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Hi there, welcome back to Apotize.com, today’s article will be a vlog instead. Tattoos used to be a huge “controversial” topic, sometimes taboo, but recently have become a modern styling way, which I definitely do not agree with. Get your tattoos, be very careful of dirty needles, and take good care of the tattoo spot until it heals. Pick your tattoo after spending weeks analyzing the design and imagining having that on you for the rest of your life. Tattoo removals are very expensive and not accurate, so might as well have a good choice rather than getting one done fast. Don’t rush it. If you don’t like a designer’s design, don’t feel ashamed or scared to ask to change it. The tattoo will be on you for the rest of your life.

Oh, and from personal experience, tattoos are addicting. Believe it or not.

Enjoy =)

Much love,

Apo Avedissian

Just another day of school finished, and it was time for my friends and I to go grab a lahmajeen (lahmajoon) from the store two blocks down from our school which made them. We all paid and got our “pizzas”. I walked down to grab the lemonade to add on my lahmajeen, and the symphony of the AK47s started. I knew it wasn’t very close to us, around 200 meters away, but the people’s words made us worry. I was in the seventh grade, and being that old, or young in a situation like that, it is very hard to concentrate on things that happen around you. First thing that happens is your body becomes a statue as you start thinking and wondering what had happened and what will happen next. The older men ran outside to see what happened, and we stood in the restaurant to watch through the dirty windows.

Three pick-up trucks passed by, full with militias who opened fire on all of the restaurants and stores around the block. I always thought that a moment like that would take forever to finish; I was wrong. The drive-by felt so fast that we all fell down, heard the shots followed by silence with the truck noises only coming after seconds. “Drive-by !” somebody yelled after around a minute of the shooting, while bleeding to death on the floor. Awkward, I thought. I’ve always believed that people show you their real selves when they’re put in a “live or die” situation,

It was a beautiful sunny day when we first walked in “the field” in Baghdad. It was a hot day, around 58 c’ degrees outside. The kids brought a soccer ball as the groups started cussing at each other before we played the “championship” match. The field was a huge soccer field project that took around 6 years to build due to financial problems. We, the kids of that neighborhood, used to make a soccer league and play in the street. My team made it to the finals, and since we won the champion ship, we got to play in “the field” whenever we wanted, and little by little it became a place we would hang out at every day.
As the war began, we weren’t allowed to leave our houses. I remember going up on the roof and jumping the walls that separate the roofs of others to get to a friend’s house, until one day a laser beam was pointed straight at my eye and two soldiers on top of a tank around a quarter mile away pointed at me to walk down. That was the last time I was on the roof.

Our next league never started. After almost a year of war, everyone was used to the shootings and bombings already, and we believed that if God gave you a life, he’d choose whether you get shot or survive. It never went by luck. It was faith. I remember the first time we got to see the field after many months of not even taking a look at it from outside. The fences were gone, the grass was no longer green, and the walls of the buildings around it were no longer the clean white buildings. Everything became brown or black. There were no older people playing backgammon on the side and eating seeds. There were no longer women hanging clothes on their balconies in the surrounding buildings. The field became empty, silent, and a smelly place. I didn’t even feel like walking on that field as it no longer was the field it used to be. Dead street dogs were lying around with bunch of flies flying over them. Empty bullet and rocket caps lay scattered on the ground. Later on the field became a small base for the American troops,

Getting a bachelor’s or a master’s degree in Iraq doesn’t exclude you from selling cigarettes or vegetables on the street. There’s absolutely no value for education over there, you need connections rather; in fact, the only reason a person might get a degree is to keep his/her family’s name high. I grew up in a family which had goals and strict rules about education, which made me want to study even more at times. My Arabic teacher told me once that he was very proud of me and he expected me to become an inventor once I get older, and he also said he could swear his life on it. He always told me to read books, whether fiction or not, whether a story or a how-to manual; he always asked me to read more and more.

During my eighth grade, many problems occurred which caused all of our school to be closed down for many months.

On a Monday morning, as we were heading to class from the concrete field, I heard people shouting and a group of people ran out of the building next to us. Just another man trying to shoot someone, we thought. The principal ran all the way to our fields and told us to not leave the campus and to stay away from the school buildings. We were a group of seven guys, and just like any other kids who take things for granted, we decided to find out what was going on. I remember a friend of mine and I picked up our backpacks and started running after the other guys who ran before us. For a moment, I couldn’t see anything, I remember seeing a white flash that stayed on for a millisecond and a huge pressure threw me back. I was laying on the ground. All my body felt sore. I opened my eyes while on the ground, facing up; I was still conscious. I looked around and saw nothing but smoke and fire coming out of the school building. I felt someone dragging me from my leg away from the building, and I remember trying to stand up on my own. I got up and my friend who ran late with me was still on the ground bleeding, and I noticed he was still breathing. I yelled at many people to call an ambulance, which the responds I got were “They don’t have enough cars and they’re all working”. I noticed that my leg was bleeding after several minutes, and didn’t feel a thing still. For a second I thought I was hit, but it was just the wound of me being thrown on the concrete ground. An old lady offered her head scarf to wrap my leg with,