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Maddening Cloud

The future: Ramadan in a few weeks

Anticipated Scenario: Closed stores, boredom, traffic, getting drunk in the living room

Work: One million unfinished projects

–> Flash: Uncooperative Actionscript

–> Flash: Difficulty (impossibility?) in making buttons nested in movie clips to link to an .swf target in the same scene (despair)

–> Errors due to server upgrading to php5 /MySQL5

–> Flash: a pain in the ass (what’s new…)

Silver lining: swimming pool, music, Hanim feeding me homemade doughnuts

Currently listening to:
Blonde Redhead
Misery is a Butterfly

2008 08 17 I rant Comments (11) Permalink

Spooflings

A few things in a list of plenty that I love: Jason Schwartzman and Sofia Coppola (who are cousins), and Marie Antoinette (the person… and also the film, which, in spite of all the bad reviews, is totally kickass… et alors? What are you going to do, chop off my head too?)

One thing in a list of plenty that I hate: MTV Cribs (remember the show? There are a few good episodes, but I always get a headache with the way the camera zooms in and out, and can’t help but cringe when they feature houses of rappers or other talentless assholes)

So it makes sense that I love: Jason Schwartzman as Louis XVI on the set of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, spoofing MTV Cribs.

“This is the Hall of Mirrors… basically a hall of mirrors that I walk thru… I can check myself before I wreck myself…” Haha, fucking brilliant.

Currently listening to:
Eddie Vedder
Into the Wild Soundtrack

2008 08 15 Film
Swoon Comments (3) Permalink

Climb

When your dreams get synchronised with the dreams of your partner, it means you aren’t the only one going mad.

“I just woke up,” I wearily told Julien over the phone. “I kept waking up and going back to sleep.  First I was climbing stairs in what looked like my old school, and it was really steep so I had to drag myself up, holding on to the rungs. Then… somehow I fell asleep again and then I was at a friend’s flat, and she lived on the fourth floor, and I had to climb the stairs — only, I had to climb over doors and step on the doorknobs to get to the next flight of stairs…”

He told me that he too has been having the same kind of dream lately. “It’s me climbing a hill. Covered in grass. But it’s so steep that I could fall backwards if I didn’t hold on properly.”

Qatar is officially sucking the life out of us.  We have become zombies.  I sit here all day, sometimes talking to myself to hear voices around me, never mind that it’s my own.  Sometimes I wake up and find myself momentarily lost, confusing the greyness of the sky caused by sandstorm for a grey winter morning in France.  I miss being with my husband.  He works six days a week, leaves the house at 5:30am, comes home at 8:30pm the earliest, with a total of 2 hours of driving a day. And in between the hours of dusk and dawn, we dream the same dream - climbing stairs filled with obstacles; trying our best to hold on.

Currently listening to:
Black Mountain
In the Future

2008 08 12 Life in France
Musings Comments (10) Permalink

Geography

I find it interesting that world maps are hard to come by in stores here in Qatar.

So after combing the shelves of Carrefour (all three branches), Villagio, and that little bookstore at the 3rd floor of City Center, I decide to go to Jarir Bookstore along Salwa Road.

I ask the guy for a world map. "Follow me," he says, exuding an air of authority. He leads me to the Travel section and hands me a map of Qatar.

I hand it back. "Errr… actually, I need a world map."

He opens the map and shows me Doha, filled with little yellow and red boxes indicating Doha landmarks.

"WORLD map," I tell him again. "With all the different countries?"

He flips the map over and shows me Qatar, and points to Doha, Al Khor, Ras Laffan, and Dukhan, then tries shoving the map into my hands.

"Asia," I say. "Europe. South America. Middle East?"

"This is the map," he tells me.

"This is a map of Qatar," I inform him. "I’m looking for the WORLD map. Qatar is NOT the world."

He doesn’t respond. He looks a touch irritated. I can see he wants to move on to another customer.

With a sigh I take it from his hands, wait until he disappears behind a bookshelf, and put the map back on the shelf. After a few minutes I find a world map hiding behind some photography books.

Jeeeeesus, I am so thankful Qatar is NOT the whole world.

Currently listening to:
Spiritualized
Songs in A&E

2008 07 29 Life in Qatar
Stuff that happens to me Comments (18) Permalink

The Problem With Me

The problem with me is that when I am sad, I expect people around me to be sad as well. Have you ever heard of anything more selfish, more egoistic, than that? I have the ability to shut down and shut others out. I also am quite skilled at not being able to amuse myself. I fear that as I get older, I wait for things to happen instead of making them happen. Which is not good at all.

When I put on a show, it’s like draping black curtains over the windows and mirrors of a house. How hard is it to remember that I am 29 and not 16 anymore? I expect others to read my mind, to solve my problems, to comfort me, without me saying a word to them. It ends up in chaos, in confusion. It ends in silence: suffocating black curtains blocking out the sun, blocking out my reflection, so that I cannot look into my own eyes and realise that a hole too deep has been dug; that what I started, from something nonsensical, has blown out of proportion and now has powers of its own.

I envy others; I feel superiour to others; I do not know what I want. The problem with me is that I have never really learned how to talk about things that seem important to me, just because I am afraid that other people will find it unimportant.

Currently listening to:
The Album Leaf
Into the Blue Again

2008 07 24 Musings
N'importe quoi Comments (7) Permalink

A puzzling delay

It’s been two years and four months since this happened. This morning I roll out of bed and see an sms message from Doctor Doom:

Borrowed cd of Nada Surf from library. The Weight is a Gift. Loved it!

Again, just to make my point, it’s been two years and four months since I told her about it.

Currently listening to:
Nada Surf
The Weight is a Gift

2008 07 22 All Families are Psychotic
Music Comments (5) Permalink

Radio Ballet

Me and my love on a Sunday night.

Currently listening to:
Eluvium
Copia

2008 07 13 Uncategorized Comments (19) Permalink

You think you can do these things…

Fucking hell, talk about itchy fingers! Four months after my attempt to give myself a haircut (and failing miserably: my hair is still uneven by 2 inches on one side), here I am again, fighting the urge to chop my hair off. I was mumbling my desire to give myself another haircut an hour ago, then started looking for pictures online to inspire me. Afterwards, predictably, the idea started to seem more and more brilliant that I dug out my thinning scissors (yes! I found them!) and started to measure how short I wanted my hair to be.

At the first strains of expressing my desire to “even out” my hair, Julien exhibited A) Suspicion, B) Skepticism, C) Forced Nonchalance and D) Panic. Just as I was about to make the first snip, he lunged at me, hustled me to the guest room, shook me by the shoulders and cried out, quite seriously and almost hysterically: “You think you can do these things, but you can’t, Nemo!”

Currently listening to:
Medeski, Martin and Wood
Out Louder

2008 07 11 Other Half
Stuff that happens to me Comments (5) Permalink

Drove through ghosts to get here

Last week, the tiles on the kitchen floor started to swell, as if there was an octopus lurking underneath, trying to get out (even though I know that octopuses… octupii?… can fit thru a bottle’s neck. Saw it on National Geogrphic years ago. Fucking amazing, those creatures! I am quite obsessed with them). Then followed a strange sound, and suddenly the cement holding the tiles together started to crumble. Ah, construction in Qatar. At first glance everything looks ok, but the truth is that buildings, and their finishings, are put together haphazardly. I’ll bet that in 10 years most of the buildings here will start crumbling.

This afternoon I took a nap, which lasted 5 hours. I woke up because of my bad driving. In my dream, I was driving à la Qatari — recklessly. My sister was with me and I was breaking about a hundred and twenty rules of Safe Driving. What really woke me up though, was when I overtook another car and found myself at a stoplight (of course, it was red, and contrary to my earlier driving, I actually stopped). The road was titled at a crazy angle; it was a slope, but we were practically vertical, the car almost tipping over backwards. Panicked, I realised that I didn’t know how to handle slopes (which is crazy, because I aced the hanging part in the driving exam, where you stop and restart the car at a slope). I was yelling at my sister, my foot frozen on the brakes, knowing that we were going to tip over. She was teasing me, saying “You mean you don’t know? You mean we’re going to hit the car behind us?” and finally she pulled up the handbrake, but my foot still wouldn’t leave the brake.

There are a thousand interpretations for this dream but I’m too bored to even think about them. My mind, it’s mush. It’s filled with work and music and the biography of Marie Antoinette (which I’m reading right now, and it’s fucking brilliant!). And my body feels different — I blame Julien, who is currently in this Healthy Zone Bubble. I find myself in the gym more and more, even though I pass my time on the treadmill raising various existential questions, the most popular being, What’s The Point Of Running When The Goal Is Unknown And I’m Not Really Moving And Anyway I Know I’ll Never Get There?

***

The area where I live is under constant, irritating, massive construction. Actually, ever since we arrived at the West Bay area, practically half of the streets have been under heavy travaux. Orange cones protect nonsense construction (for example, there has been a hole in the middle of the sidewalk that hasn’t been closed for months - and in this hole is a ladder… that leads to nothing but soil. Existential questions, all over again…), and now the roundabout leading to City Center has been closed (it’s being replaced with stoplights, finally), leaving clueless drivers to navigate themselves thru a maze of diversions, which blatantly lack the appropriate arrows and road signs.

It’s madness! No wonder I’ve been dreaming of reckless driving.

***

In response to all the hysteria, I plug my ears with math rock.

Currently listening to:
65daysofstatic
One Time for All Time

2008 07 10 Life in Qatar
Music
N'importe quoi
Uncategorized Comments (2) Permalink

No-show

Apparently Pete Doherty pissed off his French fans by cancelling his Paris shows… twice. This very angry girl, who spent 6 hours on the train to get to Paris from Grenoble, shows us that the word ‘fuck‘, like ‘cool‘ or ‘Coca Cola‘, is universal and extremely handy in situations like this. I’d stay away from her for a couple of days. I loves it, loves it when the French rant !

(seen and swiped from darkglobe.fr)

Crystal CastlesCurrently listening to:
Crystal Castles
Crystal Castles

2008 06 18 I rant
Music Comments (7) Permalink