Choosing Thoughts

I know a happy man living on a USD100 monthly income, living in a 3x4m room in Jakarta. I know an unhappy man who rolls in three Mercedes Benzes, five houses, two wives and a million followers. How did the standards of happiness become so different from one person to the next?

Force of Mental Habit

We can't control the external world. A thobe is a thobe, but if you hate wearing it, well it's not the thobe's fault, is it? However you feel about a million or three, it's not the money's fault for being there or not, is it? Nor it is the country's, the government's, the spouse's, the children's or the cats' and dogs' fault.

If we can put things into our heads (longing, hating, loving, fear), we can also remove them. Especially the imaginary things, like a BlackBerry or a lost relation or "more, more, more". If we can teach our minds to love someone/something, we definitely can train it to un-love.

Since this special freedom of thought is forever ours, whether it's in a hermitage on a mountain or in the deep pockets of an urban slum, then we are free to choose between joy or misery anywhere we can choose our thoughts. ('Coz sometimes I can't think when the whole crowd's yelling.)

What would you choose to think today?

Simple Joys in Saudi

I wanted to write 20 things that don't need to change in Saudi. Simple things that I cherish. Funny thing, the first things that came to mind were detailed, personal things. Nevertheless there should never be a list of "20 Personal Things Hning Loves about Saudi", so let's keep them to three.

Item 1. Saudi is a Culinary Whore's Halal Heaven.

There's so much to eat in Saudi (and enough money for most to go by). You can stuff yourself (and 3 other girls) full with Al-Baik, Bukhari Rice, Foul & Tameez at as cheap as USD5. You can find USD500 Caviars, and you can find the best Hindi sweets in the busiest corners of Sharafiyyah. We can know everything about a place from the things we eat there. So if there is so much to eat in a place, and food can fix even a broken heart, doesn't it mean that life is generally good in Saudi?

Item 2. Saudi has plenty of underground communities

Have you noticed how underground communities forge the most intimate and longstanding friendships?

By hobby: musicians, photographers, fashionista, Harley Davidson, books, poetry, filmmakers, bodybuilders, scuba divers, scuba diving photographers, writing.

By region: Jordanians, Syrians, Lebanese, Egyptians, Indians, Pakistanis, Afghans, Bengalis, Iranis, Turks, Pinoys, Malaysians (they used to have acrobatic takraw sessions at the consulate), Indonesians, Chinese, Japanese (albeit limited to technology and sushi), Taiwanese, US Americans, other kinds of Americans.

If people can have the time and energy to pick up hobbies, doesn't it mean that their basic needs have been fulfilled? Or that they're that bored?

Item 3. Saudi has enough for the survival of all, and then some.

The standards of living in Saudi is well-off above survival. Most folks can get by. Most folks are protected from natural disasters and mosquitoes. Most folks can put their children through school and then some. Most folks got secure healthcare and pension plans. And everyone reading this from Saudi are folks who have gotten their hands on the relatively latest communication methods and technology, which is few scales above mere survival.

Maybe it's the oil. Maybe it's the fact that there are so much traffic international going on there, of people coming and going every year from the days of Abraham that the Lord gave pity to such a barren spot. And if we still complain about Saudi it's from boredom and saturated homogeny. Because not every country in the world is as generous as Saudi, it's that simple and true.

Ain't it glad to be Saudi today?

20 little things that would make life in Saudi AWESOME

Happy National Day!

As a Saudi, I like Saudi as it is. I love Jeddah as it is. But if I may suggest a few changes on the following items, it'd be even nicer to be Saudi and live there.

Public Behavior:

1. Not get (nearly) killed for being in or near a moving vehicle (highest traffic death toll)
2. Not get killed while performing Hajj and Umrah
3. Not get killed for arguing with authority
4. Not get hooted at for taking a walk on the Pregnant Wall, the beach or the mall
5. Not get hooted at for showing up in public without Abaya (girls) or Shmagh & Thobe (boys)
6. Not get killed for expressing non-conformist ideas on TV, Internet, print publication or dress-code
7. Not get incarcerated for being at mixed-sex parties or movie screening
8. Not get assumed of flirtation for smiling and being courteous to strangers
9. Not get killed for taking pictures of women in public
10. Not die while waiting for a guardian's consent to work, travel, issue legal documents, get married, divorce, giving birth, enter court of law, and owning property (Boys up to the age of 25. Girls until they start shitting gold)

Work:

1. Not get judged for starting, running and working for independent non-profit organizations
2. Not get slowly roasted for NOT working at for-profit organizations
3. Not get judged for being Saudi and work as a janitor, Baqalakeeper, servant, driver, builder, nanny, maidservant, officeboy/girl, etc.

Relationships:

1. Not get judged for being Saudi AND unmarried in your 30s (it's the 21st century for Vimto'ssake!)
2. Not get killed for being unmarried AND lacking virginity
3. Not get killed for being Saudi and wanting to marry your un-Saudi sweetheart
4. Not get killed for PDAs (Public Displays of Affection) between opposite sexes
5. Not get killed for openly converting to an alternative sect, religion or sexual orientation

Others:

1. Not get killed for being a pluralist, hence having no violent opinion towards most things. Especially on National Days.
2. Not get killed for writing this. Hihi.

Anything to add? Thanks for reading and leaving comments.

PS. This post

Girl's Days Off

Being a good Muslim girl, you look forward to the days when you can take a few days of fasting breaks during Ramadhan, right?

Oh, don't give me the face. I know you've been checking that calendar every day since Ramadhan started, and not just to make sure that Eid is (still) on the 10th of September this year. You look forward to the day when your time of the month is supposed to come. You look forward to having that lunch, and the afternoon tea, and the cigarettes in between. Smack in broad daytime Ramadhan.

Especially if you want the whole world to know that you're going through THAT TIME OF THE MONTH.

No? Yeah, I thought so.

So even if you have the legal excuse not to fast, you act it anyways. You don't eat or drink or smoke, just like everybody else during Ramadhan. Just to respect everybody's feelings. And to keep your bodily functions private.

I say, it's your day off. Have that cigarette and lunch and tea. Add your family iftars too. You'll be on your own when everybody else's Ramadhan is done and you have to skip the last lunches before NEXT YEAR'S Ramadhan because you had to make up for the ones you missed this year.

Happy Hands

The Prophet once said that, if you don't like something, change it with your hands first, then your mouth. (And if all fails, by all means, keep your mouth shut.)

One of the reasons why I'm so happy to work with my hands (and my mouth shut) is because my hands seem to make a more sustainable difference than my mouth.

I honestly enjoy making people writhe with pleasurable pain when I give them a massage. I enjoy seeing a neat pile of anything I sort out. I enjoy writing, because it's something that comes through my hands too.

Even the satisfaction is more real when the work comes through my hands, you know?

Our hands bring forth the fruits of our hearts and minds. Bless our hands, writers, cooks, builders, drivers, hairdressers, maids, surgeons, mommies and playful daddies, for the good things we do with our hands, make the deepest impact, carve the deepest memories, and affirm the deepest faith. Amen.

What good things have you been doing with your hands?

Kinda Happy

I've been too happy to blog.

Blogging Writing had been my way of expressing dissatisfaction toward Saudi, family, society, work, fucking every and anything. Since I became happy(er), I kinda lost my drive to write. That's a dear cost for happiness to take.

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I had to be happy now. There's so much dissatisfaction a girl can take in a life time, you know? I'm getting too old, too sober and aware of the shortness of my time on Earth to be unhappily dissatisfied, even for the sake of writing. It's about time that I welcome some joy in my life.

I'm talking about the simpler kinda happy. Not cackling victory, or gleeful laughter, or absolute absence of grief. Just happy. Just seeing the world as it is, and still finding happiness. Just looking at my failures and flops and still be happy anyway.

Then forgive myself for indulging it.

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Feelings are contagious, see? We infect the people closest to us with our feelings. It's just the watery way we are.

It's not selfish to indulge in it, because joy is a very good kind of infection. I got to hear people say that they're happy to see me happy. They're happy for me even though they don't understand how I could be happy. They're happy even though I'm off the conventional path of "happily ever after". They're happy for me even though and even if.

And that's kinda awesome.

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I want this kinda awesome to spread. Which is why I started writing blogging again.

I want you to -- at least -- smell happy when you read my writings. I don't know how people can be interesting without scandalous headlines and gossip juice. I don't know how to translate this calm, quiet kinda happy into writing.…but I plan to figure it out, and you're most welcome to join and wonder along.

…as long that it makes you happy too.

Saudi Family & Sex-segregation

ضع "السعودية" في جملة مفيدة…و لا أقول لك؟ ضعها في جملة و خلاص.

Untie is an article addressing the over-tightness of Saudi families. I would like to state for the record, that even though I think that you were so eloquently sexy in that article, Omran, I also think that YOU'RE WRONG and you're missing huge elephants.

In fact, families in Saudi are separated. Sex-separated, that is.

If having to go through life's milestones without your loved ones doesn't look like a broken family, then what does?

Define family

My mother couldn't witness my brother's wedding vows because it's an all-men ceremony. Even at the wedding reception, she can't really see her whole family celebrate together. Not really.

Sex-segregation or none, how about giving "family" its working definition? As family, we spend our days together whether good and bad and awful. Family members give each other first row stadium tickets in each other's live shows.

Because grief and joy are sexless and, in milestones, it's our family's approval we seek and fear, no matter how big a crowd we show for.

Taking away the right to be each other's witnesses is a dirty, emotional rip off. Aren't graduations, weddings and funerals the most important events that one would hope to go through together as a whole family?

I could care less if it's a grand wedding or Reverend Elvis in Vegas, when it comes to milestones (pinnacles of our everydayness) you can't just segregate loved ones from each other based the contents of their bras and briefs... It's just wrong.

Thou shall not remain a family when the crowd gets too big.

If Saudi hails itself as an Islamic country, where have the Saudis seen a hadith or Quranic verse that said: ولا تختلطوا. Where was there a religion in the world that said, thou shall not work and speak and mingle with the opposite sex?

I would love to know who came up with the idea of sex-segregation in Saudi (among other things). Because the bedus in the desert don't practice this kind of segregation. There's a sheet between where the parents and children sleep, but the desert and donkeys and darlings are together in joy and grief and scandals.

I heard that, in Jeddah, they're supposed to be more advanced than the bedus. I guess, even now, it can only go so far as the privacy of our Saudi living rooms.