Guilty, as Charged?

“I wont be held responsible… we fell in love in the first place”- Freshmen, Verve Pipe

That single line is playing in my mind on loop, but it somehow is loosing its meaning, and actually managing to reverse it’s self to “I have to be held responsible”. And then it sunk in like a ton of bricks in an unfathomable ocean, and cut me deep, like a knife was drawn into my stomach and twisted till my intestines made gory churning sounds- beautiful morning imagery.

My coffee this morning tastes less coffee like, and my colleagues usual morning intrigues and jokes have not so much as humored me. My email inbox is flooded with emails with all those “!” red explanation marks, like the subject matter is one of life or death… Well I have a huge red explanation mark hovering over my head, who is going to reply to the urgency of my matter?! Of course no one can, because I am held responsible, I am held accountable.

Guilt is just a matter of how you look at things- you could be held accountable but not be feeling guilty. If you rationalize it in a way where it was just an opportunity cost, then you can move on with your day without a care in the world, because chances are you are not going to finish the food on that plate because even though there are kids starving in Africa (and actually in the poor neighborhood of the cities we reside in) you won’t forgo an extra calorie intake because that guilt supersedes the guilt of throwing away food. So this is one way of rationalizing accountability and guilt.

This wasn’t my dilemma, my dilemma is far more of a personal matter, but if I were to choose to rationalize it from a selfish point of view then this entire thought process would have been non-blog worthy, but the thing is I somehow can’t let go of the guilt, I can’t let go at the etching away at my soul, to the point where my dreams (my only escape from reality) are infested with the same guilt inside. And so I need at outlet (as public as this outlet may be), and may be I need to figure out how best to rationalize my guilt so that “I wont be held responsible- we fell in love in the first place”.

To Man, Love Woman

Women are not impossible to understand, all we truly want is security, a sense of emotional, financial, physical, attainable, everlasting, consistent, security. When a woman says I love you to a man, what she means is, “I feel safe with you, you make me feel like I am untouchable and nothing and nobody can hurt me…” but when we do that, the only person who can really hurt us is the one we said “I love you” to. The humor of irony... or more like the heartbreak of it.

As we allow ourselves to free-fall, we become vulnerable and permeable to however the man treats us. The chemicals of our brain stops working realistically, and we become “crazy” for lack of a better word; our whole being becomes paralyzed wanting just to be surrounded by the security a man offers. Even the most independent women still seek to find that security in a man.

Women are not all the same, we all have different ways of dealing with things, some are romantic, others idealistic, some are too attached, others are too aloof, some are realistic, some are bold and some seek too much attention. And where do I stand in the midst of all this? … May be I won’t say, and leave it to those who really know me to think of the answer.

So men, yes we do know we are crazy sometimes, we do know we are demanding other times, and we play games and we give you the silent treatment. We cry and we bitch and we like to be showered with romance and affection. We talk expecting you to just listen, and when we tell you we don’t care silently we mean we really do, and when we ask you if you love us, it’s not being insecure it’s just we love to hear it. We are giving you a piece of us; we are basically giving you the keys to our heart and just asking that you treat it with care because in your hands it is fragile, in your hands it can break, bleed and beat.

The Outsider

A friend of mine, Mokhtar Chahine (www.mokhtarchahine.com), snapped this shot of me- it wasn't candid, it was rehearsed, in other words the seating position, the cigarette burning my attitude was for the photo-shoot only. He labelled it "The Outsider"- this reminded me of the Albert Camus book I read in high school with the same title, about an existentialist man who lived life in a sensationalistic manner; not a care for the human thought or emotions, he didn't care about love, about friendship or family. He was apathetic towards life and cared only to live each day as if it were the first and last day of his existence.

This woman in the picture she is confident, strong, assertive, nothing seems to phase her, she doesn't care about who is watching her, she repels femininity and challenges men. She gently lays the weight of her head in the small palm of her hand, while allowing the cigarette to burn out just as the night is with her other hand. The contrast of darkness and light only serves to illuminate the vicissitudes that have befallen her. She is lost in light leaving her dark. There is something about her that does cast her as an outsider, an outsider from her own inward light.

That's not really me, it's the alter ego, or the alter ego I get from the picture. Just like Beyonce who has Sacha Fierce, and Janet Jackson has Damita Jo. I have her, that outsider. I like her because when you juxtapose her with me, you get a black-white image with a colorful bubbly energetic young lady.

Certainty?

I used to approach things with certainty, knowing exactly what I wanted the outcome to be, and I knew exactly how to go for the kill. I was like a sniper; the target was in clear sight, sharp focus, my whole being was aligned to make the shot, and with one pull of the trigger, it was a done deal. My mission was accomplished and onto the next.

I wasn’t a free spirit, I was a spirit that wanted freedom and sought ways to accomplish it. All my means are directed towards an end; the variable being the mean the given was the end. It was very mechanical, not to say emotions weren’t involved, they were, but my life was a series of logical seamless transitions until senior year of college. Everything changed then. The sharp focus I once had became pixilated by random spurs of events, I couldn’t find an end let alone justify the means to achieving them, my whole being was out of balance, and I was treading on a high wire with no clown dressed in a fireman’s outfit holding out a trampoline to catch me incase I fell.

How did I get there on that high wire knowing very well I wasn’t an acrobat? I let love in. I let myself know that free falling was just as adventurous as making a one hit kill. The adrenalin, the rush, the excitement all came from uncertainty, because for once in my life I didn’t know what to expect, nor was there a defined end goal.

Lesson learned, no more free falling.

The greatest virtue (and vice) of time is its ability to teach you a lesson or two (or gives you a crash course). It puts things on a scale chronologically ordering your life into dateable sequences of events. But to treat time as traceable is a crazy thought, because that makes time, a boundless endless intangible unstoppable force a mechanism for finding a fixed point. It’s a system that gives you the ability to pin point exactly when something happened, or when you want something to happen. And if I were to go back to the focused, headstrong person I once was then time is only a mechanism for fixating certainty. With certainty you can date things, you make a plan, you draw it out and you stick to it. In other words you mark your calendar. Usually you can’t mark, “Fall in Love”, “Learn a Life Lesson”, “Take a Risk” on dates (uncertain events), but things like, “Due date for law school application”, “Finish reading book”, “Learn how to cook” (certain things) you can mark.

I am not sure that I am ready to go back to the certainty, because in the great abyss of uncertainty I have found that my actions are not deterring me from my focus, but are teaching me a lesson I would otherwise never have learnt.

So may be the real lesson learned, is to free fall, may be train myself to be a flexbile acrobat!

Forever Young

There is nothing more rejuvenating than being silly with friends! I love my girlies, they are my saving grace!! Thank you for reminding me how to laugh from my heart again.

The Wind Down Wednesday Night

I just spent the past hour, and the beginning of my weekend, listening to John Mayer's new album (before it's official release date- the anticipation was eating away at me I couldn't wait 6 more days) and what can I say, a man has never left me as breathless as he leaves me (without even meeting him). The album came in the nick of time, it's the perfect "theme song" of my life as it has unravelled in 2009.

If i could possibly verbalize my feelings about these songs, and describe them in one word (and even then I would not be doing them any justice) then here is what I would say about each:

Assassin- Phenomenal

Crossroads- Feel good song

Heartbreak Warfare- Heartfelt and Sincere

War of My Life- Lyrical genius

Edge of Desire- Sensational both lyrically and instrumentally

Who Says- Mellow and High ;)

All We Ever Do is Say Goodbye- WOW, just WOW

Friends, Lovers or Nothing- Too good to be true, yet too true and oh so good (Absolutely love the sudden freeze before the powerful ending!)

Perfectly Lonely- THE ANTHEM

Half of My Heart- but Complete in all aspects!

Do You Know Me- Back to basic acoustic roots, stripped of crazy layers and blues.

This was the perfect way to unwind after a long week, and just as John mentioned on his twitter:"The end of my experience is the beginning of yours" And my experience was indelible bliss.. Thanks for sharing your talent with the rest of us John.

Macro Micro Mumbles

Economics, is a field of study that does not require negotiation, nor invigorating debates or passion per se- at least pre subprime mortgage meltdown, credit crisis, and Lehman Brother’s demise, GM’s quasi bankruptcy and the uncovering of Bernie Madoff’s fraudulent activities, I bet Ben Bernanke never saw it coming when he became Chairman of the Fed, having to stand up to the economy as if it had committed murder in the first degree- it just needs intelligence and ability to understand fundamental theories and attempt to apply them in the real world. That seemed doable, I could easily learn a few theories, apply them in practice.

Boring. That is what my life became right after I committed four years to economics at UCLA. I remember sitting in my Economics department graduation in the summer of 2008, and thinking to myself, “Economists are such an anti social lot”. In all my classes every student procured an ‘every man for himself’ tactic to get an A in the class. There was nothing social about this social science. There was only one professor that actually kept the lectures near bearable, Prof. Swanson. Prof. Swanson is one of those cynical, sardonic and malevolent characters you love to hate. He was old fashioned in his style of teaching, using only his chalk to scribble down notes on the black board. My favorite class with him was History of Economic Theory, and truth be told, that was one of my favorite economics classes I ever enrolled in. I understood economics as a product of human thought, beyond graphs, charts and formulas. Economics was never a ‘scientific’ field of study until the latter part of the 20^th century, before then it was just part of life, an organic progression as humans accumulated wealth, and tore away the dark veil from the Medieval era. Theories in physics, astronomy and other sciences began to surface, and the enlightenment period encouraged common man to become an active member of society, rather than be a slave to a concentrated authority of theocracies and autocracies. And so too came a deeper understanding to what drives the ‘invisible hand’ as Adam Smith wrote in his acclaimed book, “Wealth of Nations”. Now all the thousands of words written on hundreds of pages can be reduced to graphs and calculus. I preferred the words; it deepened my understanding of economics as a subject that related to humans. Today it seems economics drives human action, whereas it was human thought that in essence created economics and founded all its theories. Humans, as ‘rational beings’, have been reduced to just a variable in the ultimate macro economic equation.