Leap of faith

I was glued to my TV yesterday my heart beating and my eyes wide open, watching as Felix jumped from the edge of space, wondering why anyone would attempt to this. Jumping at 40km from earth in an astraunaut suit, risking your life, why exactly?

And then I watched him land. And I realized how incredibly amazing these five minutes must have been for him. For the rest of us, it was just another five minutes. Many of us spent it watching him on television, or on our laptops, tweeting and facebooking and flooding the blogosphere with his name. "What did you do today?" I asked my friend who was lying on his couch, feet up, laptop on his chest, TV in the background, and I knew that's what he must've been like all day. And what did Felix do?

He risked his life, yes, just to break a record and do something no human has ever done before. And these five minutes were probably more thrilling than a hundred years of someone's else's life. That's what I'm taking from this.

You see, lately I've been in a rut. It feels like I wake up everyday to the same damn routine and it's like I'm waiting for something to change but at the same time I'm not really doing anything to change it.  And I've been having this conversation with so many of my friends lately that I know I'm not the only one who feels stuck that way. I realize it's hard. You have a job, you have a salary, you have a certain way of life and even if it doesn't make you happy, the idea of losing that salary scares the shit out of us. What if whatever we try doesn't work? What if we're not as "special" as we'd hope to be? Well, what is special about someone like Felix isn't that he is built differently than the rest of us humans that he can physically withstand a 1000km/hour speed. It's that he has the willpower and the courage to just do it. Even if the risk is death.

What I also came to realize is if I don't take a risk, if I don't jump 40km of my own edge and take a leap of faith, then I could very well live another 50 years stuck in a rut, waiting for something to happen to me. And that's not how I want to live.

scaredy cat

I'm really not a cat person. And by that I mean that I hate cats. They scare the shit out of me. I don't know why, I can't explain it, but when I see a cat all I think is "run" and when I catch a cat's eyes I get shivers down my spine...

Now my Parisian lives alone in a big apartment on the ground floor of a building in the middle of Achrafieh, with a garden and a balcony that both connect to the streets. A few months ago, he saw pee and excrements on his father's bed --which has a door that opens into the garden, that he must've left open. This happened on more than one occasion. Cats were constantly roaming through his garden then, and he kept trying to scare them away.

Then one day in May, we heard miaowing coming from the garden. It was small, young sort of miaow.  The garden was pitch black and we could barely see a thing, but we kept following the sound until we found a newborn black kitten entangled in the bushes. My Parisian helped it out, trying not to touch it with bare hands so that his smell didn't rub off on it. Once freed, he put him down and we waited for the mother to collect it. Sure enough, a few minutes later, the mother appeared with two other kittens by her side, and they were reunited.

The next day, my Parisian went to Paris for a few days. When he came back, there was no sign of the three kittens or their mother. I was relieved, as I really didn't want cats constantly around me seeing how much they scare me. On a Sunday, as he spent the afternoon cleaning his garden, my Parisian saw something odd in the small fountain: there he found the three kittens, who had drowned.

The very same night, he heard a noise coming from his father's bedroom. He went in there to check, and there he found a female cat who had just given birth to three kittens. In the bedroom! The mother panicked as she saw him and fled the room. He carefully put the kittens on a pillow and placed them outside in the garden for her to collect them, and closed the connecting door.

One morning a few days later, we were walking to the kitchen when we smelt a horrible stench. We looked everywhere for what we were sure to be cat excrements, and finally, after about 10 minutes, hidden under a pillow, was a huge pile of shit on the couch. It was so disgusting I almost threw up. We cleaned up and closed the windows, as it seemed cats came in from everywhere.

Later that day, he heard a sound coming from the living room. And sure enough... there were the kittens! Two of them, not three. Behind a big trunk. Again, he carefully placed them outside, and barred all the doors, all the windows, once and for all.

Now the family of three took refuge in the garden. The two kittens never seemed to leave the garden and the mother come and goes. My Parisian, being a born animal lover, couldn't help but feed them, giving them a box of tuna every morning, and some milk.

This morning, at about 7am, we awoke at the sound of a kitten, miaowing and miaowing and miaowing. We ignored it and went back to sleep. Then, later, when my Parisian went outside to give them their morning tuna, he couldn't find them anywhere. Until he saw one of them completely flattened on its stomach, and the other with an odd foam coming out of his mouth, both looking dead. Or almost. He called the vet and they both concluded that they must have been poisoned, although they don't know how. He carried them in a cardboard box and drove them to the veterinarian, but both of them died.

Kind of disturbingly weird, isn't it?