Nope, I still have not switched my career to become a street cleaner… but of course there is a background story behind those weird requests… I won’t be able to tell the story as nicely as Nasseem does… So I am leaving it to him to tell the story in his words…

Meanwhile… enjoy J

Now back to the delight bit… this project took facebook’s place in the last few days… a couple of  friends who wandered away in life’s funny turns, found their way back… and there is nothing  more delightful than hearing from an old friend…

On a different note… I am trying to learn how to edit fims… i am working on editing the film that I took of this event… once it is done, i will publish it…

Note 2: isn’t technology amazing?!!!  I am so grateful that I exist at this time and place (only place is no longer an issue in our lives)… When I was younger, I wished I existed in the medieval ages! (what was I thinking?!)

One of  the project’s associates, who had been dangerously uncooperative had miraculously become dangerously cooperative… he dropped in to pay us an unseasonable visit. I was extremely busy preparing for an event…

 When he realized , he was not going to get the required social pleasantries form me, he rose to leave…  one of the neighbors’ children was scanning the dictionary ( I still don’t understand which part of the dictionary this child derives pleasure from, given the fact that he still can’t read and the dictionary is pictures barren)

 As the door closed behind him (I am at least grateful the child waited for that), the kid rose his beautiful eyes and said seriously

“What a dirty man! His mother should spank him!”

The guy was smoking a cigarette, even though the office culture forbids smoking….and when he finished, he simply left it to die off on the side of my lovely couch!!

 

I won’t say where she wipes the off, the book is a lovely read and would, for sure, provide all the answers…So maybe it is my fault for not providing ashtrays? but what kind of message would i give my visitors when they see ashtrays?

I have been begging Diala (an assumed name) to go out for a quite a while now…. between her two children, her petulant husband and her demanding career, she has gone incommunicado… Diala’s husband (lets call him Fadi) is a nice guy. They met at work and they liked each other… when he proposed, her family scanned him closely, and found him perfect in every respect. Good family, good manners, good financial position, good looking. Even us, her friends, we simply adored him, he is funny, witty, helpful and smart…

However dark clouds started appearing over their marriage less than a year after they got married…

While he needs someone to serve him, she needs someone to spoil her. He is very domestic but she is clueless when it comes to cleaning and cooking… He has a streak of sadism that would stay dormant if a strong partner stepped in; she is simply weak. After a while concerning patterns appeared between them. His sadism has been feeding on her weakness… and her depression has been feeding her vindictiveness.

From an ordinary point view, they have the perfect image,… Their family portrait could be published  in a magazine!  but when someone digs deeper… oh boy!

She has been avoiding not only us (her friends) but also her family because Fadi humiliates her subtly in front of us; he makes fun of her and calls her names, he acts arrogantly, does not take part in family events… so she feels embarrassed and prefers not to see anyone. This is called Isolation.  She, on the other hand withholds affection. She puts him down, and discounts his accomplishments. This is part of emotional abuse. He controls money, does not give her access to their joint bank account, spends family income without her consent, registers everything in his name, even though they both work… Surprisingly enough this is also a type of abuse; it is referred to as economic abuse.  They both use children to relay messages, they use them to make each other feel guilty…

The one thing they don’t do is physical abuse…Diala regrets that fact…

His problem is that he does not beat me up! If he did then we both would be forced to acknowledge the problem …

I got so angry hearing Diala’s troubles that I had to go out and take a walk.  I understood exactly how she feels… I am just amazed at how many people are in abusive relationships without even being aware of it… and I am talking about both men and women…

On a relevant note… I was talking to my counterpart at Sahab… she was explaining that people are in love with the series “Nour”… because it made us see that we are emotionally barren …

I wonder if this is the result of our educational system? Culture? Society? Religion? What is it exactly?

Egyptian film-maker Youssef Chahine, died on today aged 82 after several weeks in a coma. A funeral ceremony will be held in Cairo on Monday. He will buried in the family crypt in Alexandria where he was born.

For me personally, I feel it is a great loss, for the loss is compounded by the fact that we not only lost a great artist, but a genius who spent his life trying, through his movies, to  recapture and defend the spirit of multicultural tolerance against the forces he saw undermining it — fundamentalism, dictatorship and imperialism.

Chahine was born into a Christian Egyptian family in Alexandria,  on January 25, 1926.  He began his education at a frères’ school and continued his studies at the Victoria College. After one year at Alexandria University, he moved to the United States to study acting at the Pasadena Playhouse.

His movies were always the subject of controversy, either for their frank portrayal of sexuality or his bold treatment of Islamic fundamentalism..

In his movie “Alexandria, Why?” he raised eyebrows by telling the story of two taboo love affairs — one homosexual between an Egyptian man and a British solider, the other between a Muslim man and a Jewish woman.

One of the main controversies was in his later work was the move the Emigrant.

In 1992,  he started writing The Emigrant (1994), a story inspired by the Biblica (Qura’anic) character prophet Joseph, son of Jacob. This had long been a dream-project and he finally got to shoot it in 1994. This film created a controversy in Egypt between the enlightened wing and the fundamentalists who opposed the depiction of religious characters in films.

True to my expectations, it was simply standing there… by the way the shooting did not take place in the real building it took place in a neighbouring building…it looked better in front of the cameras.