It is sad when one has to say bye to a stage of ones life. Going to university, leaving university, starting a job, leaving a job...so on so forth...you get my drift. Bas I think one of the saddest things is losing a friend, well not so much losing bas more deciding that you can no longer be friends with each other.
I would like to make a note here, this is NOT a personal entry, I am not talking about any friend in particular in MY life, I am just considering something.
So back to the point I was making, is that there are friends you have that at some point you realise-no this not working. I had friends of mine from high school who after the first three months at university I was no longer able to communicate with them, or them with me. We just had grown apart. Natural...and as thus not so upsetting. But I think when it is quite upsetting is when you just don't know why...bas you no longer like someone. You still love them-as a friend or as a lover-bas you just don't LIKE them. I used to hear that all the time in movies and what not and never really understood it. But it makes sense...it really does. You can love someone and love em deeply..bas just not like em very much. They are either to loud, or to quite, to open or emotionally constipated. Whatever the reason, you just don't want them part of your life anymore, and I think that is one of the saddest changes that happens in ones life. But also one of the healthest!
04 September 2006
The Crocodile Hunter
Stephen Robert "Steve" Irwin
(22 February 1962 – 4 September 2006)
-Was an Australian environmentalist and television personality. He was best known for the television program The Crocodile Hunter, an unconventional wildlife documentary series which he hosted with his wife Terri Irwin. Irwin's personality and outrageous antics in the series made him an international celebrity. He also owned and operated the Australia Zoo at Beerwah in Queensland.
Death
In the early afternoon of 4 September 2006, Irwin was fatally stung in the chest by a stingray barb off the Great Barrier Reef in Australia while filming an underwater documentary.
Shortly after 11:00 a.m. local time, Irwin was filming in the Low Isles near Port Douglas, north of Cairns, Queensland, Australia, where he was stung either through his heartor through the left side of his chest and suffered cardiac arrest. After he was stung, his crew called for medical help and the Queensland Rescue Helicopter responded, taking him to Cairns Base Hospital. However, Irwin was immediately pronounced dead at the scene. The Queensland Police Service notified his family and released a statement for the media concerning the event.
16 August 2006
Pictures
My parents have moved back to Amman...having to be forced out of Beirut...anyway I had put pictures of my friends on the fridge-am that sort of person-when the house was all mine...bas since they are back I decided to bring the pictures down...so I put some up on my mirror in my bathroom. Thought it was cute...and my mirror is huge fa doesn't really get in the way.
BUT....
I realised inno it is kind of strange...to be brushing my teeth, combing my hair, getting out of the shower and having my friends there WATCHING! I am sure we have all heard the myth that when camera's first came out-and in some cultures around the world-they believe that when you take a picture of someone you take a part of their soul...also in Harry Potter books the pictures move...fa the other day as I was coming out of the shower and wrapping myself in a towel I looked up and saw them all-looking at me...and it kind of freaked me out. What if their eyes looking out at me could transfer to the real person what they were seeing???? What if all them had just seen me NAKED! I was creaped out...and I still am...bas somehow I didn't take the pictures down...lol...think that this all part of my exhibitionist side of my personality...but think about it would it not be freaky to think that all the pictures of me out there in the world-stuck on my friends fridges...put in frames...could bring me the images of my friends. While they sat in their living rooms watching tv, cooking lunch...coming out of SHOWERS...it would be fun...like being a fly in their houses...aw even better like being an invisible woman able to travel around the world just by having my picture taken and stuck on someone's fridge, bathroom mirror.
BUT....
I realised inno it is kind of strange...to be brushing my teeth, combing my hair, getting out of the shower and having my friends there WATCHING! I am sure we have all heard the myth that when camera's first came out-and in some cultures around the world-they believe that when you take a picture of someone you take a part of their soul...also in Harry Potter books the pictures move...fa the other day as I was coming out of the shower and wrapping myself in a towel I looked up and saw them all-looking at me...and it kind of freaked me out. What if their eyes looking out at me could transfer to the real person what they were seeing???? What if all them had just seen me NAKED! I was creaped out...and I still am...bas somehow I didn't take the pictures down...lol...think that this all part of my exhibitionist side of my personality...but think about it would it not be freaky to think that all the pictures of me out there in the world-stuck on my friends fridges...put in frames...could bring me the images of my friends. While they sat in their living rooms watching tv, cooking lunch...coming out of SHOWERS...it would be fun...like being a fly in their houses...aw even better like being an invisible woman able to travel around the world just by having my picture taken and stuck on someone's fridge, bathroom mirror.
Ironic
We all know the song...isn't it IRONIC...well today I found something that could go brilliantly on the list...having an abundance of ciggies and no form of lightage for them!!!! I am frustrated with the fact that my parents smoke...yet I can't find a lighter/match/oven igniter...ANYTHING...to light my BLOODY FAGS!!!
As the magnet on my fridge states:
Give the Bitchy Nicotine Queen her damn Cigarettes!
As the magnet on my fridge states:
Give the Bitchy Nicotine Queen her damn Cigarettes!
12 August 2006
Just had to Post this...
As usual I am doing my usual reading of newpapers online...Guardian, AlQuds, and then Haaretz-for good measure-and I come across this article...Bleeding-heart ignoramuses
By Julie Burchill Not sure what I think of it...well I do know what I think of it...typical Israeli tripe...bas thought it would be interesting for people to read what this author said...the quote that most stands out: "That Israel is fighting the frontline war, on behalf of the freedom and civilization of all of us, against the very real evils of shari'a law never seems to occur to these bleeding-heart ignoramuses." She then goes on to say: "The conflict has sent this tendency into overdrive, with not just the usual Masochist Hacks For Mohammed such as Robert Fisk (beaten up by Islamists, says they were right to do it) and Yvonne Ridley (kidnapped by Islamists, then became one) getting their chadors in a twist about big swarthy men with tea-towels on their heads treating the West mean and keeping it - in their case at least - keen."
I don't know if one should laugh or cry when this read this. ENJOY!!!!!
By Julie Burchill Not sure what I think of it...well I do know what I think of it...typical Israeli tripe...bas thought it would be interesting for people to read what this author said...the quote that most stands out: "That Israel is fighting the frontline war, on behalf of the freedom and civilization of all of us, against the very real evils of shari'a law never seems to occur to these bleeding-heart ignoramuses." She then goes on to say: "The conflict has sent this tendency into overdrive, with not just the usual Masochist Hacks For Mohammed such as Robert Fisk (beaten up by Islamists, says they were right to do it) and Yvonne Ridley (kidnapped by Islamists, then became one) getting their chadors in a twist about big swarthy men with tea-towels on their heads treating the West mean and keeping it - in their case at least - keen."
I don't know if one should laugh or cry when this read this. ENJOY!!!!!
06 August 2006
V-day
I come from the "down there" generation. That is, those were the words-spoken rarely and in a hushed voice-that the women in my family used to refer to all female genitalia, internal or external.
It wasn't that they were ignorant of terms like vagina, labia, vulva, or clitoris. On the contrary, they were trained to be teachers and probably had more access to information than most.
It wasn't even that they were unliberated, or "straitlaced," as they would have put it. One grandmother earned money from her strict Protestant church by ghostwriting sermons-of which she didn't believe a word-and then earned more by betting it on horse races. The other was a suffragist, educator, and even an early political candidate, all to the alarm of many in her Jewish community. As for my own mother, she had been a pioneer newspaper reporter years before I was born, and continued to take pride in bringing up her two daughters in a more enlightened way than she had been raised. I don't remember her using any of the slang words that made the female body seem dirty or shameful, and I'm grateful for that. As you'll see in these pages, many daughters grew up with a greater burden.
Nonetheless, I didn't hear words that were accurate, much less prideful. For example, I never once heard the word clitoris. It would be years before I learned that females possessed the only organ in the human body with no function other than to feel pleasure. (If such an organ were unique to the male body, can you imagine how much we would hear about it-and what it would be used to justify?) Thus, whether I was learning to talk, to spell, or to take care of my own body; I was told the name of each of its amazing parts except in one unmentionable area. This left me unprotected against the shaming words and dirty jokes of the school yard and, later, against the popular belief that men, whether as lovers or physicians, knew more about women's bodies than women did.
I first glimpsed the spirit of self-knowledge and freedom that you will find in these pages when I lived in India for a couple of years after college. In Hindu temples and shrines I saw the lingam, an abstract male genital symbol, but I also saw the yoni, a female genital symbol, for the first time: a flowerlike shape, triangle, or double-pointed oval. I was told that thousands of years ago, this symbol had been worshiped as more powerful than its male counterpart, a belief that carried over into Tantrism, whose central tenet is man's inability to reach spiritual fulfillment except through sexual and emotional union with woman's superior spiritual energy. It was a belief so deep and wide that even some of the woman-excluding, monotheistic religions that came later retained it in their traditions, although such beliefs were (and still are) marginalized or denied as heresies by mainstream religious leaders.
For example: Gnostic Christians worshiped Sophia as the female Holy Spirit and considered Mary Magdalene the wisest of Christ's disciples; Tantric Buddhism still teaches that Buddhahood resides in the vulva; the Sufi mystics of Islam believe that fana, or rapture, can be reached only through Fravahi, the female spirit; the Shekina of Jewish mysticism is a version of Shakti, the female soul of God; and even the Catholic church included forms of Mary worship that focused more on the Mother than on the Son. In many countries of Asia, Africa, and other parts of the world where gods are still depicted in female as well as in male forms, altars feature the Jewel in the Lotus and other representations of the Lingam-in-the-yoni. In India, the Hindu goddesses Durga and Kali are embodiments of the yoni powers of birth and death, creation and destruction.
* * * * *
Excerpted from The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler.
It wasn't that they were ignorant of terms like vagina, labia, vulva, or clitoris. On the contrary, they were trained to be teachers and probably had more access to information than most.
It wasn't even that they were unliberated, or "straitlaced," as they would have put it. One grandmother earned money from her strict Protestant church by ghostwriting sermons-of which she didn't believe a word-and then earned more by betting it on horse races. The other was a suffragist, educator, and even an early political candidate, all to the alarm of many in her Jewish community. As for my own mother, she had been a pioneer newspaper reporter years before I was born, and continued to take pride in bringing up her two daughters in a more enlightened way than she had been raised. I don't remember her using any of the slang words that made the female body seem dirty or shameful, and I'm grateful for that. As you'll see in these pages, many daughters grew up with a greater burden.
Nonetheless, I didn't hear words that were accurate, much less prideful. For example, I never once heard the word clitoris. It would be years before I learned that females possessed the only organ in the human body with no function other than to feel pleasure. (If such an organ were unique to the male body, can you imagine how much we would hear about it-and what it would be used to justify?) Thus, whether I was learning to talk, to spell, or to take care of my own body; I was told the name of each of its amazing parts except in one unmentionable area. This left me unprotected against the shaming words and dirty jokes of the school yard and, later, against the popular belief that men, whether as lovers or physicians, knew more about women's bodies than women did.
I first glimpsed the spirit of self-knowledge and freedom that you will find in these pages when I lived in India for a couple of years after college. In Hindu temples and shrines I saw the lingam, an abstract male genital symbol, but I also saw the yoni, a female genital symbol, for the first time: a flowerlike shape, triangle, or double-pointed oval. I was told that thousands of years ago, this symbol had been worshiped as more powerful than its male counterpart, a belief that carried over into Tantrism, whose central tenet is man's inability to reach spiritual fulfillment except through sexual and emotional union with woman's superior spiritual energy. It was a belief so deep and wide that even some of the woman-excluding, monotheistic religions that came later retained it in their traditions, although such beliefs were (and still are) marginalized or denied as heresies by mainstream religious leaders.
For example: Gnostic Christians worshiped Sophia as the female Holy Spirit and considered Mary Magdalene the wisest of Christ's disciples; Tantric Buddhism still teaches that Buddhahood resides in the vulva; the Sufi mystics of Islam believe that fana, or rapture, can be reached only through Fravahi, the female spirit; the Shekina of Jewish mysticism is a version of Shakti, the female soul of God; and even the Catholic church included forms of Mary worship that focused more on the Mother than on the Son. In many countries of Asia, Africa, and other parts of the world where gods are still depicted in female as well as in male forms, altars feature the Jewel in the Lotus and other representations of the Lingam-in-the-yoni. In India, the Hindu goddesses Durga and Kali are embodiments of the yoni powers of birth and death, creation and destruction.
* * * * *
Excerpted from The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler.
25 July 2006
Warped
I have come to the realisation that I am currently living three very different lives. There are three Lulwa's existing-somehow-in one body. There is the Lulwa with her friends, who laughs, chats, and just living in a world that seems to exclude all negative-except for the group politics and dramas. Then there is the Lulwa who is at home, her good friend's father has passed away and he is staying with us, so I try to cheer him up, while in my mind all I can think is: "how would I feel if it was my dad who had passed away?" and "he is so strong". Then there is the lulwa who is working on her PhD, listening to the news and has emotions that go from pure anger, to depression, to frustration-and these feels are for both my PhD and what is happening in our region.
How these three are living together, and actually surviving I have no idea whatsoever...they just are...I think it must be a bit healthy to have these feelings and this different Lulwas...no person can be the same wherever they go and whoever they are with. I have been called a chameleon before...and when I was first called that I took it as an insult. Bas I think it is normal...can you see that I am trying to convince myself?!?!?
You have to adapt, to who you are talking to, to the situation, place you find yourself. The lulwa that goes out drinking with her friends in West Amman, can't be the same as the one who goes to Saudi and visits her family there.
I have friends who tell me-with pride-that they can't ijamlo (humour others), and I used to think that this was a trait that I should foster. Bas I have come to realise that if you don't itjamil then you end up alone in the end. I am not saying that people should change drastically...aw compromise on things and ideas that they believe are fundamental. Bas I also think that there situations where one has to step back...and just smile and let people think that everything is ok...wallah I have no idea if I am making sense...and not sure which lulwa is speaking right now...bas it is a thought that I have been having. The strangest thing is when I am speaking to a friend on the phone-so friends lulwa is on-and my parents call me...the clash between the Lulwas is very odd...and very obvious to me...my voice even changes!
How these three are living together, and actually surviving I have no idea whatsoever...they just are...I think it must be a bit healthy to have these feelings and this different Lulwas...no person can be the same wherever they go and whoever they are with. I have been called a chameleon before...and when I was first called that I took it as an insult. Bas I think it is normal...can you see that I am trying to convince myself?!?!?
You have to adapt, to who you are talking to, to the situation, place you find yourself. The lulwa that goes out drinking with her friends in West Amman, can't be the same as the one who goes to Saudi and visits her family there.
I have friends who tell me-with pride-that they can't ijamlo (humour others), and I used to think that this was a trait that I should foster. Bas I have come to realise that if you don't itjamil then you end up alone in the end. I am not saying that people should change drastically...aw compromise on things and ideas that they believe are fundamental. Bas I also think that there situations where one has to step back...and just smile and let people think that everything is ok...wallah I have no idea if I am making sense...and not sure which lulwa is speaking right now...bas it is a thought that I have been having. The strangest thing is when I am speaking to a friend on the phone-so friends lulwa is on-and my parents call me...the clash between the Lulwas is very odd...and very obvious to me...my voice even changes!
23 July 2006
Death
The images that we see daily on TV, the movies that we watch all have somehow made us-or let me not generalise made me-unable or more like accustomed to images of death and people dieing. I had to rethink that yesterday. My dad’s best-friend, my mom’s best-friends husband, and my childhood friend’s father passed away yesterday morning from Cancer. He had been ill for awhile, and I guess it was expected. But I have always been unable to go to hospitals and don’t have the ability that others seem to have to deal with illness. So I didn’t go and see him as much as I should have.
So yesterday when I finally woke up, I found the house empty, only to talk to my father and hear the bad news.
For the rest of the day, I just sat at home and was thinking about it. I have never had someone close to me die-so the idea or concept of death I have never really had to deal with. Well that is not true my grandparents are all dead other then one, bas I was quite young. The idea that someone is gone, not for a trip, or for immigration, or I don’t know, up to the moon…bas just GONE. He will no longer make me laugh, he will not longer make my father laugh-and he was one of the few who could do that-I will not longer be able to talk to him about the situation in Palestine, and hear him analysis it. It all just hit me at different points last night. Bas I think the distressing thing is that my friend no longer has a father. I have no idea how that must be like.
I am an only child (and so is my friend), and to be honest my worst fear is my parent’s death, la2no then I will be completely on my own. I have friends, I have a very supportive extended family, bas my parents are my backbone. To imagine my life without then just feels me with the greatest fear…my hands shake just thinking about it.
I always watched in movies as little kids were explained death, and I always thought that it was a hard concept for a child to understand. But after what happened yesterday, I realise that it is a hard concept FULL STOP. One of my very good friends was telling that ‘Lulwa you need to re-evaluate how you view God and religion’, for it seems that when his grandmother passed away he became more religious. Bas I can’t, or more like I don’t want to, I have always believed what I believe, and that is after a lot of discussion and a lot of self analysis. I was never able to see how people become religious when someone they love passes away, la2no my thought is why take someone I love away? Bas that is beside the point, I am just sad, and I am deeply moved…his death has awoke a side of me that had become complacent with all the images that we are bombarded with.
My he Rest in Peace. I will always remember him, and what a great man, father and friend he was.
So yesterday when I finally woke up, I found the house empty, only to talk to my father and hear the bad news.
For the rest of the day, I just sat at home and was thinking about it. I have never had someone close to me die-so the idea or concept of death I have never really had to deal with. Well that is not true my grandparents are all dead other then one, bas I was quite young. The idea that someone is gone, not for a trip, or for immigration, or I don’t know, up to the moon…bas just GONE. He will no longer make me laugh, he will not longer make my father laugh-and he was one of the few who could do that-I will not longer be able to talk to him about the situation in Palestine, and hear him analysis it. It all just hit me at different points last night. Bas I think the distressing thing is that my friend no longer has a father. I have no idea how that must be like.
I am an only child (and so is my friend), and to be honest my worst fear is my parent’s death, la2no then I will be completely on my own. I have friends, I have a very supportive extended family, bas my parents are my backbone. To imagine my life without then just feels me with the greatest fear…my hands shake just thinking about it.
I always watched in movies as little kids were explained death, and I always thought that it was a hard concept for a child to understand. But after what happened yesterday, I realise that it is a hard concept FULL STOP. One of my very good friends was telling that ‘Lulwa you need to re-evaluate how you view God and religion’, for it seems that when his grandmother passed away he became more religious. Bas I can’t, or more like I don’t want to, I have always believed what I believe, and that is after a lot of discussion and a lot of self analysis. I was never able to see how people become religious when someone they love passes away, la2no my thought is why take someone I love away? Bas that is beside the point, I am just sad, and I am deeply moved…his death has awoke a side of me that had become complacent with all the images that we are bombarded with.
My he Rest in Peace. I will always remember him, and what a great man, father and friend he was.
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