Financially that is. Yesterday, I checked to see if I will get paid anything for the month of October like I am supposed to, and I will! $750 bucks is what I got for the first week of October. That’s it. No more pay cheques, and I am officially unemployed. It might sound bad, and I agree because the thought struck me with a baseball and made me think, “umm, I am poor now, and I have no steady income.”

I got used to having an income. I had a steady income for 6 years, and I decided to quit my job for various reasons, and the main one was my sanity. You can say that I retained my sanity, and I am a bit more normal now. I am still pissed at many issues in the world, but work drove me insane! Now, I keep thinking of where to get money to sustain my self. Well, I don’t have many bills. However, I do have the female itch of going to the mall every now and then. I don’t really like my parents giving me money, although they loved the idea of me quitting my job because it drove me insane, and my mom didn’t like my constant complaints and white hair.

Fortunately, I have a little bit of income. It’s not much, but it is something. This site. This blog of mine is my only source of income. You may think I am money hungry or trying to make money off writing, which I will not deny it, I am. I make money from the ads you click on, and I also make money writing product reviews. I think of it as really low income, but at least I can say that I am not 100% poor. I am not 100% broke. I am just trying to find a better way to make money without having to listen to the man and get a job. Maybe I just don’t want a boss, and want to be my own boss. Is that wrong?

Maybe someday I will end up getting a new job, but for now, I am trying to find my self. Trying to see what I can do with whatever talents I am meant to have. I wish people will understand that having a job is not everything in life. However, trying to be something in this life and challenging your self to work at it from scratch is a lot more rewarding. Maybe some day I will have a million visitors a month, and a steady blog income. I will hopefully get to write as much as I want whenever I want. Also, one of my ambitions is to write a book or be published for the world to read. You may think that having a blog is good publicity, but I want my name to be known. I think I have this major itch that I need to do something recognizable in this life time and live my life knowing that I didn’t waste my talents.

I wish I had all the drive and energy that I can possibly possess to one day make my dreams come true.

Blah Blah, Depressed, Whatever!

I tried time and time again to limit the peer pressure and the addiction to certain amounts of substances entering my body. I didn’t think that being socially accepted was such turmoil over my heath. Today, of all days, I felt a jack hammer continuously hit the frontal lobe of my brain with no mercy at all.

My brain today suffered, and so did my body. I couldn’t stop the pain in my head, and I spent the majority of the day in bed trying to relax and not think of the pain. Every time I tried to get up, I felt dizzy and my head heavy as a rock and I was about to fall. I didn’t know that the addiction has taken a new toll on my life. I never knew it would come to this.

Yes, you guessed it. I am addicted to coffee. I didn’t have a sip of coffee for about 24 hours, and this is what happened to me. Since it is Ramadan, and I am lazy and forgetful, I forgot to drink my cup of coffee in the morning. Few hours later, around 2 pm, my body lost control, and when it did, my brain kept screaming at me, WHY YOU DIDN’T HAVE YOUR CAFFEINE TODAY! HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO FUNCTION!

I stayed in bed till about 6:45 pm. Few minutes before breaking fast, and when I got up, I couldn’t sit down again without feeling I was about to collapse. I kept walking around in the kitchen and living room, and complaining to my mom that my head is about to explode any minute. I wanted to blame someone else other than me for this problem that I engraved in my head.

I despise coffee! It ruined my life!

Now, I am fully awake, but that’s because I drank 2 large mugs of coffee, and I took some Advil400 to get rid of the pain quickly. That’s far too much caffeine and drugs, but what I was supposed to do? It’s either that, or suffer from the pain.

My new objective in life is to stop drinking coffee, and force my brain to function without the need for any stimulants. Amen to that thought! Let’s see how long that will last before I SCREAM from the pain again.

Depressed, Whatever!

Dear Diary,

You are wondering why I am calling you diary although you are a public website for everyone to read. I guess I need to speak to something NOT human and write a few things that I don’t want to directly address someone with since I have been too general and people taking it offensively. You see, lately a lot of people have been emailing me and commenting saying they agree with me or not agree with me. We are back to this white and black view point of things, I guess that is the way people think, which is fine. I don’t want the whole world to agree with me and my way of thinking. I didn’t make this site for someone I don’t know to sway my thinking and making me feel bad about my self or just plain agree with me.

I have been very tired lately with all the constant thinking and I guess I wanted to just talk. However, some people think that is wrong that I do. That I say too many private things. Do I? I barely say anything. I just talk about random life questions, and people think it is private. It’s like people want to silence my thoughts or are amazed of the things I say. I mean, if I don’t talk about life, what am I supposed to talk about? I don’t want to talk about what I did today which is go to work, go home, and sleep. I do other random things, but they are not worth talking about. People don’t care. I don’t care. I read other sites of things that people did and I could care less about it.

I think the problem is that people are not ready to read or hear others speak the truth and to question life. I am not being philosophical. I hate philosophy. It has nothing to do with Arabs or non-Arabs. I have been trying to separate the two, but really, there is no need. At times I wonder why people read my thoughts. What is it about me that grabs people’s interest? I think it is because I say those things that they don’t dare to say. Some think I am dumb for speaking the way I do and I am weak. I don’t think so because they won’t even dare do it because they are scared or afraid “someone” they know will read it. I swear, half the people out there can’t put two thoughts together to make a worthy site. Yet, why am I complaining, I don’t read their sites nor bother reading their comments. I skim through them to make sure they are not offensive, and just approve them. I also get so many emails from people trying to “guide” me.

I swear I read and I am just dumbfounded by what people say. I didn’t stop replying to people because I don’t know what to say. I am just tired of having to argue back at someone’s closed minded opinion of me. I think it is nice that they spend the time writing them, but seriously, why do they bother? I mean, I am a person they don’t know, or do they? Do they know me now? I have been writing online for over 2.5 years now. Does that give anyone the reason to know me? Maybe. I would. If I was reading someone’s daily diary for that long then I would understand them, and relate them. However, some people think that I am trying to represent something beyond the scope of what my site is. That I am taking the name of Arab to something beyond their comprehension. That I am taking the female gender and addressing issues that some don’t question or bother to think of.

Why is that? I keep asking my self why are people so closed minded and will not accept things that are new to them? I don’t agree with them because they took words out of context. They took things out of proportion, and except me to sit down and have a forum of discussion to prove them right. That I am wrong, and they are ultimately right. Do they think my site is supposed to be a democratic forum? That I am a figure head that needs to be either criticized or congratulated based on my speech for the day?

I read and read. At times I think to my self that my site should be a static site with no human interaction and update whenever I receive a whimsical idea. That I should talk about things that interest the masses like music, or movies because reality is too questionable and should never be discussed.

I get so many interesting comments of people criticizing a simple thought and saying, “what about other people who have it worse? Don’t you feel their pain?” I laugh when I read those for the reason that God made humans selfish and only worry about them selves first, and others later. That’s why we are humans. If we all thought about others then there would be no hunger, shelter for everyone, no wars, no class systems, no hypocrisy, no political silent wars, no individuality, etc.

Why am I addressing this issue again and again? There is no need. Humans are afraid of the truth. We all are. We are afraid of trying to address our concerns and be our selves. Why? I don’t know why, but I am not confused because of this. I am confused by bigger issues, and people comment and email me about the stupidest things possible. I questioned things in life that they never thought were questionable.

I know what I did. I am teaching an advanced history class. I don’t just represent useless facts. I question facts. I question human actions that lead to such recorded ever lasting events. That’s what people don’t understand. I think that’s the barrier between me and others.

I wonder what people will think of me now? I don’t care. I never cared, but always wondered how easy it is to hide behind a screen and criticize. I swear I never in my blogging days have ever bothered to go to someone’s site and criticize them. I read many sites, and if I don’t like something, I just ignore and move on. Why should I make someone’s moment of despair any worse? Who am I to do that? What I want to do one day is meet some of those anonymous web people that love to comment on my site and email me. I want to see if they would dare say anything to my face. That would be the day.

I think dear diary that humans are the most interesting people, but I rather talk to you because they don’t want to accept who I am as an individual and make me talk to an inanimate object. See what humans do to one another?

Angry, Blah Blah, Depressed, Funny, Idiots, Random Thoughts, They said what?, Whatever!

I grew up in an environment that is very different than my sister’s. My sister was born in USA, and raised in Canada all her life. She speaks Arabic sometimes like Armenians did long ago in Lebanon (ie. Masculine and Feminine phrases are always mixed up), and she cannot read or write. She recently took a voyage to the middle east, Lebanon to be exact to see the family. She saw and stayed in the Palestenian refugee camp that has been there for 60 years. She heard guns in the middle of the night, she saw how poor people are, no electricity, muddy streets, water to be bought because the sink’s water is not healthy, and people who barely were living day by day. She saw the war torn area of Beirut from the Israeli invasion in July 2006. She saw 2 weeks ago Hassan Nasrallah in his car with people cheering down the streets when the 3 prisoners were freed from Israel and over 120 bodies returned to be buried. She saw so much in 40 days than she did in her almost 13 years of life.

I felt bad for her because she saw everything that our parents have immigrated from country to country to avoid. She saw why we were refugees and separated from other family members. She saw what it is like to be a Palestenian and Lebanese and how such a beautiful land was torn to pieces by political war fare and a neighboring hateful country. I felt bad for her. That’s the reason I refused to go to Lebanon. I refused to go because I didn’t want to see what I lived my entire life trying to avoid and forget. Also, I refuse to go to Palestine because I will not step into a land that is mine but I am not allowed to live in. I just felt bad for my sister, she saw too much, and finally understood.

She came back sad, broken hearted because she saw most of the family. She saw cousins, aunts, uncles, and was happy to realize that the family is big and she had other people that loved her as well. That we are not alone in this world. But she asked, “why can’t we all live together?”

Funny how attached she got in 40 days… that’s what I tried to avoid. I didn’t want the attachment because I didn’t want to go back to Canada with the constant questions, “why God us? What have we done? An entire nation? An entire culture? Why did we have to be spread all over the world and cannot be with the people we love?”

Depressed, They said what?

I was chatting with my best friend Lisa earlier. How I met her 2 years ago through my blog will always be memorable to me as long as I live. She emailed me out of the blue in February of 2006 one evening and told me that she goes to the University where I work and has the same problems as me. It was a meeting by fate. We only met because we have problems. That was really all we had in common.

I met her the next day, and I still remember it like it was yesterday. I left work during my lunch brake in that cold February day, and just went to the Library and found her. At that moment I didn’t make any judgments of the type of person she is. I didn’t think of why in the world I am meeting a person off my blog who believed that she had the same problems as me. Was it really fate?

On that day she told me that she shares the same birthday as me, but is a year younger. I was a bit shocked, but thought, no, this is a coincidence. Why her?

Our hour meeting at noon turned out to be a 2 hour meeting. Maybe even more. I don’t remember going back to work before 2. We talked and talked like we have known one another for years and we were just catching up. That bond of loneliness brought us together. Two torn hearts wondering why life turned out the way it did.

Her story is worse that mine in detail, but similar in actions. What did she do and how much did she sacrifice for someone she loved? What did I do and how much I sacrificed as well? It was too much. Far too much.

Then the days passed by. She lived a completely different life than me. We are opposite people in actions, reactions, and life choices. The more I got to know her, the more I was curious of why she was acting the way she did. Is this her type of reaction to loneliness? I felt that she lived two lives that somehow she was forced into. She was forced to be someone else when loneliness hit her more and more.

I didn’t understand it at the time, but I questioned it in my head. I just learned to be quiet and watch. If I gave advice, what was I going to gain? Would she change the way she is? I didn’t think so. The more she tried to change, the more lonely she felt. The harder she tried to forget and move on, the lonelier she became. She has a heavy shield around her. Worse than mine, or maybe similar. I don’t know. I never was able to analyze my self. All I know, that she expressed her loneliness in completely different ways than what I would have done.

At times, out of selfishness and wishing that I wasn’t the only person who has wasted years of her life, I just listened to her to make my self feel better. I kept wondering that maybe fate brought her to me to learn and feel another person’s pain. That I am not alone, and others suffer worse, and react worse to situations than me.

Me. What about me? I forgot who I am. I look into the mirror every day, and count the number of white hairs at the edge of my forehead. I look at my eyes and see that I have become a sad person. That a smile is hard to get out of me. I laugh because I have to. I smile because it is the only way to show others that I am alright. I can’t even walk alone anymore without thinking, what if? Why me? Why her? Why us? Is this our fate?

She moved shortly after I met her back to her home city. I didn’t miss her much at first. I wanted to test her motives and what type of person she was. All of the sudden she would come and visit. And she constantly did times and times again. I then realized that she would travel the distance for someone she cares about. In return, I would anxiously be waiting for her to come so I won’t feel that I am alone. We share those moments of simple happiness of being together and forgetting why life has turned out the way it did for us. To just forget.

However, earlier this evening, she was telling me that she called him. The one that she loved, the one that broke her heart, the one that made her life miserable for the past 2 years. And then she said to me, “his number doesn’t work anymore. Neither does his work number.” I just said, “maybe he is dead.” Don’t people die? Or we just wish they die so we can finally forget. Obviously my pessimistic answer didn’t please her, but that ounce of hope that she possesses is the same ounce that is left in me that I desperately want to remove from inside my heart. I want to forget. Things are gone. Things ended. I want her to understand that as well so maybe both of us will finally move on. To finally realize that we can’t keep pretending and living a memory of our past.

The memory is dead. It really is.

Depressed, They said what?