School (n.):

Prank CV

Rory the Coffeenommer

She contacts you, you don’t contact her.

Out of sheer courtesy to the general work ethics, the coffeenommer has deigned to hire an assistant munchkinlander, who can be contacted at # 555 – Café

E-mail: caffeinated-coffee@beans.com

 

Career Objectives

Short-term Objectives:

To make coffee the national drink of the Middle East.

To start a monothematic newspaper dedicated to bringing together the coffee lovers of the Middle East.

Long-term Objectives:

To make the aforementioned newspaper an internationally-acclaimed publication outlet.

To start a coffee amusement park, investing all of its profits in the recently certified rehabilitation centre responsible for people with caffeine tolerance, anti-coffee taste buds and tea fanatics.

 

Key Achievements

· Fought for midget rights against the tyrannical top shelf regime.

· Joined ranks with fellow demonstrators against the so-called philanthropist movement of stool per midget.

· Managed to interview book characters as well as dead authors, earning her the medal of multidimensional journalism.

· Was the first to interview Lil Wayne without referring back to an accent specialist or his momma.

· Interviewed Snoop Dogg SOBER.

· Won the international contest on cryptic blog posts that still riddle the Regional Pen Head Committee. (RPHC)

· Monitored the underground private classes’ scene as mole and reported back with insider information.

· Ran the first ninja school newspaper. Copies not available to public and no records of any issue are registered.

· Received the first Google badge of its kind for her researching activity in her senior year.

· Regularly interviewed cabbies to maximize commuting potential, turning it to a worldwide success with dark bitter humor in her column: ‘Word of Turd’

· Wrote a column about the intricate details of national certificate education system that received worldwide sympathy and brought attention to the underground secret society of savage students.

· Got the inside scoop on the controversial matter of the posh spitting tradition in coffyard tastings.

· Was the only conscientious pro-batman journalist during Gotham's turmoil after the penguin framed him.

· Is an honorary member of the coffee appreciation society and first to launch coffee tasting coffyards.

· Worked as a journalist under the pen name of Clark Kent.

· Abolished the worldwide misconception of coffee addiction when she stayed off of coffee for a total of a month.

· Was awarded the Nobel Prize of Altruism for taking on the torturous challenge, mentioned in the previous point, and has attracted Gandhi followers from all over the world who found in her coffee-deprivation a heartwarming reminder of Gandhi’s food strike, and Peace Prize for ending the East-West coast rap feuds and bringing them together over a nice hot mug of coffee.

 

Further Work Experience:

Regional Pen Head Committee (RPHC): (2009 – Ongoing)

· Vice president of the online community after the successful cryptic blog posts referenced earlier.

· Admin of the official online page.

· Runs her own column in the RPHC newspaper, titled ‘Word of Turd’

The Annual Coffyard Tastings:

Ever since their launching in 1998, her tastiness the coffeenommer has been the primary spokesperson, event planner and president of the event, taking on all managerial aspects of the international sensation, bringing forward a turning point in the tradition of spitting by making it possible for participants to take a gulp, financing the extra security measures that ensued herself. Under her charge, there has only been one outbreak by a middle-aged coffee taster who demanded to finish his mug, after falsely claiming he hadn’t taken a gulp several times.

The coffeenommer elegantly solved the security issue by starting a contest for coffee breathalyzers, patenting a young invention that can distinguish up to 97 brands and integrating them in the security measures.

The Coffee Appreciation Society:

· The first Egyptian member, bringing the ancient society to our land after long years.

· The first Egyptian to be elected Mayor of the said society.

· Responsible for many developments in the routine procedures, bringing zest back to red tape.

 

Education:

· High school Graduate of the Coffelation of the United Coffee Mugs School, Class of 2009.

· Graduated with a BA in The Arts Of Coffee in the United Coffelatory University in Cairo (UCUC)

· Pursued her Masters degree in the partner university of said institution in Stuttgart, Germany (UCUS)

Technical Experience

· Well-versed in the art of handling coffee-deprived early morning complaints.

· Is so good on Photoshop that she can turn Mother Teresa into Stalin.

· Has interviewed various prominent figures from the west coast rap scene like Lil Wayne, Snoop Dogg and others.

· Has letters of recommendation from each, with a special reference from Tech N9ne, as well as a hard to come by recommendation from the underground scene from E-40.

 

All references are available on request though denied because no reference is needed.

How Going To College Really Feels Like:

“My uncle ordered popovers
from the restaurant's bill of fare.
And, when they were served,
he regarded them with a penetrating stare.
Then he spoke great words of wisdom
as he sat there on that chair:
"To eat these things," said my uncle,
"You must exercise great care.
You may swallow down what's solid,
but you must spit out the air!"
And as you partake of the world's bill of fare,
that's darned good advice to follow.
Do a lot of spitting out the hot air.
And be careful what you swallow.”

― Dr. Seuss

ولدى نصحتك لما صوتي اتنبح

ما تخفش من جنى و لا من شبح

و ان هب فيك عفريت قتيل إسأله

ما دافعش ليه عن نفسه يوم ما اندبح

Of Afro Injuries, Man Manuals & Freud Being A Sod.

Pain is shooting through every finger as I type this post, and as much as I’d love to come up with a socially-acceptable explanation or a heroic story where my wrist pops by shoving a fat kid  away from his imminent death on a highway, taking the fall minutes away as the Grim Reaper skives a school bus off its track smack into the poor fat kid, or maybe  how your wrist got fried fighting Voldemort off, the only battle fairytale I got is that I made the mistake of trying to comb and blow-dry my own afro and ended up with a rotator cuff injury. Charming story, great for the kids.Why does everything have to be so complicated in some way or another? Why can’t people just say what they’re thinking and act accordingly? At this point, it just seems like a valiant effort to include myself in the definition, since we all know that being me, life is unfathomable, people are indecipherable and everything is insufferably more complicated that a Japanese nuclear reactor. I mean, it’s bad enough that I had to deal with the disappointment of manuals not being handed on arrival – I gotta add, for something so elaborate as life, it’s almost humiliating not to include a brochure, I’m so not using this service again – but I also had to be deluded to think that people get the hang of it as they go along. But no, I’m me. Lady Gaga comes along and sings about how somebody ate her heart and people don’t think that’s weird, but I do. I THINK IT’S WEIRD! And people don’t think it’s weird because they’re people. And you’ve reached an impasse, trying to fit yourself into the people definition and it’s just a round peg in a square hole with an instruction manual that’s available in 97 languages except the ones  you speak.

So you think to yourself, ‘You know what? I’m just gonna watch Gilmore Girls till this one blows off.’ And guess what? You’re watching a season a day and it’s still there, and then you run out of seasons and everything is still the same way it cryptically is and there are no alternatives or visible solutions. And that, my friends, is how shows like ‘House-swap or ‘The Real Housewives’ get fucking viewers. Mystery solved. Glad we’re done with that one, now setting it aside and back to the problem that, yes, is still pretty much right there.

And you try another approach, opening up with a heartfelt declaration that from now on, you support zombie attacks, unfriendly alien landings, mutating evil scientists and door-to-door Adventists just to piss people off. You cross your heart and hope to die if you don’t personally finance pinky and the brain's evil plans and sponsor Dr. Evil's research in hope that they all perish. You hit a couple of road bumps of how you barely have enough to cover your college funds and proportional supply of noodles to keep you alive as it has done to many other college students, and that of the realistic slap on the face of how the odds of Dr. Evil or the slightest hope of mini me showing up to any of your pleading summons is less than that of having space junk dumped on you, which is quite sad since the statistic on that is a billion to one.

Then you get bored, try to comb and blow dry your own afro, cussing at Freud under your breath only to have a very tangible proof of his righteousness in the form of a panging strain for a reminder, and you can’t reach in there and rip the notifications and sticky notes right off of your cranial walls because again, reality is being a constraining clingy parent, limiting your arm’s reach to exo-skeletal areas.

That’s when an audible ‘Aha!’ comes bearing news of why words like ‘Bummer’ exist, which you carefully file next to your reality show ratings. An army of minions rush in, like how nobody says hello when they’re goodbyin’ except when they’re Hawaiian, which increases your tolerance towards coconut bras and grass tutus only to disappoint you with yet another confirmation of how Freud was right about the defense mechanism parts as well. That two-bit whiny sod.

And just when you’re down in the dumps and thinking it couldn’t get any slimier, you get a friend request from someone whose recent activity shows that they’ve ordered mosquito forceps and are quite happy with the purchase, not to mention that their information box says: “A potato.” And you think, you know what? I’m alright after all.

Life is funny, you just gotta have the nerve to laugh it off at the end of the day .. and an emergency kit in case it hits a nerve.

Beautiful Interpretation.

Of Sylvian Fissures, Time Tunnels & The Nuts Roaming Our Midst.

I’ve been wanting to do a lot of things lately, and had the energy to do absolutely zilch. I think this somewhat imposed transition phase and the sheer monstrosity of college and career debates have forced an ephemeral psychological bubble where time does not exist. Numb is the word, and in the nothingness there is surprising nicety. In retrospect, I would have killed for the luxury of being able to sit there and not have to do a thing in the world  a couple of months ago, that should be satisfying enough.

I was watching a documentary earlier on Einstein’s brain, suggesting how the neurons have nothing to do with the actual intelligence, the name escapes me since I was never well-versed in the science department, bringing in some sort of an interactive fiber cell that seemingly wears off with time to be the true catalyst of his intelligence, annulling the entire research and putting forward the possibility that he may have been autistic, and the result of his intelligence was because of a peculiar ability of intense concentration that bred his mathematical section of the brain like a muscle, causing it to enlarge to 15% more than the usual human’s. I could be wrong, the scientific terms were confusing translated, but the idea couldn’t be that far off. The interesting part about that documentary was a couple of fleeting remarks on completely irrelevant matters to the actual dissection and reassembling of Einstein’s brain though.

I was having a conversation a couple of days ago about music interpretation and how some people are able to visualize a plot being told through the music, intensifying their enjoyment with the musical piece, and how it sometimes is advanced with certain people to render the timeline into actual sentences. That is how ballets and operas are made, how stories are told through music and driven into an obstacle course to direct your cognitive abilities to the predetermined plot in the brochure. I was wondering if that actually existed as some sort of a rare ability to a certain select, considering that some people are completely oblivious to the mechanism and only hear music, just music, without an intangible story formulating simultaneously, and frustrated by how my friend didn’t hear the poppy freshman’s distracted first day in the piece I was showing him, suppressing my piano monster shortly afterwards and petting it with a Shostakovich cookie.

Apparently, in my limited understanding of all things biological, there is something called a Sylvian fissure, that generally exists in every person’s brain, following two paths on the lateral right side and forming a miniscule island that is not connected to any other part of the brain. Amongst the many biological disparities that they found in Einstein’s brain, one of which were the non-existence of that Sylvian fissure. Scientists suggested that it may have caused a certain connection between the different factions of he brain, resulting in his having a more wholesome web than most people’s head network, so to speak. On further researching that genetic anomaly, it was found that people with a similar case are able to link auditory and visual stimuli, meaning that they would actively imagine a picture or an event on hearing a certain tune. They interviewed a pianist who claimed that her Wednesdays were yellow and had choppy edges, and reacted to a momentary composition in G major by picturing flowing gold. Not only does this phenomenon exist and is scientifically explained on the basis of neuroscience, but on my quest to figure out whether I am actually insane, I’ve found tangible evidence that my brain may be slightly deformed to hear a divorce in Yann Tiersen’s La Traversée, a blissful amnesiac’s struggle in La Noyée, the Kubler-ross model in Rue des Cascades and an old couple reminiscing in Schubert’s Serenade, but not enough to make me a virtuoso, which is a whole new level of unfortunate, but enough to be joined by a few others who are endowed with the guilty pleasure of  hearing something that is not really there.

Another giggle-inducing discovery was that Einstein had a theory that the regular human’s perception of time could be altered while working on his relativity theory, suggesting that time and place form some sort of a four-dimensional world that could be manipulated, hence all the efforts put into making time travel possible. The elaboration of which  included a man lying in the middle of a highway facing immediate death which explained why time seems to slow down when bad things are happening and speed up when we’re having fun. Up till the age of 9 I thought it was because Santa’s helpers stole time to make it possible to deliver all those gifts around the world and putting them randomly back in the form of minute deposits in your dentist appointments and school days.

Most of you wouldn’t rejoice at the discovery like I did – I nearly jumped off the couch when I linked the dots – but then again the occasional musical post isn’t meant for everybody, which shouldn’t offend you since most posts aren’t meant for anybody to begin with. If the child in you hasn’t been sufficiently murdered by now, you’ll find a way to amuse yourself with these recounts. Now if you’ll excuse me, the National Geographic channel is covering dolphins’ self-consciousness levels by their reaction to mirrors. Toodles.

FML

A Passing Muse.

“The point about fairy-stories is that they are written not merely without a moral but without a morality. They take place in a world beyond good and evil, where people (or animals) suffer or prosper for reasons unconnected with ethical merit--for being ugly or beautiful respectively, for instance, or for even more unsatisfactory reasons. A little girl sets out to do a good deed for her grandmother and gets gobbled up by a wolf. For all this is related by the fairy-story tellers without approval or disapproval, without a glimmer of subjective feeling, as though their pens were dipped in surgical spirit to sterilize the microbes of emotion. They never seek to criticize or moralize, to protest or plead or persuade; and if they have an emotional impact on the reader, as the greatest of them do, that is not intrinsic to the stories. They would indeed only weaken that impact to achieve it. They move by not seeking to move; almost, it seems, by seeking not to move."

C. M. Woodhouse wrote in the Times Literary Supplement.

Now the real question here is, doesn’t that make life a fairytale? Doesn’t the juxtaposition prove redundant if they’re the closest thing to life yet the farthest in definition?

Of A Hair-Roller Friendship, Majors & A Party Beetle.

It hasn’t quite registered yet that I’ve graduated, and the vacation has been more or less a series of ambiguously connected days separated by the missing hours for when I pass out every other day. Believe it or not, I haven’t gone out yet, and I don’t quite feel the need to, since the career debates have taken over most of my cognitive abilities. Choosing a major is harder than one might think, that is when you put into consideration how you’ll be stuck with the choice you made at the myopic age of 19 for the rest of your life. I got a whiff of how unjust capitalism can be, when the choices in the private sector where limited to a pattern that seemed to appeal to my paranoid side. The choice isn’t really a choice, but rather an act of elimination between predestined odds that are only few fractions apart and more or less lead to the same dead end. Researching doesn’t seem to make those odds any better, and a friend’s theory about how democracy is an illusion, custom-designed to give the proletariat a wrongful sense of control started to seem a lot more tangible in effect. Not that it matters anyway.

I was getting my hair done the other day, and while stuck halfway down the waiting list, the sight of a couple of children amused me. Bored by their mother’s constraining schedule, what seemed to be a 9-year-old girl and a 6-year-old boy struck an odd sort of temporary friendship. The girl, who looked more sheltered and introverted, completely absorbed in her little utopic bubble of French Disney movies on her new, laminated laptop, didn’t seem to acknowledge the existence of the more lively boy, who acted rather vulgar and was very loud and undisciplined. The boy indulged in elaborate conversations with himself out loud, ones that didn’t make sense to any intelligent and evolved creature outside of his little distracted mind, making comparisons between dogs and towers, marveling at how colours sounded alike but looked different, touching everything within an arm’s reach turning it into a rubble, was circling the area where the girl was complacently absorbed in her own world. She didn’t seem to understand why he was the way he was, nor find it more amusing than the Rapunzel movie at hand, but instinctively adjusted her seating position to allow him more access to her laptop, surprisingly inviting him in her introverted comfort zone to enjoy the movie alongside. The boy, intrigued by the colourful set of hair rollers in a nearby basket, put them on his fingers and tried to attack the girl with his newly-installed claws. The girl watched him the same way she watched her movie, a little blankly and without any recognition to his extra dimension. She then calmly took them off his fingers, and made an elaborate tower with the help of hair pins to fix the helix intact, and presented it to the boy, who, in his more neanderthalic age limitation thought it was a downright act of sorcery. She tried to explain the mechanism but he insisted that he knew how to make it.  He went around the place pretending it was indeed he who made it, then tried to sit on it and ended up in a ball on the floor when his pedestal collapsed under the weight of his ignorance. The girl, again, was rather amused, congratulated him on his craftsmanship and presently went back to her movie, forgetting he existed in the convenient two-minute attention span peculiar to children, leaving the boy staring at her with a vengefully helpless look that reminded me of the boy on ‘The Omen.’

Watching from a distance, I entertained thoughts of Simone de Beauvoir being  more amused by the live metaphor at hand than most of those she could have drawn on to give her theories ground. The boastful male marking his territory and claiming right to everything around him while remaining stubbornly ignorant, the more intelligent female who although more qualified would give up credit of her work in response to her gender’s societal demands. I wondered how many times that happened in the adult world, how many times that could have been avoided if this 7-minute-review of life, the universe and everything was shown on huge screens in a behavioural science lab.  The irony of gender inequality unraveling in a hair salon. Ha.

On an irrelevant note, since my first car will most probably be a beetle, I have decided I will settle to no less than this:

One Day Schimmel Pegasus, Just You Wait For Me.

I..Graduated?

I GRRRRAAAADDDDUUUUAAATTTEEEDD BIIITTTTCHHHHESS!

A Day Till Independence Day.

Tomorrow, I’m graduating high school. Tomorrow, I’ll be a full-fledged grownup, on paper. Tomorrow marks the last day I’m ever stepping foot in a school premises as a student. Tomorrow, I’m officially a pending college student. Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of my life, a whole new life, a bigger life, a more complicated life, but mainly a life. Tomorrow marks the last exam I’m ever sitting in the Thanaweyya system, and tonight is the last exam night I’m ever going through in the Thanaweyya system. Tomorrow is the last day I’ll be wearing my school uniform, carrying a backpack that has a teddy pencil case, a ruler and a well-cared for scientific calculator in it. Tomorrow is the last day I’ll be seeing the classmates I’ve seen everyday since kindergarten. Tonight is the last night I won’t be able to sleep because the terror and anxiety won’t let me. Tomorrow is uncharted territory. Starting tomorrow, I’ll have no idea where my life is heading and I’ll never know anything for sure, not homework-grades-kinda sure anyway. Tomorrow is the last day I’ll be a schoolgirl. Tomorrow is the last day I’m seeing the nuns after seeing them every morning. Tomorrow is the last day I’m a kid, hopefully that won’t ever change at heart. Tomorrow, the constants will be gone, and replaced with variables. Tomorrow is the start of a whole new strain of anxiety from a different system, which will probably break my heart if it ends up in disappointment. Tomorrow is not exciting as much as it is scary. Tomorrow is making me agoraphobic. Tomorrow, the world gets too big, way too big. Tomorrow, I’ll grow up when I don’t want to. Tomorrow is the last day I’ll be required to have my hair in a pony tail. Tomorrow, I’m supposed to magically drop the tomboy act and magically turn into a, urgh, woman, a term that is pretty damn foreign. Tomorrow, there will no longer be that little virtual bubble to hide in from the world. Tomorrow, there will be no piano waiting for me in the deserted school storage room. Tomorrow, I’ll have no affiliation with my school, I will not be listed in its register and I’ll go as a visitor. There will be no more queues with the national anthem bursting in the primary faction, no 18 Monicas and 16 Mirnas, no Christmas recitals and no French and Lebanese hymns. Tomorrow is the last day I’ll be hearing that familiar Lebanese accent. Starting tomorrow, I’ll never be scared of running into a nun when late for class, running into my bullies in between classes and I’ll never have to share my Nutella sandwiches at recess again. Tomorrow, everything changes. Tomorrow, the comfortable routine is gone, the tiny tightly-knit community is gone, along with the faces I know so well.

I’m never going to school again. I’m graduating high school and I’m scared. I don’t wanna grow up, I don’t wanna leave school and dive into the world just yet. It’s too big.  انا عايزه مدرستي