Wednesday, November 11, 2009

That Dirty Grapevine

You know what the deal with Arabs is? It's not our preferrance to include meat in every dish we eat. It's the level of talk. That level, friends, is high. And it's about everyone.

You know the saying "See no evil, hear no evil"? Forget the evil part for the sake of political correctness, please. But Arabs hear and see all. And they talk. It's like some right of passage that every young adult Arab in the United States must fret about the talk as they go out of their way to avoid being spotted by other curious Arabs at some point. Not necessarily because they're doing something wrong, but because the talking snowballs. Any misread moment by the ignorant machine can have scary results.

Choosing the places you hang out is very important. If you know Arabs frequent a certain part of town or store, you'll probably avoid going there just as a preemptive measure. Why risk being interrogated by someone who isn't a member of the C.I.A. just because they've taken it upon themselves to morph into the Judge Judy of Arabs once they've spotted you in public. Even a group of girls will avoid going to a certain establishment because they're afraid the Arab boys who are coincidentally there will go back home and talk. My reaction to these girls has been, "But if we're there and we see them at the same place, why are THEY talking about US? We're doing no more wrong than them!" So the girls say,"We know this. But they still talk about us. We get the hit, not them." And you know what? They're right.

Simply running into someone at the wrong place at the wrong time can mean another hit to your reputation. Your reputation is sort of like a lightweight boxer. It can only take so many hits before it goes down.

We've all had people try to take some jabs. I had an opponent once whose "concern" for me was marred by the fact that he could probably go to a number of different "Insert problem" Anonymous groups. So this elder statesman, whose moral compass is extremely off-kilter, felt it was his duty to inform a member of my family of seeing me at...where-ever the hell I was, you know, just in case. That's the sort of thing that you have to look out for. You want to scream and return the jabs, literally. But you mostly just have to move on.

Arabs have a tendancy to unnecessarily dramatize certain events. Even all the Arab actors over-act. Heck, we talk with our hands, because we need to dramatically act out what we're saying. Words aren't enough! The drama used to be reserved strictly for public occassions or sightings, but the online world has added a new platform to stalk and talk. I cannot, for the life of me, believe that facebook was not created by an Arab. Human beings, by nature, are curious. Arabs, by nature, must know every detail of your life. Arabs are like Androids of Information. If the Terminator were Arab, his mission would be to unearth and retain every single bit of information about John Connor's life and then go share that information with all the other Terminators. And then probably destroy you. Cause Arabs are like the first Terminator, not the second one.

But sweet, sweet facebook. Oh, cyber scene of stalkerdom. Institute of information. The pictures, information, and status updates provide a holy trinity of extra info. that would normally be reserved for close friends and people you see on a semi-regular to regular basis. I understand that the purpose of facebook is to generally stalk, but there are these Arabs out there who befriend you and never talk to you. Those are the ones to watch out for. Also, if their status update reads something like, "You don't know me! You can't judge me!" or "Everyone needs to mind their damn business! Haters!" then I'm probably losing trust in them. My friends with drama-free statuses usually tend to lead drama free lives. There's a reason for that.

Alas, even facebook has privacy settings. Might that our lives have the same option as well.

Like everyone else, I am going to die. But the words – the words live on
for as long as there are readers to see them, audiences to hear them. It is
immortality by proxy. It is not really a bad deal, all things considered.
-J. Michael Straczynski

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