Half-Baked Ideas: Life, Raising Kids, and Arab's Memory

Of Life and Expectations.

Life happens in a very random way. It's somehow depressing yet refreshing to know that your plans will most likely fall apart. So my advice is never plan farther than a year or two. Don't assume or expect. Things and people change. Life twists and turns in weird ways. One of your best friends will be someone who you haven't seen for 10 years. People you had many things in common with will soon drift and others will replace them. Places you planned to settle in might be the places you send postcards to, and those you used to send to might be your new home.

Raising kids

This advice comes with a great deal of credibility. Mainly because I'm single and have no kids, and so, I'm free of all inhibitions and psychotic protective behaviors.

if you want your kid to be more successful than you are when he/ she grows up, as a rule of thumb, they should be different from you!

Unless you want them to be copy cats and bad re-runs, you should unleash them and let them do their thing in their own way. 

More successful means not the same as you are. It means different. 

On Arabs' Memory. 

 In general terms, Arabs don't have a big interest in their own personal history. Interestingly, we more than anybody else tend to retain the biggest stock of our cultural history, and in many cases take it with us, oh so romantically, to the grave.

We are not big on birthdays and anniversaries. We don't usually celebrate milestones, and we definitely have a thing against pictures. You are unlikely to find an Asian who doesn't have a dozen pictures of himself in the cradle, whereas you can find many Arabs who don't even remember how they looked when they were young.

It's probably a reflection of what's going on on the political scene in our era. We celebrate our long and glorious history, but we rarely take actions on our current events or celebrate our successes, if there was any to celebrate anyway!