Subzero Blue

On The Scam Called Insurance

You know what’s worse than taxes?
What’s worse than tax is insurance.

You got to have some insurance.

They shouldn’t even call it insurance.
They just should call it ”in case shit.”

l give a company some money in case shit happens.

Now, if shit don’t happen,
shouldn’t l get my money back?

— Chris Rock – Bigger And Blacker (Full script here)

I couldn’t agree more…

Insurance is the biggest scam ever created by man!
What pisses me off even more is that somehow they’ve convinced everyone it’s ok for them to steal our money!

Trying To Make Everyone Happy…

“Trying to make everyone happy makes no one happy”

I’m not sure who originally said that, but I couldn’t agree with it more.

If you spend your life trying to please and make everyone around you happy, you’ll end up leading a miserable life, plus no one will be happy because it’s impossible to make everyone happy.

But why do we sometimes go down that path and attempt to make everyone around us happy?
Is it fueled by insecurity, an intense spiritual passion or compassion?
Is it because we believe we’ll only be happy if everyone around us is?
Is it this certain need we have to feel that we are a source of happiness for those around us?
Is it because we don’t want anyone to be angry at us or dislike us?
Is it because we care so much?

Whatever the reason is, it’s unrealistic and will only backfire on us; we’ll end up over-thinking every single thing, having to act and be unnatural, putting ourselves in sticky situations, stressing ourselves out…etc.
And what’s for sure is that we’ll never be happy because instead of focusing on what we can do to make our lives better and be happier, we’re focusing on a bigger impossible job of making other people happy.

In the end of the day, every one of us leads one life, and that is already too short to spend ignoring ourselves and trying to make others happy instead.

Of course focusing on ourselves and putting our happiness as our first priority doesn’t mean we should be selfish and mean, in fact whenever we can make someone happy we should, but we just shouldn’t put it before our own happiness.

Well, that’s what I think…

Who Am I?

The other day someone I don’t know added me on MSN, after finding my msn email on the blog. After a small introduction and all, this person asked me to tell them about myself. Being pretty sure the little profile I had on my blog’s “About” page was enough, I sent them its link.
The person told me they had already read it, but what they wanted to know is “Who is Marwen?”
Me being at work at the time, and that being an opener for a very long chat, I apologized that I wouldn’t be able to chat much because I was quite busy, and suggested we talk more later.

Anyway, between myself and I, the question sort of bugged me, and I thought I might be even using my work as an excuse to run away from answering the question.

It’s not the first time I’ve been asked this same question, and although it seems a very simple and easy one, it actually isn’t, it’s a pretty hard question.

The question pretty much asks you to define yourself in a few words, but how can you do that? How can you sum up such a complicated being like yourself, your set of feelings, dreams, ambitions, mistakes, beliefs, opinions and more?
It just can’t be done that simply, it’d take hours to go through even bits of it.

Another annoying thing about this question is that it makes you somehow question yourself on why it’s so hard to answer, and why you can’t come up with a good response right away.
That leads you to question your life and start asking yourself whether you’re actually happy with it all or not. It also gets you thinking of answers you would like to answer to that question, definitions you’d like to have for yourself, how you would like to be and view yourself, which is actually not that bad, because it’s good to do a little review of your life every now and then and see where you are, where you’re heading to, and where you’d like to be going, but when you first meet someone isn’t really the time for one of those reviews.

I know that when most people ask the question, they don’t really mean something that profound, they just expect a little introduction about yourself, but still the answer you give does constitute a big part of their first impression, and more importantly it tells you what you think of yourself.

Other than friendly first encounters, where it matters less, the same question is asked in job interviews, which we all know are some sort of low level psychological warfare, in which the person’s answer to this question could result in him getting or losing the job. The answer has to be a good one, confident and somehow majestic to give you the upper hand and leave an overwhelming impression on the interviewer.
Of course, that is not the time to be having discussions with yourself in your head on whether you’re happy with your life or not; your answer has to be ready and more job oriented, which actually makes it easier, well for me at least, because I’m quite proud of my career life so far.

Anyway, if someone were to ask me now “Who is Marwen?”, I think I’d answer that I am a lot of things, that I’m still discovering it all myself, and that the first place anyone could go to begin to know me is my blog where I’ve been writing for over 3 years, documenting some of my thoughts, bits of my life, events and news that touched me and more.
After all what is a person but his thoughts, doings and dreams mashed up together?

Decision Making: Weighing Advantages And Disadvantages

Life is full of difficult decisions for us to make, and no matter how simple we try to make our lives, how many self help books or articles we read, how much we try to learn from other people’s experience, …etc; we always end up confronted with a hard decision to take. There simply is no escaping it.

Taking decisions is a complicated process, and so many things come into play. We first have this gut feeling generated by our adaptive unconscious, some of us follow it, and some of us hesitate and need to think more, sort things out “rationally” and then take their decision.
This isn’t always good, although it seems it is, as we sometimes over-complicate things for ourselves, but well…

So we basically sit around thinking about what options we have, breaking them down to bits and pieces and weighing them to find the perfect decision.

The problem is there is often no such thing as a perfect decision or option in life.
In fact, generally speaking, there is no such thing as anything being perfect in life.
Everything has its advantages and disadvantages, its positives and negatives, and the only thing we can actually do is sort them and choose the option that has advantages that are worth the disadvantages we’re going to suffer.

Everyday we are faced with these kinds of decisions, at work, at home, at the doctor’s office, at the mall, everywhere.
Almost every thought-out decision of ours results from us putting the positives and negatives in a balance.

But still we end up taking wrong decisions, because sometimes we think we want certain things that we actually don’t want, or think we don’t need certain things that are actually very crucial to us. This explains why we hope we could undo some of our decisions.

There is no solution that will guarantee our decisions to be the right ones everytime, in fact I also think there is no such thing as a right decision, it’s all relative, and what one person thinks is the right decision, could not be quite right for another, but well in the end we’ll sometimes have to trust our instincts, in other times take a more logical approach, and generally we should try to get to know ourselves better to know what it is that really makes us happy and what we truly need, so that we have a reference to go back to when it’s decision time.

Human Unsatisfaction And Contradiction

People living in the city want to move to the country side, and people living in the country side want to move to the city…

People in their home countries want to emigrate, and people abroad want to come back.

Young people want to grow up, and old people want to be young again.

Working people want to retire, and retired people want to go back to work again.

And the list goes on…

It seems like unsatisfaction rests at the core of every human being’s existence. We’re almost never happy with what we have or where we are in life, we’re always creating something in our minds that we believe is better, even if it contradicts with an earlier belief, and even thought we’ve already been there and done it; we keep going on and on and on.
I wonder if that is what actually drives us in life, keeps us going and keeps up feeling this fake sense of purpose.

If you think of it more though, it also means that we don’t know what we want in life. It’s as if we blindly, randomly, almost madly steer our way through life, not knowing where we want to get to, emotionally moving back and forth between thoughts and wishes, and getting ourselves confused by our contradictions.

But, as “intelligent” human beings, shouldn’t we be able to determine what we want exactly out of life, and be able to plan a path to get there, and then be happy about it once we’ve gone through with it?

Crime And Redemption

A couple of days ago, I was watching “A History of Violence” featuring Viggo Mortensen, Ed Harris and Maria Bello, and it got me thinking about crime and redemption, which actually also reminds me of the movie “Redemption” featuring Jamie Foxx, which is based on the true story of Stan “Tookie” Williams.

I’m actually a bit torn between my thoughts on this, and haven’t reached a satisfactory conclusion.
I mean, if a person commits a crime or even leads a life full of it, but then realizes how wrong he was and tries to move on and build a new clean life for himself. How do we treat that person?

Jail is after all a correctional institution, but what if that person has already found out he was wrong, felt guilt and sorriness for it and is correcting himself? Do we still need to send him to jail?

On the other hand, what about the people who suffered from that person’s crimes? Don’t they deserve to see him punished? Don’t they need to feel protected by the law? Doesn’t the government need to send a clear message to other criminals out there? Isn’t it only fair?

But is it fair then for people to brand the person as a criminal for the rest of his life and not give him a chance to rebuild it and become a better individual?
I think by doing that we’re only pushing them to remain criminals, as we don’t give them any option to be anything else.

We all make mistakes, ranging from the smallest to the biggest, but a lot of us realize their mistakes, maybe get punished for them and then take care not to do them again; so we shouldn’t be marked with our mistakes forever.

I guess in the end, the law should be upheld, and criminals should be punished no matter what, but after they do their time, we should make sure that they’re really set free, not just physically but in every way, and that we give them all the options to rebuild their lives and get fully re-integrated in the society.

How Do You Deal With Stress?

People have different ways of dealing with the stress in their lives:

– Some suck it all in and let it eat away at them from the inside.
– Some bang on tables or whatever surfaces they find near to them.
– Some break things they find lying around them, glass objects are a favourite.
– Some shout their lungs out, obscenities galore.
– Some bang their heads on a wall.
– Some start a fight with the first person that crosses their path.
– Some rush for the fridge and have all they can eat.
– Some unleash it through sex or masturbation.
– Some do Yoga or meditation.
– Some pray and go all spiritual.
– Some go to anger management.
– Some go on a psychotic killing spree.
– Some pull out hair from their heads, eyebrows or elsewhere.
– Some run away from their lives, go to a far away village and become fishermen.

And some just don’t do anything about it and have a nervous breakdown.

Hanging On To The Bits And Pieces

It’s weird how as our life goes by we keep hanging on to all this stuff from the past, these bits and pieces that belong to different eras of our life.
Most of the time, it’s a bunch of useless crap that we no longer have any use for whatsoever, but still, for some reason, it’s crap that is very dear to us.

The other day I had one of those moments when something dawns upon you, and you suddenly understand a certain thing about your nature, and about human nature in general.

I think that in our present, we feel somehow disconnected from our past, as if it’s all part of a past life, a distant memory, that we’re not sure is true or not, not sure we really lived.

These small useless material things are more or less the only proof we have that we were there and we lived all that. Without them, our past doesn’t exist. They’re the only way to reassure us and keep our past alive in our present.
No wonder how dear they are to us.

I still have a bunch of stuff spanning my different ages stored here and there as some sort of anchor, a living memory of that age, a proof of existence. A teddy bear, a notebook, an old computer, a skateboard, legos, …etc.
A pile of items that hold so much more value than any possible estimation.

If Tomorrow Never Comes…

One of the songs that really touched me when I first heard it some years ago was “If Tomorrow Never Comes” by Garth Brooks, covered by a number of others too.
It’s a love song in which the singer asks “If tomorrow never comes will she know how much I loved her?”

But the song didn’t make me think of that only, I mean of course it got me thinking about whether I showed my feelings enough for the one I love, but it also got me thinking about a bunch of other things.

It got me asking myself the question: What if tomorrow really never comes…?!
Which leads to yet more questions, I’d be asking myself if that happened, like:
What is it that I wanted to make out of my life but never got to make?
What is it that I wanted to do but never got to do?
What is it that I wanted to say but never got to say?
Where is it that I wanted to go but never got to go?
Who are the people I cared for but never got around to showing my feelings for?
And the endless list goes on…

We always get too carried away with life to stop and think that it could all end so suddenly, and that there might be no tomorrow, that those things we’ve been putting off till next week, or the month after, or maybe a couple of years into the future could possibly never come true.
Even though we know we’re mortals, we often forget it and plan as if we’ll be around forever and we’ll have all the time to do everything we want, say everything we want, express our feelings for everyone we want, …etc.
But that’s not true… And we know it…

So I guess what we should do is to follow the wise quote that tells us not to put off today’s work to tomorrow.
If there is someone we want to say something to, we might as well do it today; if there’s someone we want to hug, we might as well do it today; if there’s someone we want to confess our love to, we might as well do it today; if there’s something we want to do, we might as well set a plan for it in motion today; if there’s somewhere we want to go, we might as well start planning for a trip there as soon as possible; … etc etc etc

Good luck with your lists…

Asterix & Obelix

Ok, this might be one of those posts that leave you thinking “Why the hell am I even wasting my time reading this?!”, but well you’re here and you might as well read it anyway.

Well, the whole thing is that I think Asterix & Obelix cartoons are very unfair.
I’ve felt this way ever since I was a child, and everytime I read one of the new books, I get pissed off again.

I was introduced to Asterix & Obelix by my very cool uncle, who is a big fan and used to collect all their comic books. They were all in French, a language I used to suck in; In fact I still do. Anyway the comic books helped me gain a minimum of understanding for the language, enough to understand what the hell is going on and what they’re saying in those bubbles.

Going back to the idea of the post, reading those comics and watching the movies later on when they were made, rang so unfair to me. In fact it’s their titles that got to me.
Why the hell are they all Asterix and something? Asterix and the vikings, Asterix and Cleopatra, Asterix and the romans, and the list goes on…
Why the hell is Asterix the main character?
He’s really short, he has no special powers, he’s not that handsome and he depends on a little pouch of magic potion to be able to do anything…
On the other hand, Obelix fell into the magic potion when he was a baby, meaning that he doesn’t need to take a sip of potion in between punches, he’s the one who is the most effective in battle, piling those romans up like pyramids, and well he’s also showed a more affectionate side to him.

Of course they try to make it out as Brains vs. Power, and so Asterix is made out to be smarter, resulting in him being the main character, and Obelix a secondary one. But I think that’s unfair.
Obelix is clearly being exploited.

They should at least always use the two names, like “Asterix & Obelix Against The Vikings” or something like that.
Because, honestly, Asterix is not much on his own, he’d surely get his ass kicked in the blink of an eye.