Overcoming the Sickness

Over the last few days I’ve been afflicted with the flu, a major set of headaches and now this weekend, one bastard of a chest infection. So I’m following advice, trying to stay in bed, a lot of liquids, old trusted natural remedies, etc. but as of this moment it’s the chest infection I’m concentrating on getting sorted. So I made this “super juice” in an attempt to give my body one blast of goodness from nature.

3 wedges of lemon
One small piece ginger
Fresh orange juice
Blue berries and raspberries
1/2 tsp honey

Blend them together.

It was a definite hit. Very sharp flavour but good. Looking for other healthy concoctions I can make… Anything to kill this thing.

Black and Red

Went on a trip up North about a week ago to Tethford Forest with a group of friends for some off road biking, something I’ve not done since I was a teen. Anyway it all came back to me after trudging through the Red (Intermediate) and Black (Expert) biking paths. It was by far the best and worst experience I’ve ever had and I want to do it again!

It is something I would highly recommend to anyone willing to try it although as with the picture below you really do need to be realistic around your skill level and most definitely your fitness level.

It was nostalgic though, remembering throughout my childhood how I used to ride…Everywhere! And suddenly muscle memory kicks in and you just feel your way throughout the entire journey. I loved that feeling. I realised that this is what I want to do in terms of a sport, I absolutely love the challenge of pushing myself and building myself beyond my limits and also completing the course in front of me.

At one stage to increase my motivation I imagined being chased by dogs, something not all too unfamiliar to my childhood, and just that mindset change did wonders to how quickly I completed the certain aspects of the course.

Technically, throughout the entire journey I kept the big gears in the middle area of 2 and averaged between 2 and 6 depending on the difficulty level of the terrain. I’d recommend that if you do this, you keep within the limits and you should stick to these limits.

Why am I writing this? If you noticed the frequency of my blogposts I’ve decided to break my hiatus from my online journaling and this seemed like a great place to start.  Word.

Holy Books

This is spurred from an article I just read about yet another arrest of a Muslim planning to stage yet another attack and kill innocent people. The guy even had my surname! Doesn’t bode well for international travel. *sigh*

This got me thinking about these people’s motivations though, specifically when most of these extremist idiots use books like the Quraan and Bible to justify their crimes. The holy books, from my point of view aren’t any single thing. I’ve studied both, more the Quraan than the bible but it’s occurrd to me that they are more a reflection of the person reading them rather than any one thing you can put your finger on.

Hence, if you’re a retarded extremist idiot with no brain of your own and violent tendencies, it doesn’t matter which book you read, you’re going to end up on an article in the morning Metro. Similarly there are tons of examples of ‘people of faith’ doing extremely good works for humanity spurred on by the same verses from the same books.

It’s who you are, it’s not what you read.

Peace!

“Shit is complicated, yo.”

Things mostly get complicated because of a conflict of two things. Selfish motives on one hand and what you really need to do on the other. What makes us excel, transcend, rise above is the conscious focus we have to make the right decision. It’s not always easy, it may be a simple choice since the right way will be clear but, but its definitely not easy. It may even be painful.

Intent is everything, and you need to be aware of what your intent is. In fact, be aware of everything you do, don’t be a freakin zombie because one day you’ll wake up and ask “WTF have I been doing with my life?”. That’s no way to live, yo.

“It’s not hard to do the right thing, it’s hard to know what the right thing is… but once you know what the right thing is, it’s hard not to do it.”

To Write.

What makes good writing, good writing?  I’ve been reading books which meet that standard… Man Booker, etc. It seems that creativity in presentation and wordplay are not the essential ingredients, but they are important. At the core, it’s the stories which either go deep into human experience or culture. 

It’s the stories which talk to sadness, laughter, happiness, depression, craziness and all other emotions through the little everyday things humans go through and the similar way we react to situations.  Sometimes littered here and there with insight and modern knowledge of psychology and science.

But first… you need to put something on paper, or wordpress. I think the best place to start would be personal experience. Think of some situation in which you felt something… deeply and describe every single detail.  Something will flow from there.

I need to start.

Tags: writing, beginning, start, write, how to

Foursquare: Social Media’s Dick Measuring Contest

Foursquare is a game, in essence. It has some business viability and some big brands do take advantage.

I’ve been registered for a while and only recently decided to stress test the location-based social media site to the detriment of my Facebook followers who ended up getting a lot of messages around my being where-ever I was, becoming mayor of so-and-so and getting an “overshare” badge, which was testament to my stress-test.

To the point… after a week at it I’m starting to ask.. “What’s the point?” Seriously. Becoming mayor of coffee shops, the gym, checking-in at every mundane point of your existence even the bloody highway. Having mayorships of these places proves what exactly? Anyway… I’ve realised what an absolute waste of time the damn application is.

What’s next? Geo-tagging your toilet while you’re having a crap? “John is the Mayor of the second floor bathroom”. I wonder if Foursquare is going to to start automatically tagging places for people based on their GPS location since it is SO TEDIOUS to keep checking in all the time. Can you imagine that happening? How far is sharing going to go?

And what happens when we start running out of tagging all the known places… will we see “John has checked into ‘the bogs behind KFC’” or ‘the dumpster second to left outside McDonalds’.

It’s a childish game. I guess some people just won’t grow up… they’ll always find new games to play under the guise of business opportunities and professional curiosity. It doesn’t take long to see a waste of time though. In termsof business opportunities, how big is the sample of people using Foursquare? What return will you get from those customers, seriously?

So… how many mayorships do you have? a lot? GET A LIFE.

Yes, I am a Brand-Brainwashed Corporate Slut

So what if I drink Starbucks and LIKE drinking it? I know they’re Satan’s spawn, the scum of the earth, an oppressive aggressive branded corporate entity with no moral scruples. Not forgetting the more conservative of my kind telling me constantly that Starbucks supports “the Jews” and funds Israel and I’m actually drinking the blood of Palestinian Children. WTF?!?

I did my research and scrutinised their very public annual reports. So that’s just paranoid bullshit. Plus it’s local, it’s convenient and it may not be the best coffee in the world but in a rush on the way to work. It’s perfectly fucking adequate for my needs.

I am in marketing, I know what goes into creating a product and getting it into market. It’s hard enough without some fucking ridiculous notion of an insidious evil plot to take your money and support some oppressive bastard regime like Israel.

I also like branded jeans, prefer branded cereals, sneakers, clothes, cars (do you even get unbranded vehicles?), even my underwear has some discount chains brand on it. Oh, and I’m writing and publishing this from my Apple iPhone, so to the haters, fuck you.

The Currency of the Imagination

“Are there gonna be strobe lights?”
“Yeah… in their hearts!”

This review is a bit delayed, but I attended a poetry reading by Suheir Hammad and the Palestinian Audiovisual group Tashweesh recently on the Southbank Centre’s “Imagining Peace” Poetry International 2010 event.

The introduction to Suheir Hammad, renowned Palestinian-American poet, and Tashweesh, audiovisual Palestinian group mentioned something about poetry being the currency of the imagination.  A very nice description I think… in a philosophical kind of way which can mean very different things to different people, but that’s what poetry is right?

Anyway… I’ve always loved Suheir’s poetry and the way the event was sold regarding Tashweesh, the audiovisual elements, etc. I was expecting something great.  The DJ of the group, MC Boikutt, is known to me too where a few years back I downloaded mp3′s of his work and his group, Ramallah Underground.  Well… I got something I really didn’t expect… you know the weird artsy thing some artists do where they use static and weird sounds as music, well this was something like that. With an added visual element, the images were jittery, incoherent and sometimes really scary.  I got a few pictures in my head which made sense… riding between two huge walls which looked like the Apartheid Wall in Palestine, and the other being a silhouette of flying birds against the backdrop of a picture of a leaky, dingy sewer.

The sounds also had the heavy constant bass in the background with the front notes being the scratchy static, which gave the unmistakable impression and feeling of oppression and anxiety. I think that is what they were going for but it went on a bit too long and later on in the set there was some elements showing of Boikutt’s previous work which actually had some beat to it before falling back into what eventually just became really irritating sounds and images lacking any further meaning.

Unfortunately in this context I feel that Suheir’s poetry suffered as well in terms of having that dark edge to them instead of the usual meaning.  Suheir, however, did save the show with her humour and personalising the event,,, “Yo London, make some noise! Thanks for your rainy Friday and the river”. The added element of randomly choosing her poetry did work in a way with Tashweesh and some of the audience picking random numbers which she then used to choose poems from her books.

It’s not just her words… but the way she delivers the poetry which makes the impact all the more potent.  The meaning becomes much clearer with her presentation than from plainly reading her work.

What is Beauty?

It’s temporal and it’s not only image based. It depends more on the observing than the observed. It’s all perception.

If it depends on the eye of the beholder… then what is beauty dependent upon? Surely it would be the values and perceptions of the one observing the object of beauty… but then, what determines those values?

Media, cultural perceptions, little niggly perceptions we grew up with. But then… beauty can’t be that superficial, I mean… so-called “ugly” people, according to convention, fall in love all the time and surely that’s dependent on some type of beauty, right? Maybe it’s just not the image-based perception of beauty.

But let’s look at the facts… generally the beautiful have a few common characteristics… They’re fit, healthy, strong… mixed with the intellectual side of being intelligent, not very risk-averse and emotionally intelligent as well.

Note: All of the above don’t come easy… they take hard work. Hence, to be considered beautiful one would have to work at it. Expecting it to just fall into one’s lap is, well, improbable.

That’s what beauty will always be dependent upon – characteristics which are wholesome and need to be maintained. Except for the few culturally based values like that of some islands and countries where more ‘robust’ women are preferred or like in Cape Town where the loss of front teeth is seen as beautiful… you get the picture.

Why do I stay awake?

That’s Yusuf, standing next to the stove at 2am frying cheese and corn samoosas. He can’t sleep… actually it’s somewhere between not wanting to and just plain can’t.

“Hungry much?”
“Yes, much.”
“Can you do it in the dark? I can’t sleep with your bloody kitchen lights on.”
“Do you cook in the dark?”
“Oh shutup, I can’t talk at this hour. make some for me, I’ll have it in the morning… Taa… Taaa…”

Suddenly a conversation begins in Yusuf’s head…

Why does someone stay up at night? Why do I? What am I searching for, What’s missing that I need in order to get some bloody sleep? Maybe it’s because I work better at night… or maybe, I just have too much caffeine, well I do but that can’t be it, I’m practically immune by now.

Why am I here? No, that’s too broad a question. What do I want? that’s closer… Am I missing something I need?

Wait… why don’t I just go to sleep. I haven’t tried that. Lay down and eventually it should work, right? So why am I choosing to stay awake? Maybe I’m just screwed up… but everyone is.

What the hell is keeping me awake?

Maybe the philosopher’s had it wrong… maybe that is the ultimate question.

What keeps me awake?

Maybe I should sleep on it.

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