stand the smell. It seems that I have buried the prince alive along with his fairy. I looked at the scattered pieces of memories then I closed my eyes and I drew an end that would have made that tale a fairy tale.
This tale would only be a fairy tale, if that little man gets the chance to re-meet his old girl. It will only be a fairy tale, if he has got the chance to know that the little girl is now a woman. The envy look will complement the happy look I will have on my face.
I buried that stinky box, and got out another. That one didn’t have a buried prince. It had a live fairy with a glittery magic wand. The box had a big vault with secret numbers where I kept a dagger with my blood on and a little pieces of papers of what shouldn’t be remembered. I closed my eyes and made a wish, for the fairy to die and for the prince to vanish.
I moved on to another box, it had “DANGER” engraved on it. It was empty for my surprise. I let the memories go one night but I kept the box to remind me of the man who stepped on my Neverland.
I came across the Brad’s box where I know the woman is buried I asked if she has anything to say, and all what she said was, if it was meant to be a fairy tale he would have finished the kiss dream.

I buried the boxes back in place with all the memories, princes and unattainable happy endings. And if I am to choose a dream, I will never choose any of them. As the man who deserves my tears will never make me cry.

Picture: Galatea Of The Spheres by Salvador Dali

When the spoon becomes just a spoon

There is a point in a relationship when you discover that things have lost their meaning. You suddenly discover that you are not the same person and that this is not what you signed up for. The point where you look at you partner wondering why you fell in love in the first place.
You look back and remember how good it was when you first met. The tingles of like and the first buzzes of love. You go on keeping the little memories, match boxes from places you visited, the plastic spoon you used to share your first bowl of soup and lots of tiny little meaningless things that meant everything at that time.
And you keep going on, replacing the tingles with a soft feeling of security, breaking the uncertainty of anticipation with the routine of a relation.
Then life takes over, instead of you and me it becomes you, me and everyone. It is the stage where the relation is like a little boat in an angry ocean. And in the ocean tiny things disappear, in the storm whispering sweet nothings is of no use. And some how you wake up on the fact that yelling have replaced talking and fights have become the official way of communication. You come to the point to face that the little boat is drowning and then you have to face the fear of facing each other and finding out that you have nothing in common.
The point you both discover that the spoon you kept is just a spoon and that the little things that meant everything belongs to your trash can.
The moment you know that boredom has conquered. And that there is nothing left to be done.
Boredom isn’t an instant thing, it grows over time that I even think it is a parasite that lives on the love plant. It takes as much time as for love to develop but secretly it suffocates the poor plant that seems strong but fails to face the slightest breeze.
We start the relation with the belief that we are not like any other couple. Love always comes in a promotional package that reads genuine that’s mostly believed to be unique too. And this believe of uniqueness has the seeds of boredom and hence the destruction of the relation.
Love relations are genuine but are not unique, we opt for uniqueness in away to prove to ourselves that this relation will be a big boat to stand for the oceans waves ignoring that no matter how big the boat is, the ocean will always be bigger and no matter how strong the boat is, storms will always be fierce.
Out of uniqueness come expectations, expectations that the other will always understand and will always fulfill. And out of expectations come unfulfilled needs and frustrations. And out of frustrations come subsurface anger, and out of anger comes the loss of curiosity and then the boat flips and the storm takes over.
We cause the boredom by refraining from communicating our needs in a clear way, we expect for love to be the answer for the questions that we didn’t ask. We expect the other to read our minds and act the way we want. We push the limits by doing things that we think will make our significant other happy in the time we don’t really want. We suppress anger and accumulate frustration. And instead of facing the storm side by side we face it back to back and when the time for eye contact come we find out that we have lost the aim and that spoon is just a spoon after all.

Picture from: studio.nathanielguy.com

Love!!

It is in what we expect, not in what we really find. It is in the pain not in the joy. Love resides else where but we are prisoners of our own illusions. We choose to fall for the imitations and miss the precious stone.Love is mutual, love is real and love sustains. Love isn’t a way to escape our realities. Love exists, it shows when least expectedLove is a treasure protected by a spell, “those who hunt love shall not find it”, “those who hunt love shall always be in pain”, “those who hunt love shall be cursed for eternity”.We all hunt love, or at least most of us did at least once in life time. The teenager who struggles with hormones hunted love thinking it is the savior. The lonely girl hunted love dreaming of a prince charming saving her. The young boy hunted love to grow into a man. Love was the answer and still it is. It is the answer we sought to explain hormonal rush, severe depressions, loneliness, neediness, emptiness and more unanswered feelings. Instead of answering those feelings we just thought it is love, we used the most appealing answer deceiving no one but ourselves.Sorry, but if love is the answer, the question should be re-phrased.

Status: Re-Phrashing

I don't know why I have the feeling that I should re-write the parts I wrote in the unfinished project I call book.
Suddenly, I started seeing that I was writing from a dark angle, and that things are not that bad.
Re-writing, keeping the idea, but trying to change the factualization process, or may be I am trying to decrease the factualization tone.

P.S.
I am a free bird, I can choose to stay in the beautiful cage for a while, but my home is out in the air .. I wanna go home!!

The Book

The story started around a year ago. I had the urge to write, it was either to get out what I felt in written format or to walk around the streets talking to the public.
I chose to write what I felt down; I couldn’t take the risk of being an officially crazy person. So I started writing, I wanted it to be an article, but ideas kept flowing. So I started calling the article my book. I even gave the book a name; I called it, Notes In Love, Marriage, Friendship and War. To sum up how I see the way the interrelations between the men and women are.
Most of the posts I blog is extracted out of this thing I call book.
Today, someone posted a comment on a forum, mentioning that he will be of the first to buy the book when I publish it.
And as I didn’t write a word for the last couple of months that was my reply

"Actually, there will be no book till I have something to push me to write... So I guess a couple of heart breaks, and one more abusive relation could do the trick... The problem is, I don't fall for the old tricks anymore .. Anyway, I am doing my best to find another impossible relation, that I will get into and completely believe it will work, love again, get hurt again and finally finish what I call book...

wish me luck!!!!"

In Right & Wrong

Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all!! - G. K. Chesterton

I once wrote, describing my paradise that I call Neverland, that it is the place, where right people, comes in the right time, to say/do the right things.The idea kept buzzing in my head as I was analyzing different situations around me, of people who are stuck in between right and wrong as absolute measures. Someone who has been waiting for someone to act in a certain way, that someone is his/her right person and the expected way is his/her right way.But real life situations away from the expectations, this right person never goes the right way. Instead someone else do what you have been longing for. Gives you the unexpected care you needed in a harsh time, smiles when no one else do, listens when the world in full of deaf ears, understands when the whole population turn to be dummy, and accept you when you have a sign reads "rejected" on your forehead. At that time you will be left hanging between definitions of what you think is right and what you thought is wrong struggling against absolute measures of valuing persons/things.
Although they are naturally relative, right and wrong are always being used in an absolute way. Things we want are always absolutely the right things while things we hate or may be just our unwanted things are absolutely wrong. We only apply the relative approach of right and wrong when dealing with others needs, in away where every one of us will defend his right things to be his relatively right only if someone else viewed them as the wrong things. In that case, the first and best defense will always be the relativity of the measure as what's good for you isn't necessarily good for me and vice versa.
Accepting that the being right or wrong is always a relative issue, with no absolute mark to compare will gradually result in more acceptance of what we think are the wrong persons, and more rejection for those we believed the right ones.A wrong person was never absolutely wrong, he is just someone outside our scanning range, or maybe someone who doesn't meet our fulfillment list. Someone who might be far from our expectations, someone we never foresaw a next step with him or towards him. He was wrong because in a relation with expectations, this person lacked something that we couldn't ignore. While a right person was absolutely right because he lacked everything but got the only one thing we expected or wanted to be right.
The right way, is what we think absolutely right for us in relation to a specific time.So speaking in absolute terms, we will be in bliss, if the right person did the right thing, in the right time, and in absolute terms too, any deviation in the above requirements will lead to distress, which is absolutely wrong.
But applying relativity to the subject will lead more to a dilemma, a confusion of pleasure and sadness. A hurt caused by the right person who never acted the right way, a joy caused by the right thing done by the wrong person. And a list of questions; does what makes things or persons right or wrong is the timing. Is there only a right time, and nothing called a right person, or a right way? Or should it always be a combination of all three, or is it always a compromise of only two factors? Is it enough to have the right person doing the right thing in the wrong time, or the wrong person doing the right thing in the right time, or the right person in the right time doing the wrong thing? Is the term relative is really relative or it is just an absolute term? Can having only one factor be satisfying? This list of questions leaves us no where, leads us straight to the point where we started, where expectations go east while reality goes west, with no way to get them in a common way except at the starting point. And we keep repeating and moving in circles, leading to nowhere but the same place we stand. Where we absolutely believe that somewhere out there is the right person waiting for us to do the right thing in the right time.
That's why I called it Neverland!!

The Road Not Taken

Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart. -- Marcus Aurelius


The story was about a brilliant man who was sipping his coffee and telling his friend about a blind date that he was planning to go for. While in his way he hit a girl and instead of going to that blind date he went out with the girl and had fun and kept showering her with his emotions and love, till he went out with her to a big party along with the same friend of his, she broke up with him and he ended up lonely hiding from a horrible girl chasing him in the party.
The other alternative for that man was to go to his blind date and meet a horrible girl who he never want to see again, and then in a try to get him out of that miserable state his friend suggests that he should go to the party and she sets him another blind date with her date's sister, at the party his another blind date turns to be his first horrible blind date and he spends the night escaping her.
Moral of the story, whatever meant to happen, will happen, regardless the choices you make. The road not taken usually leads you to the same end the road you chose led you to. Just when you choose be careful to enjoy every step you take because the real pleasure is on the road itself not in where it leads to.

Cheat Chat

I have spread my dreams under your feet;Tread softly because you tread on my dreams!!
- William Butler Yeats, From "He wishes for the cloths of heaven"


In love as in war, loyalty is a question that some of us fail. In love as in war, some of us cheat. In love as in war, cheating is a betrayal. In love as in war, people cheat for a reason, but in war people cheat for money as war betrayals are highly valued, while in love people cheat for thousand different reasons that includes habit on the top of them.
Why do men cheat? The answer is simple; most of them do to prove that the quasi-God still can have more dedicated worshipers in addition to the one he already gained.
Some men cheat out of habit, they were born to be cheaters, they cheat for cheating itself, just for the thrill of having a double life while some men cheat out of a logical reason. They claim that they are not happy in the relations they have so they sake stability and happiness in the hidden affairs.
Some men cheat out of a philosophical call. They think that they, by cheating, are seeking the perfection they lack in their relationships. Some seek the perfect sex, perfect romance, perfect woman, or even a perfect relation. They cheat out of being perfectionists; regardless that cheating is a flaw of the perfection they seek.
If men cheat out of nature, then women cheat out of defense. Women by nature are not cheating creatures, they as worshipers of the quasi-Gods are loyal to their faith. Cheating on her man is as changing her religion. But even though some women cheat, for reasons that may be similar to those men have, some women cheat to compensate an unhappy relation, some women cheat to compensate neglect, but all of them cheat out of revenge. A woman cheats to make her man drink from the same glass she is sipping. Cheating for women is the last possible weapon to be used against a man, a weapon that she knows quiet well will be killing her before killing him.
Every reason in this world is debatable. Regardless the reasons for cheating on a partner, these reasons are never enough, those who seek happiness in an affair ignore the fact that they will be hurting more than one person in process, they will be hurting their partner, they will be hurting the person whom they are having the affair with, they will be hurting people who are directly and indirectly involved with them. The only winner in the affair game is the person himself who is cheating. He/she will have the whole fun, with minimum loss while people around him will suffer. This person is hiding real motives behind logical sense, if someone is being cheating for finding true love, so why in first place getting involved with a fake love, if a person is seeking happiness in an affair so why in first place getting involved with misery, if a person is seeking perfection why he got involved with defects. Again, every reason is debatable, so there will never be enough convincing reason for betraying someone's trust. There will never be a convincing reason to sustain a relation that is technically no longer exists. There will never be a convincing reason, to escape reality and search for self satisfaction while hurting others.
Always the betrayal will be a betrayal regardless how noble the motive is.