During the last century, cloth diapers were the best way to handle shitty moments until disposable diapers were introduced. A real disposable diaper was not available until the 40s, and even then, diapers were considered luxury items that few could afford. Elizabethan times allowed for a cloth type of diaper, however, diapers were changed so infrequently that several days’ worth of shit accumulated in people’s pants. Other ancient diapers consisted of animal skins, moss, linens, leaves, and the like.

Human race has always been in need of diapers at the beginning and the end of their lives. For babies or adults, diapers indicate the necessity of one not being able to control his most basic natural function as an independent entity. The natural function being one shitting their pants. In that context, a diaper is simply a tool that gracefully handles shit in pants.

We buy diapers, shit in them, and dispose them. We don’t even recycle them. Diapers remove and clean shit all day long, and sadly, no shit is given about diapers.

Chances are you know somebody in your life who, at one time or another, acted like a diaper handling shit and went on to accomplish amazing feats. Shit given? Fuck no.

The point is, most of us struggle throughout our lives by giving shit to people who act like diapers in situations where shits do not deserve to be given. Wisdom is what happens when one learns to only give a shit about issues that have nothing to do with diapers.

Go diaper free …

Lately, I have been roaming around the Chemotherapy lab of the local hospital accompanying my best friend who is dealing with stage-IV cancer. It’s a welcoming scene for those who are odd-enough to immerse themselves in the hardship of others. The lab has a large room with a nursing station in the middle. There are big comfortable chairs around the room where patients rest for hours to infuse the chemo in.

Everybody smiles and there appears to be absolutely no preconception against anyone or anything. There is no talk of sex, either. Those who run the place seem competent. Nurses consistently use the term “my dear” in their conversations with patients. Patients are usually of two character types: spinners and tuners, but mostly tuners. About half of them wear hats.

Patients sit on those big comfortable chairs for hours and watch the poison getting injected in with each drop. Chemotherapy promises a bargain to cancer patients: in return for the possibility of shrinking the tumor and controlling its growth, you agree to submit to the notion of having a few things being taken away from you including: taste buds, ability to properly digest food, hair, long-lasting erection, and ability to concentrate. It seems like a reasonable trade.

Katy the nurse-in-chief, comes around down to earth and folksy. She has an extremely balanced sense of humor. She says that she has been a cancer nurse for 35 years. She talks about how her work experience has changed throughout years -from the days of patients experiencing extreme adverse side effects –to today when some patients don’t even lose their hair.

It’s mostly a quiet and anxious scene that has its own nomenclature and vibe. You see a lot of deep long looks to blank points. Everyone shares a smile … a real and penetrating smile.

Cancer sounds like a big word, that is often expressed with heft and gloom. These days, I’m experiencing a different side of it. The absorbing fact about facing a serious condition such as cancer is that one spends a good deal of time thinking about the past, and the future. The main difference in this case points to the fact that: a cancer patient’s past has little to no correlation to his future. This is one of those cases where the past definitely doesn’t equal the future …

Today is my birthday. One year older, and perhaps, more peaceful than ever. I have never felt so insignificant in the company of my best friend whose charisma has not left him -no matter how hard his condition has been. He’s a spinner. He has made a party of going through this experience in the chemotherapy lab. He has transformed the chilly, humming and beeping and blinking room into another chapter of his beautiful life where he wears sunglasses, and walks around in surfer-short and flip-flops without any indication of giving a fuck.

My work has always involved conversations, exchanging ideas, talking, convincing, compromising, being convinced, understanding the context, reading the subtext, pushing, pulling, and getting others to do what they initially had no desire to do. It’s been a constant chess-match that spans across years. An endeavor starting in one culture, and continuing in the next three cultures.

Throughout this time, if there is one thing I’ve learned in absolute terms is this: there is no room for context in American culture. Period!

If you ever start a conversation by laying the foundation of a topic, you’re wasting time. If you’re sharing the genealogy of an issue, people phase out by starting to look at their phones browsing pictures posted by butt-blog on Instagram. Your impatient audience act like: what’s the point? As if the point is a pill. They don’t even care what shit you put in that pill. They just want to drop a pill. Pills like Crooked Hillary and Basket of Deplorables. Heck, even Obama’s cabinet and west-wing members thought Obama wasted “too much time learning” or he paused during conversations because “he thinks too much”.

The American pop culture places no value on the full version of the story. There is an intense systematic disregard for verification, prudence, and due diligence. Everything is a meme. Analysis and position is an article that’s shared online, and is unread by the poster. You’re smart if your article is from NYTimes.com, and you’re stupid if you post something from Fox News. You get more noted if you yell repeatedly and louder -as if you’re selling carrots in a flea market. People keep yelling justice by constantly saying “See, what he said today”. Ok gringo, posting memes does not exactly make you Nathan Muir trying to judiciously rescue Tom Bishop from Suzhou prison near Shanghai.

If you think this problem is to be fixed by changing leaders, you’re wrong. You’re dead wrong … Newsflash … you are the problem. This is all on you with your shitty attention span and non-existent curiosity. You’re one of the many who got us here.

I firsthand witnessed people changing leaders through an emotional revolution. But they continued their own awful habits and cultural norms. A few decades in, they ended up in the smellier part of hell, where they now have to put their full heads in the shit-pool.

Enjoy dropping pills, motherfuckers.

She asked me if I have ever dressed up for Halloween. That’s a great question. I ask myself a question related to that question every night. I barely know the answer to either the question, or the related-question.

It’s Tuesday. It’s Tuesday in Kirkland, Washington. I am in Kirkland, Washington. A place far from home. I have had a property in Kirkland, Washington. But then this place cannot be any farther from home. Far in many ways. This is my first Tuesday ever in Kirkland, Washington. It’s almost Halloween. It’s October 29^th. It’s not too cold yet. Pine needles have covered the front yard.

I’m not going to dress up for Halloween. Why not? Well, you have to rather ask, why. You have to ask why from the people who are dressing up. The default is not dressing up. Those people who don’t dress up, don’t have to justify themselves. The burden of proof is on people who dress up in ridiculous costumes. At some point, most everybody dresses up for Halloween, and then they decide that they will no longer dress up. That’s what I have decided. I’m not dressing up for Halloween in Kirkland fucking Washington out of all places I have lived in. I didn’t make that decision this year or when I was sixteen. I have never dressed up for Halloween. Some say that explains why I’m such miserable person around this time.

This time of the year reminds me of a song called Honey, Honey. I wonder if you noticed, but there is a comma between each instance of the word honey. Basically, honey comma honey. Ken wrote this song. Ken titled this song. When I first saw the title of the song, I read it honey …… honey, like everybody would. There is a sort of deliberate pause implied by the comma between the two instances of the word, honey. A lot happens in that deliberate pause. That pause in stuffed with a few decades of thoughts, hopes, would-have-been(s) and should-have-been(s). That pause is why Ken wrote the song.

This song reminds me of my daughter. I wonder if Ken wrote this song for the daughter he was having. This song expresses my idea for the daughter I’ll be having as a father, and it’s about my hopes and dreams for her. I have never been a parent, but my daughter already has a song written for her. My daughter doesn’t have a specific due date, or even a mother.

Honey, Honey has been playing in my head for the past decade around Halloween. That should explain why I don’t dress up for Halloween.

I have become fascinated by the book and its movie –reviewing both mediums multiple times. The best quote of the movie goes to:

“People hate to think about bad things happening, so they underestimate the likelihood … they found markets that sell options very cheaply on things that would never happen. So when they were wrong, they were wrong small. But when they were right, they were right big.”

He’s always home. Todd, I mean. He never laughs even though he’s got perfect teeth. Full head of hair in salt and pepper, but the spice of his hair is going bland. Tall, handsome, and in his mid-sixties; Todd can’t help himself but to be noticed as soon as he enters the room.

He has an uncanny side. He wants his grave to be filled with ice cream when he dies. Todd, I mean. He believes pain instructs. He keeps saying that experience is the ability to forget what hurt you. But not so much that you won’t get hurt again. He writes beautifully. His late-style of writing is captivating. Once he wrote “Experience, the conventional wisdom dictates, is a positive. Experience is supposed to teach how to react to circumstances. Experience provides a library of precedent. It can lend perspective. We look at an experienced man’s lined face and grey hair and feel reassured”.

None of Todd’s anecdotes about experience are necessarily untrue, but they won’t stand the test of circumstance because the reality may be rather more complex than what he thinks.

Towards the end of his life, the literary theorist Edward Said became fascinated by the notion of “late style” and how an artist dealt both with age and decay. In his book on Late Style – published three years after his death – he points to those whose late works seem as though they “crown a lifetime of aesthetic endeavor”. His interest, though, is more in those whose late style “involves a non-harmonious, non-serene tension – a sort of deliberately unproductive usefulness”.

Todd has solved countless problems in the past. So he turns to past experience. There is a danger, though, that what was successful in the past will no longer be successful, either because of a false identification of the problem – that is, that a present problem resembles a past problem but is in fact different – or simply because he never leaves home. Todd, I mean.

I wish I could save my feelings at a certain point in time. I wish I could go back to those emotions and review them, and feel exactly the same. If that was the case, forgiveness would suffer and benevolence would spike. It’d be like time is a non-existent concept in that it could not neutralize or erect past emotions.

This is my strange way of saving my jarring mindset on Tuesday October 6th at 9:45pm.

Almost everyone agrees that change is inevitable. If nothing else, the fact that clock keeps ticking, reminds you of the seconds that go by.

On a lazy midnight and while maintaining a swollen state of mind, I asked myself : what’s not changing? What things, people, or places have not changed for me, or at least, have lasted for long? I started by thinking about things and objects. And oh my … did that not lead to a pile of mental gash.

Things: speaking of things, I’ve never possessed any object with substantial emotional value. But, there is one piece of clothing that I can’t seem to be able to throw away. It’s a v-neck black sweater with dark grayish stripes that I bought in Montreal back in 1997 -when I used to date Nelly. I don’t know why I like it. Maybe because it still fits and makes me look fitter. I get a kick out of the fact that it reminds me of not gaining considerable weight in 15 years. It’s been a hard 15 years, too –with all the change in my eating habits. Ironically, I bought the sweater on the day Nelly lost her ever-so-loving pinkish lipstick, and she couldn’t stop crying for the whole day because of it.

Places: I have perhaps been one of the least faithful people to places. I have lived in four different countries and seven pretty diverse cities. If a given municipality or borough is the fundamental unit of a place, I don’t have any, to call out as the one that has stayed unchanged. So that’s that.

Surprisingly and almost embarrassingly, there is one entity that has stayed unchanged in my life for the past 12 years. That’s the company I work for. In addition, it gets more awkward to underline that this is the only corporation I’ve ever worked for. Prior to that I was the small business fan, and for a few years, an entrepreneur. What Gives! One just needs to read this blog to know how-unlike-me, that is.

Corporations are partly about people. People share one or two aspects of their lives in corporations. Most of them 9-to-5 it, to earn and provide. Some come to heavily screwing the system up and down and left and right, and go to “succeed”. You got the junkies who have read, memorized, and took-to-church the guidelines. And of course there are the sweethearts who are just people people.

What’s so important about a career? I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do, doesn’t matter in a life-and-death kind of way. I could see why people enjoy their jobs; it makes you feel important, sought-after and put-upon. But, I’ve always understood that the best way of my limited time on earth was to spend it with people I love. MC is one of those. He’s a coworker. Who he is, and what he means, has been and will continue to stay unchanged.

Lee is a single father of a beautifully protesting teenager. He works hard. Between that, all the responsibilities at home, and other personal tasks there is not much time left for anything else. Lee holds a socially graceful status amongst friends and the hardest task for people around him is to dislike him. As a friend, he’s the most miss-able person. Lee is not very much into gadgets and computers, and it was only recently when he finally put up a profile on Facebook. In one of the social gatherings, Lee got introduced to Jane and they kind of hit it off.

Lee and Jane started hanging out, doing sporty kind of activities, and having long conversation. After a while, Lee felt a connection and decided to ask Jane out to dinner to get to know her in a better environment for a face to face interaction. So he sent a text message to Jane, which by then, was the preferred method of communication between the two, asking [Hi Jane, what are you doing on Thursday night?]. The response to that text was something that left Lee in a state whereby he felt both failed and helpless. Jane’s response said [are you asking me out on a date by texting? If so, you ‘should have called!’]

Factually, some 83% of American adults own cell phones and three-quarters of them (73%) send and receive text messages. When asked those texters how they prefer to be contacted on their cell phone, 31% said they preferred texts to talking on the phone, while 53% said they preferred a voice call to a text message. Another 14% said the contact method they prefer depends on the situation. Heavy text users are much more likely to prefer texting to talking. Some 55% of those who exchange more than 50 messages a day say they would rather get a text than a voice call.

Nowadays communication have become a multistep, multiplatform process. A friend of mine likes to talk on the phone, but only after you have sent an email to propose a chat, during which you actually determine if a call is necessary. By the time voice meets voice, I’m spent. To her credit, she gives out all of her contact information freely. The other friend doesn’t want to talk on the phone because her work requires her to be on the phone all day long, so she prefers text and facebook messages.

With all available forms of communication, every newly formed relationship seems to come with operating instructions such as : “Try my cell first, then shoot me an e-mail. Or circle back to me via Facebook wall if you want, I’m very responsive on there”. On top of all that, contact itself is subject to infinite whimsies like: an e-mail can go to spam. A call can bump up against a voice mailbox not taking new messages. Its owner, managing too many mailboxes, has let it fill.

Just about 15 or so years ago, we used to have only letters and landline phones. Those were the good old days when writing a letter was considered personal, romantic, and wholesome. If Lee had met Jane 15 years ago, all he should have done was to pick up the phone and call Jane to set up a date and Jane would have most probably said “yes”. My educated guess is they would have probably had a peachy time together, too. But now, they first need to clear the cloud of misunderstanding. Things have spun out of proportion in terms of communication between human beings. You hear so much about how instantly reachable we all are, how super-connected, with our smartphones, laptops, and tablets. But the frustrating truth is that we’ve become so accessible we’re often inaccessible. The simple act of getting to any of us has become a tortured and tortuous process. In such situation, one important concept that suffers the most is: communication adequacy. No one knows what’s an adequate form of communication anymore. The know-it-all gods that we are, we start forming our own adequacies which maps to no one else’s.

Looking from the outside as a person who introduced Lee to Jane, I see that they have already put up a thick wall to defend their assertions -because a few days after that infamous interaction between the two, Jane texted me to say [Lee asked me out via text. You should teach him how to ask a lady out] … …, I waited for a couple of hours, and just to make the whole drama more exciting, I replied to Jane on facebook and said: [if you wanted to discuss your drama with Lee, you ‘Should Have Called!’].

When times get tough, “Just Flow”, he said! … what does that mean? … Who knows. It’s hard to identify or measure it. But you know it when you experience it. I saw it several years ago through a late friend, and then ended up liking the whole notion of flowing.

I experienced one of the most interesting trips to Thailand, last month. One of my friends and fellow travelers posted a comprehensive blog about it, so I will only talk about the flowing part.

The fact is human relationships are hard no matter what, because of the dynamic between individuals being a function of time, location, and state of mind. That’s why getting along takes so much energy and consideration –which is why some people prefer not to get along. Albeit, that’s not an entirely positive phenomenon for social creatures like human beings.

And then you have floaters. Those who sit at the edge of a lot of different conversations and group of people, but never end up being fully a part of anything. They share a little bit of everything with everyone. There is either no conviction, or no doubt which is why they virtually portray high degree of tolerance for a lot of common nonsense.

On the other hand, one who flows has wide variety of interests in a lot of things. There is a high degree of genuine tolerance for curiosity and doubt. There is a profound sense of comfort for discomfort, and an essential belief in curiosity. Unlike floaters, the person who flows sits at heart of a lot of things and finds herself/himself a big part of them.

Just Flow! especially when you take a trip to Maya Bay.