Monday, May 29, 2006

Get Me Out

So, here I am, in the same timeless, most boring and most dangerous place in the world. I've been away because I have nothing to say or write about! The same days are repeating themselves, and the same monotonous things are happening everyday.

I'm hopless,
Helpless,
Angry,
Currently unhappy,
Simply, I feel like a hell burning inside of me.
I want to get out of here as soon as possible, yet the time seems endless for me! There are many different signs everyday telling me and my family to get out this country that once was.

For the first time since the war started, a motor-cycle exploded in the middle of the local market of my neighborhood. It killed 22 people, most of them were kids, and that just made me raged and hopeless. The explosion took place at about 9 P.M., so many people were there, mostly kids. It's true that it's a night time when everyone should be lockep up at home cuz of the night curfew, but shops would close at about 11 o'clock every night in my small region, so people would still be going out at night.

Thankfully, we were all at home that day. I begged Mom to go out and buy some stuff from the market but she kept telling me to postpon it to the next day. If we were there at that time, I would be writing this from Heaven by now. Or from Hell maybe!

We knew most of the people who died. One of them was a girl preparing for her wedding day which happened to be the next day! Three little brothers were inside a car waiting for the parent. One of them had his brain popped out of his head and died immedeatly, the two others lived but with a traumatic disease now. And many more...

The streets were closed, funerals were held in ever corner of the neighborhood, and people were all in black attending the funerals. Candles were lit in the explosion's place on the third day. I went there to see it; it was so sad. Seeing the place where I grew up in this state and knowing that people died their is heart breaking. The faces I've seen almost everyday since I was a little kid... They're no more.

I am out of thoughts and ideas. I've been trying to think of one good topic to write about but my head seems emptier than what I thought! I lost my Muse. All I can think of now is to "get out".

Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Forcast From Baghdad

On yesterday afternnon, a sudden and very quick sandstorm hit Baghdad. Everyone around the house was running trying to close all the windows and doors to prevent sand from getting inside the house! I tried to go out and take some photos to post them here but I couldn't go out cuz the sand was so thick and I couldn't breathe. Besides, I once heard that we should not use cameras in sandy weather cuz the sand would damage the lense... or something like that.


Anyway, this morning as I was checking the emails, I found a link with two photos for the same place in Baghdad taken before and during the storm. So I thought of posting them here.


Have a look at Baghdad's weather!


It's a good setting for a scary movie, I guess!!

Sunday, May 07, 2006

The Devil, Bottle of Sause and Me!


NOTE: This post should have been published before the previous one, but there were problems with uploading the photos.

So i guess it's been more that a week since I last showed any life sign! I've been busy and kinda lazy. Busy going to college for some fun, busy shopping a laptop, digital camera, webcam, bluetooth and a flash disk! (it costed a fourtune!).. and I was also resting my eyes from PC and reading for a while.

Lazy for no reason :P

This is the first post I write from my new DELL laptop ;) oh by the way, the headache is gone at last. I figured out two reason which caused me that headache, but there another important one which I haven't noticed before; it was lack of water!! Yes, I forget to drink water. I'd be good if I could drink more than one glass of water aday!!

Well, I wasn't really sitting idle all the time, in fact I was coloring some pages. Remember those coloring pages we used to color when we were kids? I was doing exactly the same! And everyone at home was laughing at me... i was obsessed with drawing and coloring when i was a little kid, I had my papers, crayons and magic colors with me all the time wherever I went. So I thought of posting new ones here cuz I couldn't find the old ones I used to color. Moving from place to place with my family was a reason that I couldn't keep everything I had.


Some kids believed in crazy yet funny superstitions, and I was one of those kids who believed that the Devil was stealing my stuff!!! I remember one day when I was seven or eight years old, I was in the room with my sister and two of our relatives playing and having fun. One of the two relatives had her Barbie doll with her, and suddenly one of Barbie's shoes got lost somewhere in the room. We started to search on the floor but we couldn't find anything. Then I suddenly got this crazy idea and told them that the Devil stole the shoe! But how can we restore it now? The only idea I had in mind was to punish the devil and let him return the shoe back to us. So we started to jump and beat the floor as hard as we could thinking that the devil was hiding under the floor! And after sometime while we were still beating the ground, we saw Barbie's shoe in the other corner of the room. For me, that was an evidence that devil really took the shoe, we were playing in one corner of the room when the shoe was lost, and we found it in the other corner after we punished the devil for stealing the shoe from us!!!

I also believed that there were some evil souls in our house! I even swore that I saw one in some time at night! One day I was sleeping and I suddenly felt that a hand was tapping on my pillow, I raised my head and looked but there was no hand and no-one else in the room. I was sure that it was one of those evil souls playing jokes with me, and I was scared till death that I couldn't even move and go to Mom! I liked to watch horror movies, and yet after the movie was finished I used to regret watching it cuz it made me scared! I still like watching this kind of movies but I don't regret watching it anymore ;)

Like all the girls in the world, i liked Baribe so much and I had about ten dolls, or maybe more. My sister and I used to make small houses under the bed for them, and we used to give them names, plan for a scene and start playing. Kain was named Marc most of the time!
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well, i took a break from typing for some time and decided to watch a movie. Dad got me two DVD's today; one was Chronicles of Narnia, and the other is War of the Worlds. I just finished watching the first one, it's so awesome! I will probably go watch the other movie after i finish typing this.

Talking about movies, there used to be a lot of cartoon movies I liked to watch when I was a little kid. I remember this Russian cartoon called The Wild Swans. The characters were Russains but they were speaking Arabic. The story of the movie goes around eleven brothers living with their one beautiful sister and their father, the king. Their stepmother happened to be a witch and she turned the brothers to wild swans one night, and then turned the sister to an ugly girl. They all wandered in the woods to search for some magical cure to undo the spell of the witch. And sure, peace prevails at the end!

We had this cartoon on tape and my sister and I used to watch it all the time. We even learned most of the dialogue by heart! Other favourite cartoons were Tom And Jerry which I still watch till now J, Morocco, a Chinease cartoon about a little crazy and funny girl. Well I was watching this one when I was at college. And like all the Iraqi kids, I liked Grendizer!




I have a bad habbit of smelling things before I use them!! Well I don't know if I should call it a bad or weird habbit. When I was at college, I found out that one of my friends, F., used to smell things as well, especially food! Whenever we were at the college's cafeteria and wanted to eat something, I was asking her please not to smell the food! At least no in front of all the students. And she was laughing at me saying that I do the same.

For instance, I was just smelling the CD before I put it back in its cover. Well, it has a smell! And it reminded me of the times when my sister, uncle and I used to stay all night playing some playstation games. We didn't have a Playstation at home, so we used to hire one from the vedio games shop in the neighborhood every weekend, and we used to start playing from 10 P.M. till 10 o'clock the next morning! We first were getting pale as the time elapsed, then at the end of the time we all turned green! That wasn't a very long time ago, it happened when I was at high school. I never showed any interest in computers and plastations before that time. I never liked these things! But now sure I do!


While I was having dinner with my family a few days ago, dad asked me to pass the ketchap and sause to him. Then I rememberd that I haven't tried sause with my food for a very long time. When I was a kid I preferred sause to ketchap and mustard, but now I prefer the opposite. The reason for that is because the taste of sause reminds me of the long sanction we had during the 90's! It was hard to find the good products so we had to buy a not very good sause which was made in Iraq. The test wasn't good at all, but we didn't have another choice. My sister and I used to have it with almost all kinds of food.

Back to the night when I was having dinner, I decided to try the sause and asked Dad to pass the bottle for me. as soon as I tried it I laughed and said "sanction taste!"

For the first time, this post took me more than a week to write, and God knows how many days left to publish it! I'm still having problems getting online, so as usual, i'm typing this offline.

Go ahead, laugh at Morbido!

Saturday, May 06, 2006

Sleeping in The Rain

5-5-2006 Thursday

Summer has begun in Baghdad, and all the troubles began with it! Yesterday was one of those bad days for me, everything was bad especially the weather. At 2 P.M. we were waiting for the neighborhood's generator to be on like everyday on this time. But a few minutes after switching it on, it suddenly got off. Everyone in our streets went out asking what had happened, and they all started to swear and insult the man who is responsible for switching it on and off!! The weather was hot, sandy and humid yet we all were having our after-lunch hot and dark tea.

At afternoon dad decided to go check for the generator and ask the man incharge whether he was going to turn it on at night or not. We had to do some preparations in case there would be no electricity at night. And the news came: gasoline had fallen on the engine while it was on and burned the generator!!!!

Hot weather, sandstorm, humidity, lots of bugs in the air with only four hours aday of electricity and no water! How cool and comfortable is it to sleep in such conditions! Well, it didn't end this way. At night my family decided that we should sleep on the roof. We were thinking of the flying gunshots at night but we had no other choice. At 12:30 my parents, my sister and i went up to the roof and settled ourselves to sleep. The weather was still very humid and there were some clouds in the sky.. and some lightening.

I took my new laptop with me up to the roof in order to try the wireless connection. After less than five minutes it rained heavily on us!! We all started to run and laugh trying to get our stuff inside the house. The gasoline was already finished in the small house's generator, so we had to convince ourselves to sleep in the living room with no fan, no airconditioner and no nothing. Well, i've spent countless nights like this, so it doesn't seem that bad to me. the rain kept falling so heavily for some time, and then a sandstorm started right afte the rain. I don't know how can there be rain and sandstorm in one place at the same time! But it's been this way since spring statred, and for the first time it's still raining here in May! Everything has changed in this country, even the weather. Sandstorms in spring, and rains in summer. Won't there be any snow??!! I watched Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire, but i couldn't finish it cuz the batteries charge was over. I finished it this afternoon.

I woke up this morning feeling that as if i had fallen from a very high building. All my bones are aching, even my nose's bones!!

Two months are left for me here, and i sure don't want to spend it this way. I want to sleep in my room during this final time, but it seems that i have to abandon it as i do every summer!

I hate it this way. When is it going to end!!


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From the Roof of an Iraqi House!
6-5-2006 Friday night

This is the first post I write from the roof of my house. It's unusual to do such thing, but i decided that everything can be possible in iraq! There is a wireless LAN in the laptop but i'm not getting any signal. So now i'm just typing this and listening to the sounds around me and some songs for Abdul Haleem Hafith.

This is our second night without electricity. The national electricity comes for one hour every six or eight hours, and we ran out of gasoline now, so we decided to go up on the roof and sleep there. The weather tonight is better than last night. The sky is clear and i can see the stars. There is a slight gentle wind that brings all the smells of the burning gasoline from the generators around the neighborhood. There are some fierce bombings in a near by region. It's probably in Adhamiya, but i'm not sure of this of course. I can only hear the explosions and gunshots.

I've been trying to get online fot the past couple of days but all my efforts went in vain! There is something crazy happenes to the internet server everytime i try to get online. I'm started to get to my wits' end.

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i woke up before 8 o'clock in the morning. Bugs were eating me all night long, and now flies are everyehere. The bombings continued till the morning.

Sleepy Morbido!