Acidic People and Neutralizing Their Effect

I’ve been feeling quite upset lately for so many reasons. No matter how much you try to ignore sometimes, there are people out there who just want to test your limits. In the simplest example, I told someone “Assalam aleikum” once and they responded with their back to me by saying, “aha” (illi huwa, ‘go on, what do you want?’). And that’s just the simplest example I am allowing myself to post in an attempt to explain why I’ve been totally “off” lately.

It gets worse when some of these are people you can’t really avoid and you just have to deal with them. It’s good that at least I have a brother who’s willing to listen to me ranting about how I’m being mistreated.I call my brother my buffer because he keeps my mood stable by absorbing the extra electrons when I’m really pissed off.

Worse thing is that since it’s towards the end of the semester, it doesn’t seem like things are going to get any better any time soon, so I’m just going to close my eyes and pray that things just pass by quickly and peacefully.

Ciao

Corrosion, Life and Three Little Words

When I took the corrosion course during my undergrad, there was an answer that frequently found itself in multiple choice questions; “Live with it.” The basic idea is that corrosion is inevitable and sometimes you can delay it by using corrosion inhibitors or by a change in process design or pipeline sizing, but most often than not you are going to have to live with it.

Same applies to some things in our lives; relationships that you have to live with, whether in school or work or at home. People that you can’t really stand but have to work with anyway. This could apply to married couples who stay together just for the children; they make a choice to not do anything, and decide to ‘live with it’. It could also apply to situations in your life; when something has gone horribly wrong; like a failed attempt or a major mistake that resulted in a fiasco. You’re just going to have to live with it.

Having to ‘live with it’ takes strength if you ask me. Not everybody can undergo a hardship, and face it with patience. Some people would intoxicate themselves to forget, and it’s their attempt to run away from it, whatever it is. But then there are others who don’t let it affect them, and they go on with life knowing that next time around, they could try to avoid it but if it was inevitable, then they’re going to have to live with it. Some of these things that we have to deal with everyday; they were here before us and they’ll be here after us, so we are just going to have to ‘live with it’ as best as we can.

Your task today is to figure out what in your life can be likened to corrosion; what in your life that you have to live with whether you like it or not…

 

Crumbling Up

Sometimes you find yourself surrounded by terrible events. Maybe your friends have deserted you, or your family has shunned you, maybe you’re financially and emotionally broke, and maybe all of the above happened all at once. People normally refer to their life as “crumbling down” all around them. But for some people, a different view could be taken and things would be “crumbling up” sort of like the video below. 

The thing is, people react to such events differently. Some people react to severed relationships by building a thick wall around them, so that they don’t get hurt again. It’s well known that if you don’t want to get hurt then stop caring too much. While these people might be viewed as cold but never judge them because they’re just reacting to circumstances and doing the best that they could do with what was given to them. So once those thick walls are built around them so they lock themselves in a fortress devoid of any warm human connection, the act itself is like a wall “crumbling up.”

Some people rise above the experience and use it to make themselves better people. It’s like the case of a person who owns a wooden kiosk, and it falls down in flames caused by an arsonist. Then he ends up winning enough money in a legal case to build himself a kiosk out of steel the next time around. So in other words, though his kiosk had “crumbled down” initially, the final results is that of a kiosk “crumbling up”.

It’s like that quote; “sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together.”

P.S. I’m publishing this without editing it so please alert me if there are any typos.

The Irony of School Shootings

It is popular to see people advocating the social message telling people that education is the key to get out of the ghetto and lead a respectable life away from drugs, guns and gangs. That makes ‘school’ shootings quite ironic if you think about it. People go to school to get away from a life of violence, but the hierarchies and status quo of the school system are conducive to nurturing a bullying culture until one  might end up in an explosion of violence, literally.

What opened the topic is that I read about a shooting in some university in Oakland on April 2. Even though investigations for this case are still going on, previous school shootings like the infamous Columbine one tend to connect these acts of violence to bullying.

And to think that the movie “Bully” hit selected theatres on March 30.

Talking about acts of violence, some terrorists blew up places in Mombasa  as can be read in this article. The message from the attackers reported in the article, “The Kenyan public must be aware that the more Kenyan troops continue to persecute innocent Muslims of Somalia, the less secure Kenyan cities will be; and the more oppression the Muslims of Somalia feel, the more constricted Kenyan life will be.”

Now I don’t know the validity of this statement since it was posted online, but the irony is they make these claims even though they attack the Coastal region which is filled with Muslims from different background including Kemenies, Indians and Somalis themselves. So what are they trying to do? Give mixed messages? It’s as if they are saying that to pay for Kenyan troops killing innocent Muslims of Somalia, they’ll kill innocent people in Kenya some of whom could have been Muslims, and where does that leave us….Conspiracy theorists might actually start to see something here.

Whether the victims are Muslims or not, these attacks are not justified at all. Attacking helpless civilians who might as well have been armed with butter knives against grenades is not the way to go about protesting against Operation Linda Nchi.  The main reason Operation Linda Nchi was initiated was because Somali militants were suspected to have kidnapped several foreign tourists and aid workers inside of Kenya – Kenya not Somalia. So if they step over the border first, what do they expect exactly, a Taraabu dance??!!!

In this case of Kenya vs. Al-Shabaab….who is the bully now?