STORIES, STORIES

Hakeem and Abdullah talk about The Order . Follow them for fitness and LOLs, two of my favorite things. Here are reasons why I like these two: * They have never looked better than they do right now. Proper workout routines, good eating habits, discipline, and for Abdullah, quitting smoking. These things work and the guys are living proof. I hate getting (unsolicited) fitness advice from people who aren't themselves fit. These two can go on for all I care, I'm listening. * They're real because I know them in real life. They happened. * They're funny. 

Now that we're safely past New Year's Resolution season (by now, most of us have slowed down on the gusto we started off with, AMIRITE?), and because I am reverse-hipster, I'm making public my own resolutions. In keeping with reverse-hipsterdom, I started working on my New Year's Resolution in December last year, so I'm really just continuing the work. I call it The Yes Man Plan, because how can anyone not love any movie Jim Carrey is in? I have 3 goals this year: Fitness, The Having of Lots of Money, and Writer Betterment. The Yes Man Plan states that I will say Yes to anything that will contribute to either one of those 3 goals, and No to anything that takes away from it. The simplicity of this plan hurts my head. I've done years and years of overcomplication and over-analysis that just settling for something this simple is gonna take me a little time. It's been working for me so far. Not excellently, because I am nothing if not below-average, bu...

The past 6 months has seen me sneaking slowly into creative writing, once when I wrote a (draft for a) novel, and a few more times as part of a short story creative writing workshop.  I've discovered two things about my creative writing chops (or lack thereof). One, I always spiral down the angsty drain. I can start off light-hearted, funny, very chill, and then always ALWAYS end up all emo. I don't know why. Is being emo the easiest way to write a creative short story? MAYBE. Why else do we have an abundance of emo stuff everywhere? On TV, books, blogs, movies, everywhere. Everyone is emo. I'm one of them.  [Read the first story I wrote for the workshop HERE .] Two, it's true, what I once heard Tarantino was supposed to have said, something about how if your friends and family aren't nervous when you start writing, then you're not doing something right. It's easy to draw inspiration from the people around you, and it really must be really we...

It's officially the 3rd year of my Great Flirtation with Fitness! The last 2 Januaries were nice because when I looked back a year, the changes were huge - I'd dropped down a few dress sizes, my weight in kilos reduced dramatically, and my fitness level several notches higher than when I first started out. THIS year, though? Disappointing. Not disastrous, just disappointing. Last year, I committed to Hakeem's Veggiesaurs program and was excited about the changes I would see a year on. Well, there have been zero changes. I'm at the same weight, same dress size, same fitness level as exactly one year ago today. Now, sure, that's not a bad thing at all, coz at least I didn't gain weight, right? The problem is that I wasn't consistent at all this year. I went through cycles of frenzied workouts + healthy eating and fat-ass binges with no exercise for weeks on end. You'd think that after a couple years of this, I'd have at least done away with ...

Around last week, I started reading my first John Hodgman book - That Is All . It is various kinds of funny, but here's why it really stuck to me: ever since GeekFest Jeddah , I'd started thinking that it was entirely possible to find someone else within this city who shared a large part of my Venn Diagram of interests. This book neatly wraps all those interests up. I already have an existing circle of close friends who are familiar with (and perhaps slight fans of) Hodgman's kind of work, but we're looking to expand. So I announced online that I'd be giving away a copy of this book, and got exactly zero (positive) responses. Understandably. It caters to a very specific audience. The thing is, you don't have to know Hodgman intimately, you just need a working knowledge of SOME things to fully appreciate the genius of this book. I've compiled a short list here, so you can check if you deserve to read it. * Have you read The Unbearable Lightness of B...

I love fashion blogs. I thank the internet for being the internet because I don't have to spend any more money on fashion magazines, a habit I developed growing up fashion-starved in Jeddah. One of my New Year's resolutions is to be more fashion-savvy. I employed the help of the boys to jumpstart this, that one time we found ourselves at a mall. Here's what happened. 1) Fashion in car. This is a nice, comfy sweater from H&M Ladies. Not quite his size. 2) Gangsta + Hipster + Yellow = I dunno. It kinda works. Headgear at GAP.  3) This Madonna/Michael Jackson outfit from Zara Ladies, with the glitter and skinny pants. Looks ridiculous on a hanger, but I bet it's bitchin' on an actual person. 4) Mini-skirt from... I forget the name of the store, but the color wouldn't do favors for Menelik, so we left it. But how about that bow-tie, ha? LADIES. 5) Animal print stilettos. Bill's exact words upon seeing this: "Dude, what the ...