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When You’re Living Peacefully in a Perfect Loop, a Small Unexpected Interaction Can Be Disruptive
| ESTIMATED READING TIME: 7 MINUTES
This is the video that made me write all the stuff above.
28:29 Yup, glorifying the “other” can be like that, especially when the other is from a Western country. 🤦🏻♂️Newsflash: They’re humans just like us, so they, too, practice social hypocrisy, and they, too, can get mad when things don’t go their way, and so on. I’ve recently blown a girl from Belgium off (not in a hostile or sneaky way, mind you) when she approached me, asking me about the bag holders I was using, and where I got them — I was on my way home, carrying two bags of groceries. I tried to be nice, but the looks from my fellow “fasting” Moroccans were too overwhelming, so I had to remind myself, and her that, “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.” Like Elliot from Mr. Robot, I have a loop or a pattern that I feel like I have to stick to, so I can’t just be socializing with strangers interrupting my perfect loop, because all it takes is a so-called harmless interaction for me to forget something important; I don’t care if it’s a tourist or a fellow countryman. Ramadan is the worst time to be all curious, and friendly anyway, especially during the day, and the person you have to indulge is of the opposite sex — and I’m not even religious, by the way. It really felt like a glitch in the Matrix, because no one has ever been persistent enough to tell me to take my headset off, so they can ask me something. Normally, I just go straight home, but the fact that I took a 30-second break to skip a song or two made it easier for her to mess with my perfect loop — not on purpose, obviously. Maybe not everyone’s like me, because personally, when people are in the zone, I make it my life’s mission not to mess with their flow. Probably about a decade ago, I remember I asking a guy about the time, and he looked at his empty wrist, and then said, “12:30PM.”, and any one could tell it wasn’t 12:30PM, not by a long shot, so the only explanation that makes sense was that he thought I was a mugger, because here in Morocco, muggers usually ask about time before they proceed to work their magic, so to speak. That silly incident alone made me vow to never ask strangers about the time ever again, 😅 and not because I felt offended, but because I kind of empathized, and realized that it’s probably better not to mess with people’s perfect loops. Another simple example would be something like, when someone asks, “How are you?”, instead of burdening them with your drama, you just say, “I’m fine.”, and call it a day.
In the last 5 years or so, no one has ever approached me about anything except for beggars, which I’ve learned to ignore to death, knowing that the guilt-tripping never ends. Funny enough, for a split second, I thought the Belgian girl was a beggar, too. 😅 Despite the awkwardness of the situation, the conversation was decent while it lasted, but honestly, it’s like I forgot what it was like to have random conversations with strangers, man, excluding the everyday grocers that I interact with, of course. My best friend, and I refer to strangers who interrupt us like that as “Commercial breaks”, because they unknowingly do the same thing; you’re talking or thinking about something, and suddenly you’re in a random conversation that starts out of nowhere, and the craziest part? Some people might read this, and think, “Man, you’re really blowing this out of proportion!”, and it’s probably the same people who live on autopilot. 😅 It’s okay, though, because I don’t expect anyone to relate to this.
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3:45 Story of my life. 😂👏🏻 I once got reported by someone on Upwork because I told them their question was too generic for me to answer it properly. 😂
16:39 now I know why we say in Tetouan, Morocco “Ruyo Chino” to imply, “A Chinese ruse/trick.” 😂
22:20 I started learning English on my own back in 2006. I was 12 at the time. It just made no sense to me to speak English with a thick accent, so it was easy for me to adopt an American accent thanks to music, movies, TV shows, and video games — starting with Yu-Gi-Oh! cards as the main reason why I started learning English in the first place. Before I started learning English, I was very good at French, and yet I didn’t let the standard French accent interfere with my American accent. It’s always been ingrained in my DNA that, “If you want to learn something, learn to do it right; don’t half-ass it.” I wrote my first rap song on the 31st of December, 2010, and I joined a local rap band here in Tetouan, Morocco, soon after. One underrated pro tip that Ibrahim mentioned: You keep going back to whatever it is you’re trying to learn until it gets stuck. That’s pretty much sums up my learning process. To this day, I still look up words, phrasal verbs, idiomatic expressions, etc. Sometimes even when I know what a particular word means, I still look it up, and so the more I look it up, the easier for me to remember its meaning(s). Ibrahim also said something very interesting, and here it is in a different way: Because it’s going to be hard to “fix” your accent, it’s better to work on your accent while learning English; that way, you get to kill two birds with one stone, and that’s what I intrinsically did as a 12-year-old kid. Something else that’s very important: Some people might bully you — in a way — when they notice that you sound like a native speaker even though you’ve never been anywhere outside your non-English-speaking country; don’t ever let that prevent you from working on improving your accent daily. Back in high school, my English woman teacher told me that I had an “artificial accent”, knowing that ever since I started learning English, I started adopting an American accent unknowingly, so her calling my accent “artificial” was a clear case of sour grapes, and I remember telling her, “Well, I’d rather have an artificial accent than a Riffish one (referring to Moroccans who live in the Rif mountains to imply a vague accent).”Improving one’s accent is not really a waste of time as some people might have you think. As far as I’m concerned, it makes learning English so much more fun. When you have a good clear accent, it’s like you’re doing a physical exercise the right way, and like my handball coach used to say, “When you cheat [during a physical exercise], remember: you’re only cheating yourself!” I live near a restaurant called “Buffalo”, and everyone here in in my city pronounces it like, “Boo-fa-loo”, which is annoying as hell; they really make it sound like the name of a Moroccan village. 😂I know this may seem like a preposterous or shallow thing to say, but people who don’t care about the accent are rarely conscientious. In other words, I can tell that a person is detail-oriented when they have a good accent, but not always.
27:12 Side note: If you don’t like a particular accent (e.g., Indian, Egyptian, Moroccan, etc), it does not mean you’re racist, for the same reason you’re not called a racist when you say you don’t like a particular music genre. For me, if it’s a funny video, then I don’t mind the accent; however, if it’s a tutorial or something like that, I’d rather not give my ears cancer — no offense. 😅
29:15 In my case, some people here in Morocco think I’m arrogant just because I have a flawless American accent. 😅 Back in high school, the backward culture was pretty much like, “Those who don’t speak English are cool, while those who do are nerds who think they’re better than everybody else.”
For me, it was never a competition, and it was never to impress anybody; it’s just so much more fun when I learn to do things the right way.
The idea that bullying people with a bad accent will make them prefer not to talk at all is absurd, considering that I was kind of bullied into not speaking at all, and I have a flawless American accent. 😅 Most of my teachers were incredibly supportive, and because, “Sticks and stones may break my bones.” haters’ hate could never stop me from getting better and better. Let’s be real, the only reason most people don’t see “having a good accent” as a priority is peer pressure; because our Arab culture is based on bullying each other into being humble, we fear that learning to speak English the way it’s supposed to be spoken might give others the impression that we’re arrogant for whatever reason. I’ve seen it time and time again. It’s ridiculous!
32:56 I can relate to that, because sometimes I speak in a funny “Dictator” English on purpose, and for some reason, I tend to stutter less. 😂 However, that’s no excuse for me not to speak properly in a serious context.
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