It is common knowledge that the most shared types of pictures of Instagram are those of meals. Be it their lunch, dinner or breakfast, people just love to snap pictures of their food, apply some filter on it and share it for the whole world to see. I don’t have a problem with that but it has become a running joke with many.
But there’s a new type of “food” that’s making its way around Instagram. And you’ll know what I mean once you see this picture:
I guess we can say someone has been all tied up in the matters of breakfast.
This makes my Instagram pictures (example 1 and example 2) look very mundane. I don’t post much but I cannot begin to fathom sharing any sexual exploits there. I guess I’m too conservative for that. But whatever floats one’s boat.
This year’s most anticipated book release drops this Thursday. The project has been under tight wraps from the moment it was announced, reminiscent of the supreme amount of secrecy surrounding J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter releases. Don’t you miss those?
The Casual Vacancy is 512 pages thick. The idea of it was conceived on a plane where Rowling thought “local elections” and the idea wrote itself out. She says it was the sort of idea that hits you and you know it will work. It was the same with Harry Potter.
The title was initially “Responsible.” But when Rowling stumbled on a newspaper with the words “casual vacancy” in it, she immediately knew that it fit her story better. She has been writing the book since Harry Potter was done and considered publishing it under a pseudonym but she figured it would be much braver if she published it under her own name.
And it is her name alone that’s causing this book to be a success even before it is released.
The Casual Vacancy opens with the death of a parish councillor in the village of Pagford. Barry, the councillor, had grown up on the Fields, a nearby estate that’s drenched in poverty, with which other citizens of Pagford, notably the middle class, have lost patience. If they can fill Barry’s seat with one more councillor sympathetic to their disgust, they’ll secure a majority vote to relinquish responsibility for the Fields and hand it over to a neighboring council.
The battle for the seat starts. And it’s not a simple election as one can conceive, it is the story of a town at war. Pupils at war with their teachers, sons and daughters with their parents, the rich with the poor…. It is the battle of different classes. The chairman assumes the seat will go to his son, against whom are a cold GP and a deputy headmaster with ambivalence towards his son, a self-possessed adolescent whose subversion takes the form of telling the truth.
The Fields’ most notorious family is the Weedons.
Terri Weedon is a prostitute, junkie and a victim of abuse. She is struggling to stay clean to stop social services from taking her three-year-old son away from her. But it is her daughter, Krystal, who will take up the mantle of being the mother. But the death of Barry, the only adult whom Krystal considered as a friend, leaves her alone and struggling in the poverty that she lives in.
Anonymous messages will then start appearing on the parish’s website, exposing the laundry of the people living there and the town sinks into paranoia and tragedy.
The novel is written from multiple perspectives. So it invites the reader to delve into the head of different characters. Some journalists who were offered the chance to read the book said that this differing perspective made them think the book was closer to a comedy until it really sank in and they were hit by the severity and tragedy of it all as they delved into the Weedon’s minds.
The book is about the middle class of Britain. It is a representation of what J.K. Rowling says a “phenomenally snobby society.” And she has laid it bare. It is the story of heroin addiction, teen sexuality and economical problems. So it is as an adult book as it can get without it being Fifty Shades of Grey. The book is so unlike Harry Potter, in fact, that even the language used is one that would definitely shock any Rowling fan.
Some quotes from the book are as follows:
“The leathery skin of her upper cleavage radiated little cracks that no longer vanished when decompressed.”
[A lustful boy sits on a bus] “with an ache in his heart and in his balls.”
And there’s a reference to a girl’s “miraculously unguarded vagina.”
The Casual Vacancy has already sold more than one million copies in pre-orders and will be the year’s top selling new release. I will review it as soon as I finish reading it upon its release this Thursday. But I have high expectations.
When a journalist wrote an article in the Huffington Post about Lebanon’s babes and botox in its capital, many Lebanese stood against the article in uproar.
This is not us. These are not our women. This is not our city.
Do they have a point? Sure they do. After all, not all our women boast plastic faces as they strut their heels and behinds on the tables of Beirut’s rooftops. But what people seem to fail to realize is that the side of Lebanon portrayed by the Huffington Post is the one we want to get across to the world.
Check out this video from 2011. I have written about it before (check it here).
I disagree with the content of the video. I dislike the categorization of Lebanese joie de vivre as something only related to partying the night away. But when the only face even your ministry of tourism is giving of your country is that of rooftops, nightclubs and night life, what could you expect from a journalist who’s coming to your country to see the supposed highlights your country has to offer?
When you tell someone to come visit specific places in a country and they judge a country based on the places you recommended, you can’t but blame yourself for that.
Even I am guilty of that. Whenever a French person decides to inform me he thinks my country is full of Islamists where women are forced to wear the veil in order to go out of their homes, I go on and on about our nightlife, among other things. And I’m not even a fan of nightlife to begin with.
What David Constable has noticed is a phenomenon that runs deeper than should be acceptable in Lebanese society. Have you ever seen a woman your grandmother’s age with her face so plasticized that she looks downright disgusting? I have seen way too many of those, the last one of them as I boarded my flight to France. Have you seen girls your age who decide the moment they finish high school to start injecting their lips and cheeks? Well, I know some girls like that.
And the list goes on.
No, I’m not saying everyone does it. I’m not saying all our women are plastic. I’m not saying all our women can be summed up with boobs and botox. What I’m saying is that we have a lot of them and what is “odd” is usually the thing that sticks out the most. Simplest example? We don’t notice the calm days we get throughout the year but when all hell breaks loose for a few days or weeks, we judge the entire year accordingly. And we get judged as an “unsafe” country by everyone else according to those days as well.
It’s the same premise when it comes to boobs, babes, botox and Beirut.
A friend of mine, whom I met abroad, has a Lebanese mother and a non-Lebanese father. She has a typical European face: blond, a little nose and green eyes. When she visited her mother’s homeland a while back, she got interrogated by random people on the streets who wanted to know the surgeon who fixed her nose – because no one can have a nose like that – and the place where she got her contact lenses – because no one can have eyes that green.
We have many people who want those little inconspicuous noses that don’t require them to choose a specific side every time them want to change their Facebook profile picture. We have many people who want bigger breasts and asses. We have many people who want to have chest implants to go off all macho. We have many people who want to change their faces, look younger and have bigger lips in the process.
Are those “many” people the entirety of the Lebanese population? No. Are those “many” also present in other societies? Perhaps. But if you look closely, you will find many even among your close friends who have at least had something done – the fact that we can get loans as well to do so isn’t helping. On the other hand, in a one month stay in Europe, I have failed to see as many botoxed babes here or women who dress up for a wedding every day before going to work.
Many in our societies in Lebanon like to show off. Be it through their phones, cars, clothes or even through plastic surgery. And those are the people we like to show the world because they are the ones who help us change the stereotypes others have of us. But with the baggage of the bling-bling crowds comes something else entirely, which is another stereotype: we are a country of fake people.
Are we fake? Absolutely not. Beirut has much more to offer than just that. Lebanon has way more to offer than rooftops and night clubs. But that idea won’t change anytime soon. Especially when the only thing we want people to see in Lebanon when they come here is Gemmayze, Skybar, Downtown and Zaitunay Bay. Demand of our ministry of tourism to change tactics and to change the way it promotes the country and then we get to be in uproar over an article turning our entire society plastic.
My best friend was having dinner at the newly opened Nasawiya Cafe last Saturday. They had a Ghana-music night and it was for a good cause, she thought. When the event ended, she got up to leave.
Her friend walked with her. His car was parked a little before hers. He offered to drive her to her car. She refused.
This is Gemmayzé. I have walked this street all my life. What’s the worse that can happen?
So she tucked her hands in her pockets and walked on the sidewalk. Like a ma’am. She looked around the bustling bars and the intoxicated people. She saw the fancy cars trying to find a place to park.
As she walked and walked, she felt safe. Gemmayzé and Achrafieh were home.
It was then that she spotted something in the well-lit corner of the street. She stopped right in her tracks. She was paralyzed with shock. She was petrified.
It couldn’t be. Not here. Not like this. Not on this street.
In that well-lit corner was sitting a man. This man didn’t care about passerbies who looked at him in disgust but did nothing about what he was doing. He just kept at it.
She looked at his hand. Down there. She couldn’t move. The man in front of her was mastrubating in public. In front of her.
But that wasn’t the end of it. Suddenly, the man stood up and walked briskly towards her.
He had a steady pace. He was not intoxicated. He was not drunk. He was not high. He was fully aware of what he was doing. And in that moment it took him to get to her from the corner he was sitting in, she felt the most afraid in her 22 years of existence so far.
The man stood in front of her. He looked down at her and said: “Do you want me to cum on your breasts?”
Her reflex response was to grab her phone. Speed dial her friend and start shouting for him to come to her.
It took the friend less than a minute to be there. It took her more than a minute to catch her breath.
Never did she believe she would be this threatened this close to home. Never did she think she would see this level of decadence on a street that she always considered as beyond safe.
That night she felt the least empowered of her life. She felt so weak that she felt she couldn’t have done anything. And what’s worse, she knew that if anything had happened further, she wouldn’t have a safety net to fall back on.
That disgusting man would win. And what’s worse, his win would have been fair and square by all accounts.
When she got home, she needed to vent. She had already read my article about losing hope in Lebanon. So she wrote an addendum centered around the night that seared her decision to leave the country for her PhD in 6 months.
“From a Lebanese ovaries point of view, it is impossible to spend your life in semi peace without a pair of testicles guarding your back. From your dad watching your every move to your boyfriend being over jealous, to your husband being overprotective. Testicles are handling the situations.
This is the most annoying thing to young ovaries. But sexual assault is not a far fetched situation. It lurks around your brain every second of your waking time. Whoever tells you otherwise is in oblivion or still didn’t hear the stories everyone is so busy hiding.
If you walk around a carefree neighborhood, it is only because you know the alpha male there. No matter how loud you are online about your independence, you will never be ready to punch a guy once confronted.
Bottom line is we should either grow a pair or embrace our inherited dependence.”
What’s ironic, she later told me, is the place she was having dinner in.
After the torture read that was Fifty Shades of Grey (my review), I braced myself for the second book. A sane person would have stopped reading but being the masochist that I am, I wanted to know if these books, which are still selling like hotcakes, actually had anything more to them than the sex scenes upon sex scenes which filled their pages, ultimately becoming useless and skippable.
The second book in the Fifty Shades trilogy, titled Fifty Shades Darker, doesn’t stray away much from its predecessor. But as the title suggests, it runs deeper into what the first book lacked: a tangible story.
Fifty Shades Darker picks up where Grey left off: Ana had left Christian after he beat her in one of his sexual escapades. She then starts to sink in to despair, as is typical for similar characters in other books (Yes, Twilight comes to mind). Luckily enough, that doesn’t last a whole book. A few pages later Ana encounters Christian and ends up in his arms again without much struggle. This time, however, their relationship won’t be the same. New boundaries need to be set and new rules need to be instilled. As the story progresses, Ana starts to become fearful about the prospect of Christian leaving her for someone else when he gets bored of her and the “vanilla” relationship they have. On the other hand, Christian finds in Ana a reason for living (the billions upon billions that he has are not enough) and is equally fearful about her leaving him.
As their “relationship” grows, one of Christian’s ex-subs who had never lost her fixation on him returns with a vengeance while Ana faces trouble at the publishing house she’s working at with her overly flirtatious boss.
That’s book two in a nutshell.
Is it better than book one? Only slightly. Fifty Shades Darker delves deeper and goes darker into what made Christian the sadist BDSM-loving person that he is but those insights into the character’s personality are so diluted by the overly abundant sex scenes that they eventually become irrelevant.
Ana is still as useless a character as she was in book one. Even the “improvement” to her relationship with Christian don’t rub off on her – no pun intended – to give her some spine. In fact, she even melts further into the man she’s in love with, becoming more and more useless with each passing page. She “flushes” at every turn of the page. Her infamous “oh my” is blurted out countless times. Her Macbook Pro is still called the “mean machine.” Everything about her is still the same – except much staler and when her being as stale as it can get in Fifty Shades of Grey, that’s saying something.
If you’re the person reading Fifty Shades for the sex scenes (I’m not judging), you won’t be disappointed. As I said, Fifty Shades Darker doesn’t run short on them. Among the places that get a taste of Ana and Christian’s undying libido there’s a pool table, an elevator, their corresponding apartments and a boat’s deck, just to name a few.
Fifty Shades Darker manages to go a few shades deeper than its predecessor but that’s nowhere near enough to turn this erotic “thing” a novel worth reading. The characters still use the same cues for sex. Whatever plot that takes place is as predictable as it can get and that’s without even going into the overly repetitive writing style which gets even worse on this.
Why did I read these? Yes, I read all three books a few months ago. Well, horrible as they are, they were still better than the medical school material I had to study.
I guess we can say someone has been all tied up in the matters of breakfast.
A Separate State of Mind | A Blog by Elie Fares 