Hat tip to Haseeba for providing this gem - and being able to handle the jealousy

Men Are Just Happier People– What do you expect from such simple creatures?

Your last name stays put.
The garage is all yours.
Wedding plans take care of themselves.
Chocolate is just another snack.
You can be President.
You can never be pregnant.
You can wear a white T-shirt to a water park.
You can wear NO shirt to a water park.
Car mechanics tell you the truth.
You never have to drive to another gas station restroom because this one is just too icky.
You don’t have to stop and think of which way to turn a nut on a bolt.
Same work, more pay.
Wrinkles add character.
Wedding dress $5000. Tux rental-$100.
People never stare at your chest when you’re talking to them.
New shoes don’t cut, blister, or mangle your feet.
One mood all the time.

Phone conversations are over in 30 seconds flat.
You know stuff about tanks.
A five-day vacation requires only one suitcase.
You can open all your own jars.
You get extra credit for the slightest act of thoughtfulness.
If someone forgets to invite you, he or she can still be your friend.

Your underwear is $8.95 for a three-pack.
Three pairs of shoes are more than enough.
You almost never have strap problems in public.
You are unable to see wrinkles in your clothes.
Everything on your face stays its original color.
The same hairstyle lasts for years, maybe decades.
You only have to shave your face and neck.

You can play with toys all your life.
One wallet and one pair of shoes — one color for all seasons.
You can wear shorts no matter how your legs look.
You can ‘do’ your nails with a pocket knife.
You have freedom of choice concerning growing a mustache.
You can do Christmas shopping for 25 relatives on December 24 in 25 minutes.

No wonder men are happier.

Send this to the women who can handle it and to the men who will enjoy reading it

I gotta admit, I’ve never heard a song that so insistently tugged at my heartstrings or remained on my lips for so long. I even found myself singing it at the office today even though I stopped to ask myself what I was doing, I kept at it and eventually answered my own question - because it reminded me of our ancestral home, and for the final end that we all hope our long journey will end at, insha’allahu ameen.

I suspect it probably has something to do with the fact that it was written and sang by a Muslim. Its the song chosen by Lena Khan for her short film “A Land Called Paradise” which got top prize for the One Nation | Many Voices contest.

Here is country singer Kareem Salama’s song along with the short film by the same name, by Lena:

A Land Called Paradise
(K. Salama)

(Chorus)

I wanna live in a land called paradise
I wanna go to the valley of the King
I wanna live in a land called paradise
Wanna see the birds fly and I wanna hear the angels

Sing the praises of my Lord so far above
As I move poetically with the struggle I fall in love
I look to the left I look to the right and all I gaze upon
Reveals the source of flowers rainbows and the dew at dawn
Some see before and some see in and some see after
I let my sight pierce the chains and see the master

(Chorus)

I wanna live in a land called paradise
I wanna go to the Valley of the King
I wanna live in a land called paradise
Wanna see the birds fly and I wanna hear the angels sing

So many times in my life I ask myself the question
What got me brought me into all this mess I’m swimming in
But pain is not and neither harm in the pool of bliss
So slap me with your hand or kiss me with your softest kiss
Tell me that you love me or that you don’t like me now
Tell me you invite me or that you don’t want me around
I won’t cry over a world that can’t change my life
I’ll put my money on what lies ahead in paradise

(Chorus)

I wanna live in a land called paradise
I wanna go to the Valley of the King
I wanna live in a land called paradise
Wanna see the birds fly and I wanna hear the angels sing

I try to do right and love my wife and trade and pray and talk
I can be anywhere doing anything and I’m mindful of God
I’m pleased in good and happy in harm and now I realize that I already live in a land called paradise

(Chorus)

I wanna live in a land called paradise
I wanna go to the valley of the king
I wanna live in a land called paradise
Wanna see the birds fly and I wanna hear the angels

I wanna live in a land called paradise
I wanna go to the valley of the king
I wanna live in a land called paradise
Wanna see the birds fly and I wanna hear the angels sing

You can understand a lawyer’s being brusque with opposing counsel on a tough case. But to be obnoxious to a man offering you a job? That’s what one applicant at a law firm in Boston did in 2006.

Dianna Abdala, a young attorney, had been offered a position at the firm, but the job didn’t come with the salary and benefits she was expecting. Just before her start date, Abdala e-mailed the lawyer who had made the offer, William Korman, and declined it. The subsequent e-mail exchange degenerated to such a shocking extent that the entire thread made its way to inboxes around the country and eventually ended up in the hands of ABC’s “Nightline”–which published the messages for all to see:

Abdala: Dear Attorney Korman, At this time, I am writing to inform you that I will not be accepting your offer. After careful consideration, I have come to the conclusion that the pay you are offering would neither fulfill me nor support the lifestyle I am living in light of the work I would be doing for you. I have decided instead to work for myself, and reap 100% of the benefits that I sow. Thank you for the interviews.

Korman: Dianna — Given that you had two interviews, were offered and accepted the job (indeed, you had a definite start date), I am surprised that you chose an e-mail and a 9:30 PM voicemail message to convey this information to me. It smacks of immaturity and is quite unprofessional. Indeed, I did rely upon your acceptance by ordering stationary [sic] and business cards with your name, reformatting a computer and setting up both internal and external e-mails for you here at the office. While I do not quarrel with your reasoning, I am extremely disappointed in the way this played out. I sincerely wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors.

Abdala: A real lawyer would have put the contract into writing and not exercised any such reliance until he did so. Again, thank you.

Korman: Thank you for the refresher course on contracts. This is not a bar exam question. You need to realize that this is a very small legal community, especially the criminal defense bar. Do you really want to start pissing off more experienced lawyers at this early stage of your career?

Abdala: bla bla bla

[source]

Just one night before the competition…
I find no rest, no sleep, just intuition.

Tomorrow I will hear Let The Games Begin…
Everyone scores, but I have to win.

I will be much faster than the speed of light…
I’m stronger than a lion in a fight.
This song, a reminder in my heart
For my people, for my country and for us
ELLAS ELLAS ELLAS

“Let the Games Begin”
- Nikki & Christina.

THIS IS IT BABY!!!

It’s the biggest World Cup finale ever. There has NEVER been any series as hyped as this one, ever in the history of professional sports. This is the game that’s on the minds and lips of everyone from the presidents and prime ministers, to the halls of power and business, of governments and mega-corporations, on the streets and schoolyards, in the places of worship and sanctuary, in the dance-clubs, malls and cafes, to all the way down to the small towns and fishing villages dotting the globe like sand on the beach.

The stadium is bursting at the seams, crammed with 200,000 fans and nearly a thousand media personnel, with hundreds of high-definition digital cameras broadcasting the game worldwide, where over a billion people are glued to screens large and small, fervently praying for their favorite team. Billions more are listening on the radio, on the net, or asking others about The Game.

No series has been so heavily contested such as this one, so pregnant with your victory and indeed these are the last moments before delivery. The stakes are piled sky-high: the winners go home with the Cup and with all the prestige and glory of a triumphant army coming home after a long war, the bragging rights are unparalleled, the paychecks are going to have double-digit zeros on them, your fellow compatriots will be congratulated wherever ’round the world they go and the envy of other nations will no longer be hidden. The losing team will be scorned, mocked, and spat on for years to come by their own countrymen and even families, for bringing such unbelievable ignominy and shame to the nation, until they find themselves to be outcasts.

The teams are tied but because they have more points than your team, a tie will spell a disastrous loss for your team and for your nation. Every player is calling upon their most innermost, hidden reserves of strength to carry them through. Sinewy muscles bulge; foreheads are riven by overloaded arteries, adrenaline flows in torrential amounts through the veins of every player.

The opposing team has pulled their goalie off their net to add another player into the mix, to throw you off-balance and to gain numbers and strength against you. And now, with the ball in your end of the field, it would be suicidal to pull your goalie off as well, and so you fight insanely for the ball, ignoring the pain in your shins and knees, never letting it out of your eyesight, madly driven to keep it from getting past your goalkeeper. You keep getting closer and closer to it, just grazing it with your knees or knocking it back down with a perfectly synchronized head-butt while it continues to be fiercely fought over.

… and then, it’s yours …

You have the ball and your deft feet handle the ball like a music conductor handles his baton in front of the Symphony Orchestra. Your team sees you with it and you hear them screaming at you to come down the left side where they’ve engaged the opposing team and cleared a path only for you, leaving you a window of a few seconds to break free of the melee. And instinctively, without a second thought you take the ball and barrel right through that small breach and onto the wide open field, streaking across the grass with one singular, overriding objective - the empty goal you see on the other side. You don’t even hear the screams of despair of the opposing team. Driven by desperation, they lunge forward trying to catch even a sliver of your shadow but they know all is lost. Their morale dropping faster than a bullet fired straight downwards, their faces betray them before their bodies do. Not even Superman could reach you in time, and they know this. Even you know it.

What before seemed to be mere lightning flashing in the distance has now coalesced into thousands upon thousands of camera flashes going off in rapid-fire succession, straining to capture The Moment, that exact point in time when your powerful thighs deliver that final blow, slamming home that ball like a hammering the final nail in a coffin. The sportscasters lose their composure and bellow into the microphones about the lone comet they see ripping across the field unhindered, unchallenged.

But you don’t hear them or the earth-shattering, roaring crowd. The unending barrage of dazzling sparks is denied entry into your visual cortex. You block everything out. You’re in the zone, and you’re high on the colossal, near-illegal boost of adrenaline. You’ve expertly bent the entire world to conform to your desires, all down to this every moment where everything has given way to you and your superior mastery. No one else in history has ever commanded such a clear shot at the goal, and you know no one else ever will.

This is going to be the shot heard and seen around the world.

The crowd boils over. The thunderous screams of your name can be heard across the city. Traffic stops. Horns blow; people exchange glances and presume your impending victory. The millions-strong crowd surrounding the stadium is now a live, pulsating, and cheering monster dancing in the streets. In front of screens around the world, in front of Times Square displays and in front of radio sets in cities and villages, the tension mounts and overflows as premature cheers of euphoria erupt. Hands are raised to the sky; tears come unbidden to millions of eyes, cascading down wet cheeks. Never before has such a massive amount of humanity come together and willed for such a pivotal triumph to come into existence …

…and then, you don’t take the shot.

It’s not like you swung at the ball and missed, it’s not like you actually belted it out and it bounced off the goalpost. It’s not like some mad maverick on the opposing team intervened and stole it away from you.

No.

You Just. Never. Took. The Shot.

…

“You miss 100 percent of the shots you never take.”

- Wayne Gretzky…

To be continued.

“We call that person who has lost his father, an orphan; and a widower that man who has lost his wife. But that man who has known the immense unhappiness of losing a friend, by what name do we call him? Here every language is silent and holds its peace in impotence.”

- Joseph Roux

[Hat tip to Afifa for providing the quote]

I found a decent article about resilient people - people who are able to rebound from whatever difficulty life brings; about how they make it through tough times in life more easily than others, and what some of their endearing qualities are, which include:

They take control of their lives: They don’t see themselves as victims whose fate is in the hands of others. They see problems as challenges, are committed to facing them head-on, and look to influence their own outcomes. Resilient people not only learn from hard times but also acknowledge their own fortitude.

They forge connections: Being resilient also means seeking aid from others, building up your own support system. Studies have shown that people who had many relationships — with family, friends, neighbors, coworkers, even within church and community groups — actually lived longer than those who had the fewest.

They allow pain to spur growth: They tell themselves that its not the end, its the beginning. Studies show that resilient people find the proverbial silver lining by reinventing themselves. They accentuate the positive. They cultivate their childlike curiosity, grab every opportunity to laugh, spend time with friends. When trouble strikes, these are their best resources.

And they insist on changing the world: Even in the face of imminent disaster, or actual disastrous losses, they will still give to others and try to improve the lives of others around them.

Read the whole story here.

And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, “Speak to us of Children.”
And he said:
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts.
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as he loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.

- Khalil Gibran

…

This is one of those stories that’s true and yet, so unbelievably bizzare that it leaves you fearful for the human race - I don’t think we want genes as retarded as these getting mixed into the human race:

“A young male entered the walk-in entrance to our ER one busy Sunday afternoon shift, holding a hand over a bloodstained shirt. When the overwhelmed triage nurse didn’t acknowledge him for several minutes, he calmly walked to the registration desk and informed the startled clerk that he had been shot in the chest. After the man was rushed into our trauma room, his unluckiest-ever story unfolded.

It seems that he had been depressed for several weeks, and two days earlier had decided to commit suicide. He took a bottle of Valium and a fifth of vodka and fell asleep in his bed, fully intending to never wake up again. Unfortunately, the combination was not lethal, and he did wake up, albeit thirty-six hours later, with a tremendous hangover. Deciding that something else was needed to complete the job, he filled up the bathtub, got in, and slit both wrists with a razor blade. Alas, the bleeding was all venous and clotted off after several minutes, leaving him sitting in a pink-tinged lukewarm bathtub.

He climbed out of the bathtub and decided to hang himself from the dining-room light fixture using his belt. the light fixture tore from the ceiling and he crashed to the floor with such force that he fell through the dining-room floor into the basement. Battered but not beaten, he looked around the basement for something to finish the job. He found a .22 caliber bullet but no gun. He decided to hold the bullet with a pair of pliers and, pressing it against his sternum, took several whacks at the compression end of it with a ball-peen hammer. On the third whack the bullet went off. He fell to the floor and looked down to see a bullet hole on the left side of his chest. After lying on the floor for twenty minutes, he decided that maybe he really did not want to die and drove himself to the ER.

Our evaluation showed that the bullet had harmlessly bounced off a rib and was lying in the subcutaneous tissue of the left chest.”

…

AAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA STUPID RETARD.

On a much heavier and more serious note, I think this just goes to show that really, when it’s not your time to die, then you CANNOT move your time forwards by even a split-second. It wasn’t his time to die and no matter how hard he tried to kill himself, it just wouldn’t happen.

(Does the Angel of Death ever laugh? If not, he does now)

(Hat tip to Saima M., for writing it up, from the book “True Stories from the Nation’s ER”, by Mark Brown, M.D.)

So I just started my new job last week and it’s been pretty hectic, as expected.

For starters, there’s the travel time and distance. Its over 40 km / 25 miles away which is within an average range for commuting to work, but the fact is, Toronto has the busiest highways in North America. So at first I thought of taking the bus and subway to work, but even with the express routes, that turned out to be a staggering two-and-half-hour trip, EACH way. Five hours a day commuting back and forth? Sounds like my college days. I used to skip sleep at home and make up for it on the bus and subway.

Anyways, screw that.

I went to SmartCommute.ca and found two commuters who live close to me and also happen to work near my new office. Coupled with my flexibility of work hours - I told my boss I’d do 9:30 to 5:30 and he agreed - and working from home if I want by just hooking the laptop up to the corporate network, commuting to the office is easy now alhamdulillaah. And I’ll pay them $160 /mth, which is less than what I’d pay for the bus and subway tickets, and definitely less than the gas + insurance I’d be paying if I were driving to work by myself each and every day. So that’s one problem off my back.

Then there was all the mental cramming to do - because of my job as an account manager at the company, which has its HQs stateside, we up here at its Canadian branch are subject to all American laws governing American corporations, including laws such as Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, and more … especially a slew of American export laws. We can’t export to Cuba and Syria and North Korea, and a few other countries, etc, blah blah blah. Financial regulations, getting upto spec on pretty much all the lines of businesses / services that I’ll be handling.

And then there’s the issue of my diet [haha] - I skip breakfast at home and I get to work and this is an example of what I’ve eaten in a day, for breakfast and lunch:

- Spicy Dritos chips with Tostitos salsa sauce
- Haagen Daz ice cream bar
- A slice of potatoe bread [made by a co-worker, she gave me some as she was passing by]
… that’s all for breakfast

Had some macaroni and meat leftovers for lunch, from the day before. THen the Marketing guys came by and told us all to head down to a conference room because they were having some big new product launch and wanted us to check it out. So I go there and of course, refreshments were available so I helped myself to some more Doritos, a Mars chocolate bar, and a cup of really strong Starbucks coffee with like ten pounds of sugar dumped into it, because I never really drink coffee or even tea. That kept me awake for the next house and then the downer came, my body just crashed, and I tried to fight off sleep. That same high metabolism which keeps me in shape automatically with no exercies required, also uses up the energy so fast that it leads to such crashes.

Oh well.

All I ask is that God make me so good at what I do that I make it look ridiculously easy. Because if I can do it, so can you, so can anyone else.

There’s a bro I know who’s in jail, he’s fairly young, about 18 or so. The following is part of a letter he wrote to his family counseling them to patience - when ironically, it was his family and friends who were always writing letters to him, advising him to be patient and not go give up hope.

“I don’t really know what to say as we already talk soooo often. All words of encouragement have already been exhausted, yet I still repeat Yaqoob (as)’s words when he truthfully said “Patience is beautiful!”This beauty is beyond the beauty a Man finds in nature, it’s beyond the beauty of a bride on her wedding night; it’s beyond the beauty of our glittering jewelry and it’s beyond the beauty of watching our wealth amass for a ’secure’ future.Why? Because this is beauty that can only be encaptured by the heart. The majority of people can see with their eyes, hear wih their ears and smell with their noses. But Allah swt only hand-picks a few of His slaves to envision and perceive through their hearts. So be of those slaves. Steer your heart towards bliss by using it to guide you, by using it as your sense of perception, and by completely engulfing it in hope of Allah’s Mercy.

Have complete Yaqeen that Allah does not wrong His slaves. Every moment will be recompensed and the TRUE Beauty, the REAL Beauty, the ABSOLUTE Beauty which currently only resides as a sensation of the heart, will one day be actualized through sight, sound, smell & feel in their absolute PERFECT form inshallah.”

The beauty and strength of his letter left us all silenced and at a complete loss for words.