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 

Differentiation & Integration.

Mechanics Massacre.

DISCLAIMER: It’s one thing feeling bad about not doing as well as you thought on an exam, and a whole other thing doubting whether or not you’re passing your national certificate examinations. It’s a little more than pressure, it’s a matter of psychological life and death, an occupational hazard. If you’re not aware of the how much the system affects your future or you’re not from around here long enough to get a whiff of it, I’d suggest you skip the comment box, take your “You’re being a pussy and a drama queen’ and effectively shove it. I, as well as a multitude of Sanaweyya casualties, have just FAILED an exam on our last detrimental year of the fucked up system that has taken education, aptitude and the worth of a person, mashed them together and produced a fucking monster that has zilch to do with either of the aforementioned sugar, spice and everything nice.

I’m sure a lot of you have seen this post coming, because just as I wouldn’t miss a chance to rant about a well-deserved cause on my blog, a chance that doesn’t come by ever so often in this mundane whirlpool that identifies with the more relatable oxymoron of ‘student life’, I equally use this as a sandbag knowing full well that most of you don’t even exist out of my head. This is not really a post as much as it is me using my Maths drafts for catharsis fully believing that it’s a better use of ink and paper judging the mechanics fiasco that took place last morning, one that I’m sure will have engraved itself in my head long after I’m well within my wits to register a lot more important things, like for instance how many spoonfuls of sugar I take in my coffee or my last name.

For those of you who are not as locally grounded as most, checking the news or the hash tag would fill you up on how the mechanics exam caused rallies and acts of rampage in schools everywhere, rendering the more friendly exchange of ‘how’d you do today?’ to ‘Are you passing?’ But let’s not get ahead of ourselves as I give you an impression of how it felt in firsthand experience. Not that you care, we all know that blogs do nothing but send the information out into cyberspace where nobody bothers to pick up the signals with their long term memory antennas.

Sitting there for two hours staring at an advanced Mechanics exam paper, knowing that within its folds lie my future, my options and everything I’ve ever worked for, one that could make or break my career choice and life as I know it really, not sure about one result in the whole goddamn paper, that is within the ones that I’ve actually solved, was nerve-wrecking. I kept it together till the last plotted minute, knowing  for a fact that I’d flunk but not giving myself the excuse of going out without a fight. Leaving the torn down class that goes by the more fancy semantic of an exam hall, feeling like a loser and watching life as I know it getting flushed down a public toilet, I’m surprised by the sight of not one, but each and every student breaking down as soon as they hit the gates. The spectacle, as put by my worrying parents waiting in the car, was described as ‘They’d wait till they hit the gates, wail and pass out, then get shipped into their respective cars, that deserved the title of hearses at that point.’ The more composed of us didn’t pass out or wail, but broke down in hysterical blubber as soon as they set foot in their little portable comfort zones. The feeling of being an absolute failure was elated when I found out that my fellow A students also weren’t sure of one result in their papers, as a matter of fact, most of which didn’t even have time to complete the exam and were pretty sure we’re not passing. The staircase was the hardest to get through, with people passing out and breaking down in every corner, and I was hurriedly ushered out by my mother who came to the rescue when she saw the state of the ones who took, or rather were taken, to an earlier exit.

I am sitting here, with the knowledge of what happened, the fact that the same dude who put the Mechanics exam is the one that put the Differentiation and Integration exam I’m sitting tomorrow, as well as the Algebra and Solid Geometry exam I’m sitting 4 days later, and I’m trying to find a reason to work and coming up with nix. The feeling of failing so drastically as opposed to being an A student all throughout your educational voyage, getting 98% the first year and the silhouette of a 60%, at best, looming on the horizon for the second, seeing your life slip away because some teacher out there was given orders to fuck up the curve so the colleges wouldn’t have to handle an influx of people who’ve worked their fingers to the bone and their parents wallets threadbare into their oh so cherished paternally caring government hands is indescribable. Fair is one thing, this is a whole other thing. This is not a difficult exam that people are whining about, this is an impossible exam that’s not designed for its appointed exam hours or the capabilities of an average student, or an A student, or a fucking student to begin with. The fact that they’d sit there all blue collar and confident claiming that its proportional to the time, work or pressure pulling on its sleeves is outrageous. The fact that they’d gamble our nerves, futures and well being like that is something I don’t even have a word for. Should I be happy that nobody got one question right? Should that be of any consolation? It’s not. This is my work. This is three fucking years worth of work, three years worth of putting everything else on hold and investing 17 hours a day into shit I, as well any other human being living in the 21st century, don’t need to know. This is three years of not having a life. It’s three years worth of anxiety and terror over a future that is hanging by a thread. This is three years of being plugged into a system over which you have no control.

I am sitting here and I am trying to find a fucking reason to keep going. I’m trying to find a reason to work when I know that nothing I do right now is ever going to matter. Hell, even Hogwarts’ sorting hat wouldn’t be able to get me out of this ditch. All is lost, I know it, everybody knows it, and we’re still asked to keep it together and keep working. The patient is dead, but hey, keep resuscitating, keep zapping him and maybe the sheer voltage going through his body will dislodge your sanity enough for our logic to take a comfortable seat.

I have failed an exam in 3rd secondary. Amnesia, lemme see you swing your bat at that.

Fuck the system.

Of Midnight Student Rants And Afro Pixies.

As usual, I’m on here till my coffee cools down then I’m back in the work ditch. Not much has been happening due to the widely acknowledged fact that during exams, you lose the concept of time and luxury of having a life. However, a small update, whoever said that once you’re in the exam cycle you won’t know what hit you till you’re out, you’re delusional. It’s psychological warfare. But hey, it totally makes sense that the centuries-old tradition of judging your humane abilities by your robotic capabilities since you were so kind as to evolve and lose your giant mass of ape hair works. Sure, it’s also perfectly logical that you have to remain fully functional knowing that your whole life and career aptitude depends on a percentage that is graded by severely under qualified pseudo-teachers at best and the former armed with no degree in the actual subject, a typo’d model answer and are aggressively biased against people who actually got an education at worst, meaning they grade you worse if you actually know your shit to bring about some sort of communist-induced jungle justice to their own government-bred kids. Praise the system, all ye faithful.

A saying goes around that pressure is the only disparity between Carbon and diamonds, but then again, I’ve never really liked bling. Due to lack of sleep and a sorely mistimed panic attack,  I managed to lose 1.5 times more marks in Physics alone than I’ve lost last year in all subjects, driving me between a rock on a hard place with only a couple of more marks to go around before I’m actually out of the realms of my designated major. I hadn’t had one of those ‘crying while saying I want my daddy’ fits since I was 6, brought about a lot of memories. What pisses me off is that once I actually got sleep, I found them out on my own, which brought about a minor adjustment to the national certificate studying strategy; being fuck work if you can get sleep instead because apparently, that ‘if you can’t walk the walk don’t talk the talk’ rule applies out of Brooklyn. Of course, there’s that little setback that is none other than the fact that I have to go on and manage not to lose it before the 4th of July, because yes, you’ll have to schedule your reactions to be part of the system, another one of em robotic parts. Meh, I’m whining, enough of that.

Pressure does a whole lot of weird things to you, like getting an afro pixie cut in my case for instance. My hair looks like it put up a good machete fight with a very pissed Hulk Hogan, leaving me with the look of a recovering Cancer patient. I’ve come to terms with it because it’ll go on my list of proofs for ‘Not everything that feels good is necessarily right’ rule. Truth be told tho, it feels so awesome that I got half a mind to go on a bald pride parade. There’s still the little con of how I went from Sphinx to Tranny on a boring day. Oh well.

'And then they lived happily ever after..having applied as human guinea pigs for unauthorized lab experiments on a new mood drug.'

There are of course other things pressure does to you that hardly need be acknowledged in any textbooks, like sending an ‘I miss you’ text to the worst possible person at 4 am, theatrically passing out in Maths class for forgetting to eat, pulling a controversial elaborate prank that has a church congregation list you on their ‘To be assassinated while making it look like an accident’ list, and, well, saluting a mosquito for putting up one hell of a fight with your shower head. The usual.

The really great thing about this whole examination trauma I’m going through is that the last exam, the day I’m finally out of this ditch and back into the real world, the day I leave high school and go to college,  is conveniently the 4th of July. Independence day has taken a whole new meaning in my book.

To wrap it up, a shoutout to humans, an air supply can't always be an oxygen mask, crying over spilled booze is hangover without the missing 24 hours, and every time you feel like beating yourself up over a bad decision, remember that at one point, the whole world firmly believed that fluorescent flare pants were a pretty cool idea. With that I leave you, take good care of yourselves, you’re all you have.

‘Nobody said it was easy, no one ever said it would be so hard. Oh take me back to the start.’

One day, I will forget your name, and many years later, it'll sound familiar on an obituary. Life is kind that way.

All Dem Nuns Be Making Me Go Soft.

Life has been taking more of a life-y pace lately, slowing down at all the right times and speeding up when you don’t need it to linger, kind of like ballroom dancing with a sumo wrestler; in the sense that the guy is big enough to slow the earth’s revolution while showing surprising agility that works just right when you least expect it to.

The exams are going considerably well, even though I still can’t get my head around the fact that I’m graduating. School mates aren’t  hostile for a change and everything has taken more of that malleable, passive aggressive, social-friendly air that only comes in preparation for nostalgia’s crash course.

I’m pretty sure a couple of years ago I wouldn’t have been able to think of two things that I’m going to miss about that place, but to my pleasant surprise, the list is filling up pretty quickly. Granted, a lot of things were consistent about not having a snowman’s chance in hell to making it on that list, like for instance the competitive mini-Stalins running around disguised as teenage chicks. Man, I’d rather have my eyebrows plucked by a blind Asian seamstress till the apocalyptic horns sound than see them again. However, some squeezed through. Least expected was this; I’m going to miss the nuns.

I mean, don’t get me wrong. Growing up, they looked like this:

They wait for us each morning in front of the scarily official, nightmare-of-a-surrogate-school-gates, being the only comforting faces in a crowd of blue collar oppressed maniacs that seem to detest us for the sole reason that we dare to breathe their rightfully-claimed, government-approved air. I don’t know about you, but moral support doesn’t come in a more fluffy package. I mean come on, loud joking nuns, it can’t get better than that. All I had to do when I was lost the first day was follow the all too familiar Lebanese accent back to shore. Is it weird that I can’t grasp the idea of going to an educational institution that doesn’t have eccentric nuns? How else is it going to feel like home? Don’t be too surprised, I can’t recognize myself either. Who would have thought I’d miss the same bubble I’ve wanted to burst for so long now?

Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself here, I’m still two exams into the whole mess, but I guess that’s how the realizations ebb in, you know? Little by little, one creeping in every other day in indiscernible packages that sift through your conscious, like how I’ll never be sneaking into the storage room and playing that ancient piano that everybody forgot about again, or how I’ll never have to trade my Nutella sandwiches for cheese sandwiches, or how I won’t have to sit down and memorize all those Lebanese hymns for the annual Christmas recital again, even though I never really could keep it in there for longer than a couple of days, making sure to get the accent just right so the head nun (ma mère) would be happy then deciding that the rest of the corny choir will sing over me while I mumble blissfully, or how I’ll never be hearing Sister Tacla’s beginning of the year speech or make jokes about how she always manages to shove in her signature metaphor of ‘You’re the soul of this premises, without you it’d be a lifeless body and so would I.’

When did it go by so fast?

Maybe I am a little too old-fashioned after all, but hell, sue me. Look at me getting all mushy. Heh.

I’ve Got To Got To Gotta Take It Slow.

I Was Bored. Sue Me.

Of Web Woes, Tortinas & The World Of Boys.

The last couple of days have been interesting in the way their tumultuous nature always led to some decent laughs, and not the bitter laughs where you try to save trees by not using up too many tissues for naught, no. The kind of laughs that come from you pegging life for what it is; nothing but an over-zealous excessively-propped farce that’s a couple of lines away from running up against Cats.

For instance, there’s how my mom has recently discovered the dark corridors of online realms, and came up to me a couple of days ago with the announcement that she’s meeting her first online friend for coffee. Needless to add, the newly acquired piece of information sent off a grenade in my ‘I really don’t want to die’ department, which respectively instigated the most elaborate imaginary plot of how they’d turn out to be an Egyptian pervert/serial killer and I started to seriously consider how I may never see my mom again in a couple of days until I’ve received a court-approved morgue summon to identify a body. Seeing as to how I couldn’t manage to successfully get it through my mom’s head that she’s not Meg Ryan and the stranger does not have a snowman’s chance in hell of being Tom Hanks, I took it into my own hands to go to the mattresses.

Now let me clarify that this was not the worst dilemma my culturally-confused mother has presented over the past years, so I’m well-trained in the art of swapping mentor roles to effectively deflect an incoming nuke.

Presently, I did my research – otherwise known to the cyber world by the term ‘stalking’ – and having eliminated homosexual no-lifer, the possibility of a sexual assault and, without fail, a potential con artist who lives in his mom’s basement and fishes out unsuspecting law-abiding citizens for evil ulterior motives, I jumped on the modern bandwagon, making sure that my mom doesn’t give out too much personal information. However, that couldn’t be helped since the object at question had successfully curated our phone number, district, and unfortunately, my name. My dad had long given up on the survival quest and had settled for watching us over his morning coffee and newspaper with an amused countenance that only comes with being a sport.

The long-awaited phone call was this morning, and we were all pleasantly surprised to find out that my mom has found her match, an equally confused citizen who’s gullible enough to rule out the possibility of how the person on the other side of the call is a psychopath and who’s, thankfully, rather pleasant. With mortal danger out of the way, I stepped out of my investigator shoes and joined my dad in being complacently amused with the turn of events, throwing off sarcastic repartees that neither the object at question or my mother seemed to quite register. What personally amuses me though, is that while my father and I were thinking what to do with the potential body bags, the fact that they could have both been dead right now flew right over their heads.

The list goes on to include my grandmother, who has been thinking about death a little too much and reached a twisted state of acceptance that gave her enough room to seriously consider leaving me her savings in the form of Loacker’s dark chocolate Tortinas, just because they happen to be my favorite. I made sure I controlled my facial expressions enough to moderate my reply into how I don’t mind the chocolate Tortinas even though I equally don’t mind not having them if that means she stops scaring the living shit out of me with the image of her in a coffin holding out a Tortina with sheer powers of Rigor Mortis.

Also, I’ve fulfilled my childhood dream of having a secret language that I use to communicate with my father, considering that most of our conversations are now limited to the pros and cons of automobiles. Being a girl in a sexist society, I can almost guarantee almost nobody gets what the hell we’re talking about most of the time, and I’ve admirably enriched my car-related vocabulary in the process. I gotta say this has been a breakthrough in terms of how I now get why dudes like cars, even though I hardly think it calls for a complimentary badge to mark the achievement unlocked. The irony lies in the fact that I’m yet to understand the feminine fix on the art of cooking. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a Snape away from being another potions class I skive off to start working on my more interesting ‘Werewolf Vs. Animagus’ report.

It’s quite an odd world we live in, and I don’t expect to get the hang of it any time soon. Till then, I'll settle for enjoying life’s ever-updated Merriam-Webster definition of the word Joke.

Of Coffee Signs, Senioritis & Dreaming About Cars.

I haven’t actually sat down to write a blogpost for a while, my old friends seem to have developed an irrepressible knack for e-mails, about time they discover the realms of not so instant messaging. It got me thinking about those old times when people actually had to sit down, write a letter and wait for a couple of days tending to eternity for a reply. Human communication must have been so valuable back then, you could see it with all the effort put in calligraphy. It’s odd just picturing it.

I’m suffering from a textbook fit of Senioritis, workload has effectively quadrupled and time appears to have finally modified its pace to modern times. I feel like that little squirrel in ice age that spent the four or so movies running after that nut only to start a meltdown when it actually got its little claws onto it. I’ve gotta say, my nerves have improved since the past years, I don’t seem to be quite registering the whole situation in full momentum. I don’t know what to make of it, but I’m hoping that when I find out it’s not too unpleasant that it would require life-long therapy. I gotta be honest though, the short horrifying intervals during which the full realization of the finals hit home send my heart rate on a, well, Himalayan marathon. Gilmore girls, however, seems to be handling the responsibility of keeping me sane so far. Let’s not jinx it, shall we?

As much as I’d love to rant about the political situation, I know better than to start even though it would fill up three or four blog posts in a jiffy, especially that my political stances and nihilist ideologies don’t seem to be sitting well with most of this planet’s more willing tenants. It’s all so infuriating and I’d much rather not discuss it since my last news overdose resulted in a very clear view of a textbook asylum case hovering in the horizon as plan A, B, C and D, not to mention four hours that could’ve otherwise been engaged in my seemingly hopeless deciphering quest of my Economics syllabus. It takes me about 15 minutes to translate it into my cognition then 5 to digest it; grueling process. However, I’ve found that reading my supposedly advanced English course in a British accent calibrated into a dialogue between a Mrs. Willsworth and a Mr. Shawshank walking around the house helps increase my sober hours long enough to get the work done.

My microwave has been getting back at me for that last Herring adventure, making it a point to always heat my plate and not my food. I’ve come to the point where it seems perfectly logical to assume that if I don't wait for the microwave timer to beep I'm going to morph into super microwave woman by the radiation and cook things every time I get pissed because I’ll vibe out microwaves out of every orifice unto oblivious edible objects in the vicinity that may or may not include humans, turning me into a cannibal by coercion. Here’s to hoping my microwave is not as vindictive as my imagination plots it out to be, I’m well on my way to turning to cannibalism by mere starvation and lack of ability to feed myself without its help.

I actually dreamt last night. Granted, I got out of bed 7 hours into a good night’s sleep for no reason whatsoever other than my downright opposition to the unraveling of the plots and the several guest appearances made by people who’d qualify as nightmare material, but there were some nice things in there too, like running down in my pj’s in the middle of the street to my new vintage car that’s still not here yet in real life. I was much shorter in comparison though, the proportions would have made more sense had I been five and it was a 4x4 land cruiser, given that to my REM cycling self, the car was pretty much the size of a tiny monument and I had to stand on the tips of my toes just to reach the windows and look in on a canvas-choked and incredibly colourful couch for a backseat. It was also golden, 60’s style, giving on to space that its exterior couldn’t logically betray like those carnival tents in harry potter and the goblet of fire that look like a shack on the outside and give on to auditorium space on the inside. Haha. I’m never gonna grow up am I now?

I sat down yesterday in one of my middle-of-the-all-nighters panic attacks to write down all the things that I look forward to when I’m finally done with high school in an attempt to cool down and maybe start working again after a hot mug of coffee, and around my 6th item I realized that not only do I not have the least idea what the hell I’m gonna do with myself or more importantly how I’m gonna do it when I actually get to have that luxury, but I also can’t think of anything that is neither directly or indirectly related to this whole kid-life. The future makes me dizzy, and even though I have a clearer grasp than most on the direction I’d like to have a head start towards, it’s still awfully vague and very..list-incompatible. That’s normal right? I’m supposed to be fresh meat, pathetically lost and have everything look big and scary, right? Well, I’m hoping it is, because I’m getting agoraphobic just thinking about it.

Oh well, that’s about it for today. This morning is looking good, with random friends agreeing on simultaneously posting coffee pictures on my wall. I’m going out on a limb here, but I gotta say, it made my smile like an idiot and think up various ways in which divine providence is maybe doing away with the flashing billboards and settling for coffee posts to tell me that everything’s gonna be alright after all.

George Orwell Describing My Frustration Better Than I Ever Can.

A happy vicar I might have been
Two hundred years ago
To preach upon eternal doom
And watch my walnuts grow;

But born, alas, in an evil time,
I missed that pleasant haven, For the hair has grown on my upper lip
And the clergy are all clean-shaven.

And later still the times were good,
We were so easy to please,
We rocked our troubled thoughts to sleep
On the bosoms of the trees.

All ignorant we dared to own
The joys we now dissemble;
The greenfinch on the apple bough
Could make my enemies tremble.

But girl's bellies and apricots,
Roach in a shaded stream,
Horses, ducks in flight at dawn,
All these are a dream.

It is forbidden to dream again;
We maim our joys or hide them:
Horses are made of chromium steel
And little fat men shall ride them.

I am the worm who never turned,
The eunuch without a harem;
Between the priest and the commissar
I walk like Eugene Aram;

And the commissar is telling my fortune
While the radio plays,
But the priest has promised an Austin Seven,
For Duggie always pays.

I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls,
And woke to find it true;
I wasn't born for an age like this;
Was Smith? Was Jones? Were you?

Up With The Birds.

 

Might have to go where they don't know my name

float all over the world just to see her again

but I won't show I feel any pain

even though all my armor might rust in the rain.

 

A simple plot

But I know one day

Good things are coming our way.

Oops, I Think I Just GRADUATED! :’)

It feels odd, and fuzzy. The formal printed certificate finally made the realization tangible enough to hit home and I thought 'hey, when did I grow up?' I can't believe I'll never have to go to school again, see any of these people again or that I'll give up on a huge part of my daily life ever since I knew how to call life for what it is, you know? This tiny virtual life where people aren't that mean and life isn't that hard, and news is nothing more but how the pizza's not stale today because they've just unloaded a fresh batch, getting at its possible worst hearing that the head nun passed away and discussing how she's been a living heritage of this school from its first baby steps well into its golden 5th decade. Looking back on all the years I spent at school, it wasn't nearly as bad as when I decided to hit life's playground. Look at me, I'm actually being nostalgic about an inept closed community. Who would've thought man. Me and feelings, oh well.

Haha, it's almost like these tribal missions of woes and hallows they used to send savages out on to assert their manhood and win the chief's daughter's hand in marriage, and somehow I managed to come back with the severed head of a wild boar. It certainly doesn't feel like it, it feels like I'm a big fish in a little pond who was prematurely released in the ocean. These people are sending me out to real life under the impression that I should know how to go with it by now. I just hope they don't ask for their money back when they realized that I'm not nearly what they bargained for. It's one of these few moments you appreciate that the government couldn't give less of a fuck about you. If it did, I'd definitely be in trouble.

I was talking to my grown-up friend then; that's what I call him because the first day I met him he'd just come back from a presentation and was fresh in a suit with a briefcase in hand, looking like the textbook definition of the financial advisor he is. A man in his late twenties, with wit so sharp that it's almost cruel seeing it confined in a blue collar. We have this joke going on, where he leads me into the dark corridors of life and I call him an old man. He was saying how from here on in,  everything is like high school, except there's more money and sex and people are constantly getting older. I was confused because from where I'm standing, that doesn't sound much different, except that it's actually easier to come by, statistically speaking. That's when he started whining about growing up in the 90's. There was really no reason to this story other than the fact that that's probably how I'll remember today, it'll be the day I advised a tax advisor about life and confused him with the numbers.

Cringing Is Good For You.

I’ve been studying Maths II for about 12 hours now. To the untrained in the excruciating abilities of national certificate curriculums, that’s the equivalent of having your soul sucked out by a dementor, without the kiss part.

And as usual, when I get to study for that long, my head finds it funny to press me with every embarrassing memory it could possibly find. They vary in intensity, usually proportional to the amount of concentration I may be trying to put in at the time. Around the time I hit integration it triggered the time when I managed to lock my friend out of his car, lock myself in, get my head stuck in a revolving door and get stopped by security twice, all in less than 5 hours. Time rates initiated a series of images for all the times my friends thought it was funny to take my shoes off and place them on high surfaces, being a door ledge, a shelf or maybe just holding it up in the air, only to have me jumping barefoot up and down trying to reach it, closely followed by the time my friend thought it was funny to pick my up and throw me in the air a couple of times, which made everyone curious as whether they’ll be able to manage it enough to wanna put the theory into experiment, that time when a huge Christmas tree fell on my curious 7-year-old self because I liked it so much I wanted to drag it back home with me, and of course the memory of how my fixation on my glow-in-the-dark sneakers was cured at the age of 12 when the lights went out in a department store and I guided  a giggling crowd of seniors out to the street.

And before you know it, all the slips, headfirst crashes and awkward sentences I ever came up with were incoming. Images of when I sat on a spaghetti plate my friend placed on my chair for safekeeping, bounced ass first off a trampoline, drowned in a kid’s ball pit because apparently, the minimum height limits were put there for a reason, choked on an important meeting,  was nervous around my crush that I hand shook his finger and not his whole hand, closely after bumping into his torso and falling flat on my back in sight of no less than 14 people, tried to catch an object and got it straight in the face were rushing in.

The cringing inevitably called for a study break, since maths seemed to have developed the ability to turn my psyche against me, and in that study break I found a cure. All you gotta do, is laugh at yourself, then it’s not that bad anymore.

You didn’t expect a magic pill, did you?

That’s What Hope Sounds Like.

Of A Cherry On Top Of A Crap Cracker.

Realizations are always a bummer. They come in all shapes, sizes and packages, some friendly and easily undoable with a nice strong mug of coffee, like finding that you’ve retweeted Unicorn Glitter Tits the other night, and some are impossible to fix if you don’t have a time machine, but that’s what Alzheimer’s is for.

I don’t know why everybody hates Alzheimer’s, it’s there to make being a half centenarian more tolerable. It’s blessing granted by nature, the cherry on top of a crap cracker,  in the form of slight dementia to a certain select. Imagine having lived that long and you still remember every single little thing you did wrong, that’s torture.

Granted, some of them develop a humorous tinge over the years, like the memory of your young self bumping into your, then much taller, crush’s torso trying to find him in  a dark movie theatre, or the memory of having your head stuck in a revolving door because you were too busy sedating your mother’s nerves on the phone to bid your time when entering the medieval vice, or that other memory of how your reaction to the geography teacher stating that the same water has been around since the beginning of time going through purification cycles of evaporation and condensation was to raise your hand and blatantly ask her if that means we’re drinking dinosaur pee, or maybe that other memory of you crashing face first into a lamp post because you were excited about finally getting your hands on the latest copy of the Harry Potter series that you couldn’t possibly wait till you’re home to read it.

However, most of them fart out an insufferable hue of guilt that only keeps growing over time till its sheer monstrosity eats you up; munching its way through your cranial mazes that you can almost hear it drilling its way to your conscious sector.

And that’s why I could never understand why people find Alzheimer’s a liability. I mean, it’s almost a blessing, even more so that it’s incurable. People would pay to have that! They wish on genies to undo their blunders yet they manage to be hypocritical enough to shoot it down when granted.

What’s so horrible about not recognizing acquaintances, forgetting recent conversation and events, and ultimately losing the ability to spot danger? That’s bliss, people. That’s an Undo button provided on a silver platter!

Nature finally gives you the opportunity to start anew and you finally want to clamp on to your problems? All the ex’s, the dead relatives and friends, the people you’ve lost over things you’ve done wrong, your career dilemmas, your petty worries, your consequences, your shit and your mistakes, everything is taken back. You’re no longer held at fault for any of that, because you’re no longer there, but somehow you still are to see all of those people inexplicably nice, and even the ones that never show up, you’re given the courtesy of not remembering them. It’s the solution to all of your problems, and it’s flagged preposterous?

Alzheimer’s give people the chance to be happy over the re-discovery of little things. Re-learning how to work a toaster would make their day, or perhaps tasting coffee for the first time after 68 years of drinking it every morning, taking a long bubble bath having forgotten how awesomely it relaxes all of your muscles, talking to the person you love and getting to know them all over again, re-living all of the beautiful things and forgetting all of the horrendously ugly things. So you forget how to swallow in the process, too bad. I’d rather forget how to swallow if it means I forget about a lot of other crap. The setbacks are the price you pay for the chance you’ve been given to be happy again, for what little time you have.

Why do people want to cure Alzheimer’s? Because they’re selfish. If they’d stop to think about the happiness of the supposedly afflicted, they wouldn’t be so sure about whether they’re jealous because they can’t contract it and would rather drag the person back into their petty reality and provide  them with the guilt dose they relished.

People have been getting drunk, high, popping pills and risking their life on extreme sports to get that one little break from conscious thought, they’ve been destroying their lives trying to find that little anecdote to memory with all forms of destructive escapist habits, they’ve been trying to build a time machine ever since they knew how to call time for what it is and when they find it, they try to cure it. How does that make sense? You’ve just been re-born you fucking morons, why are you trying to take that away?

The nerve on humans. Once a dipshit, always a dipshit.

The Herring Adventure

This is the story of one of the many times I attempt to feed myself and it goes catastrophically wrong.

So I wake up from about 13 hours of sleep, and I’m inevitably hungry. I try to put it off with generous amounts of carefully brewed coffee, and it doesn’t work, so I resort to trying to find edible leftovers in the fridge, which doesn’t turn out well since my mom’s storage system needs a deciphering manual. However, I manage to find two odd looking packaged herrings. And that’s where it all started.

I get out the plastic bag with a fish drawn on it, and it looks rather embossed. To my inexperienced self, I thought that’s just the packaging and when I open it there’ll pieces of herring carefully aligned to emboss the picture. I was horribly mistaken.

I open up the package only to be met with a horrifyingly whole and very alive looking fish, which sends my body into convulsions, reducing my powers of speech to variations of grurghrugheghurgheghgegh aaaaaa grrrghhhh.

I repeatedly try to approach it, but to no avail. To my vivid imagination and starving self, the thing was alive and almost moving. I had a corpse of a living thing lying on the counter and I had no means of removing it, putting it back or trying to turn it edible, and my toes had given up on their duty to keep my balance, since I’d been reduced to hopping around with my toes cramped into odd formations. It had eyes and fins and everything.

Since I could neither leave it there nor cook it without losing my motor functions, not to mention the fact that I had no idea as to how I’m supposed to cook it in the first place, my logic leads me to two things: a) There has to be pan and oil involved. b) There has to be instructions on the packaging.

So I hopped around, making sounds that, to a neighbour, would sound like I’m having my my joints popped out of their sockets in a medieval vice, and got a pan, filled it with oil, and held the packaging in midair with scissors in one hand and a towel in another. There were no instructions to be seen.

Being caught between a rock and a hard place, I get out of the kitchen and try to beg my sleeping dad to get up and remove the corpse, telling him I wasn’t hungry anymore. My efforts failed to penetrate his REM cycle. So I try to wake my mom up begging her to either get up and help me or tell me what to do, I managed to penetrate her REM cycle, but only enough to reach her subconscious. She mumbled something about leaving it there, no oil involved, defrosting and a vivid description of the cats she was dreaming of at the time.

So here I am, in the middle of the apartment, with a corpse in the kitchen and no idea how to dispose of it. I tried to summon the powers of Jack the Ripper and found his advice on the boiling point of human hearts of no help. After extended psychological turmoil, I decide to get myself together and brave through it on some sort of quest to prove to myself that I’m not a pussy, since there was no way I’m eating that thing if my life depended on it.

I go back into the kitchen, which activates another episode of me jumping around the place spewing jargon. I had the mental image of myself in a morgue identifying a deformed body, and found myself rather inclined towards that version of the plot than the one I currently had to deal with, for at least I’d have sufficient evidence in the latter plot that the subject is sufficiently dead.

It seemed perfectly logical at that point to stuff it into the microwave, since my knowledge about the whole cooking culture involves me stuffing things into the microwave, only to have the magical waves render the object suitable for human munching. There was of course the teeny tiny little problem of how I’m going to get the fish into the microwave without my having to touch it, keeping into consideration that telekinesis is not a valid option. Another one of the Indian rain dance episodes was initiated as I propped the thing with the longest ladle I could find onto a plate, with my heart halting to a temporary stop when it tumbled my way. With some ninja moves, I managed to balance it there, and shove it into the microwave, set it to a minute and run for my life.

The sounds and view of the fish moving in agony was plain torture, I felt like Neville when Mad Eye Moody performed the Cruciatus curse on that spider in front of him. Time was up and I got out from behind the doorframe where I’d hidden incase something exploded into a shower of fish guts.

Comparing the before and after, the fish looked like something out of a horror movie. It had curled upwards, its eyes popped out and there were juices oozing out of all sorts of perforations from its bloated body that seemed to lose length and gain width on some sort of deathly equation. The position of the fish on the plate looked as if I’ve been performing  an exorcism, and vaguely resembled this:

Another Indian rain dance later, I decided that I had to do this. I approached it, took a deep breath, positioned the scissors, closed my eyes and let out a yelp as I severed its poor head. I got a fork and knife and proceeded to surgically gut it into perfect little squares, removing what then appeared to be poo and was later identified as eggs, since in no way could a fish be this diarrheic without ingesting oodles of chocolate which I couldn’t possibly imagine finding its way to the ocean.

After the excruciating process, both to me and the poor creature, I got rid of the evidence with the precision of a serial killer and stuffed it in the fridge. I had to talk myself out of turning vegetarian for 2 hours afterwards, settled on not eating anything with a face for sometime and swore on everything holy that never, ever, for as long as I live, will I attempt to cook again.

Of Espresso Pebbles, Jeep Wranglers & Wedding Vows.

Today’s been a weird happy day with bouts of craving pickled lemons and wanting to cry your problems into the jar and proceeding to eat lemons pickled with your own tears while pretending to be a halfassed cannibal, then ignoring the impulse because you don’t have pickled lemons anyway and you’re rather consoled by the fact that you liked Louis CK before he made it on the 2012 Times’ 100 influential people’s list, right before you found out that Rihanna was on there too and wished you’d closed the tab without hitting the next button and cursing yourself for your insatiable need for knowledge that has been conveniently triggered because of your impending finals’ force-feeding and cramming that caused this traumatic realization by making you want to click that next button into the wondrous world of things you don’t know yet.

In case you also have the need to count everything and was trying to keep track of how many times I flipped from happy to sad, it’s 4 times in the last paragraph raised to the power of pi in the last 24 hour window, which made me proceed to make an infallible equation to stop that pattern and that is the following: Whatever you do, don’t watch The Rum Diary, and cupcakes are bad for you. The combination is lethal, so don’t go there unless you run out of bytes and food. Maybe not even then, but anyway, you get the point.

I’ve been sleeping a lot too, I think it’s another one of the whole finals-are-in-a-month effect. And when I say a lot I mean the going to bed with a scab and waking up to find that it’s not there anymore kind. I slept so long I grew up a little. Also, my left middle finger decided to cramp at the joint and now I can't bend it. Ironic? I’d say convenient. I’d make it a point to run into everybody I hate today if I didn’t have to wade through a pile of books to get to the door.

Since my body is not used to this whole ‘sleeping enough’ thing, I woke up this morning groggy enough to head-butt the door, bump my laptop into the wall, squish dad’s foot then lose my balance and trip over only to fall right on his poor hand. Luckily enough, he managed to straighten them on time or else I would’ve broken it trying to go through with my quest to reach the couch after heroically getting out of bed in one piece. My dad’s reaction was a full-fledged ‘HOW THE HELL ARE YOU GONNA DRIVE? YOU NEED A GPRS INSTALLED IN YOUR OWN BUTT!’

The Kübler-Ross Model slightly shifted in my behalf when he started considering a Jeep Wrangler to keep me alive, since the logic that ensued included thinking of a car that can take the highest ratio of brick walls to people. Since he could do nothing to improve my own co-ordination, he was hoping a 4x4 would help, but he reconsidered it when he thought about all the people I’d squish as opposed to just run over or hit and his philanthropist senses eventually took over. So now I don’t get a Jeep wrangler, my head hurts, my middle finger is on the offence and my laptop has battle scars.

My mom then went out and got me a weirdass sleeping gown with angry birds all over it because it ‘made her think of me after what happened this morning.’ My dad refuted her logic by saying that angry birds can hit a target, and I hit something and then called it a target. Needless to add, they wouldn’t let me hear the end of it, but that doesn’t mean that you, oblivious reader or alien checking out our planet, shouldn’t.

So I was watching Gilmore Girls this morning and Lorelai was getting married to Max Medina and she started thinking about her wedding vows, which in turn made me think about my wedding vows. After serious thought that went on for an average of 7 minutes, I honestly couldn’t come up with anything other than ‘You’re cooler than Coffee’ because my train of thought kept getting interrupted by internal conflict and a lot of voices berating me for ever telling such a blatant lie. There couldn’t possibly be anyone who’s cooler than coffee. So I moderated it to ‘You’re as cool as Coffee.'

And that was probably the worst thing I could have ever done because, to my head, it was more plausible that love doesn’t exist than the fact that I’d find someone, look him in the eye and firmly believe that he is actually as good as coffee. The fact that I’d conjure up such a thought, of having a person, a human being, be up to par with something as gracious as Coffee. Coffee has been there for me more times than I can count, it has been the emotional support and the pick-me-up, the one making sure I don’t nod off in all-nighters, the one staying up to make sure I see it first thing in the morning before I go to school, sticking around in the cab till I was ready to face reality of a long day with bullies. It was there when I was heartbroken, pissed, sleepless, plain bored and grieving. The one who was there when I was nervous before an important meeting and needed to prop my logic with something other than googling all the topics I could remember being ignorant of. And I’d actually have the nerve to meet a mere human and lie through my teeth, or even worse, believe that he’s as cool as coffee? The fuck was I on.

And that’s when I decided that Gilmore Girls makes me think when it shouldn’t because that’s not what it’s there for and I’d just taken part in a leisure massacre.

Then mom swooshed in and saved the day, having updated my ample stash for a rainy day with chocolate-covered coffee beans and espresso pebbles, and the world was okay again.

Of National Anthems, Anagrams & This Life Thing.

So I’ve been thinking. On one hand, I’d make an excellent feminist; it it didn’t involve liking women. On the other hand, I’d make an excellent chauvinist; if it only involved hating women, not liking men as well. I’m not really sure where that leaves me, other than that field beyond right and wrong where people who hate their species exist, along with the German neuter article and the psychopaths of the world.

Which explains why when I was watching Gilmore Girls this morning while writing in my journal and the realization of what the fuck I was doing hit me, I got the sudden urge to off myself, which was inexplicable in its philanthropist sense, as if I’m somehow doing the universe a world of good by it.

Also, I’ve been humming the national anthem to a country I can’t place all morning, it’s rather annoyingly victorious and sounds like the lullaby of a toddler who’s finally reached the cookie jar. I’m not sure what to make of that either.

This whole life thing has been getting harder and harder, and I'm reduced to living with the fact that I missed more classes than I can afford to get tutored for, both metaphorically and literally in that sense. It has reached the chronic stage where friends are probing for growth acceleration in attempt to put an end to their frustration at the sight of my crashing into brick walls. I never thought life was quite that hard, why people had to read all those Dude 101 books when they could just watch the Godfather trilogy or whether pizza delivery guys who worked this late realized they’re doing a better job than most of the suicide hotlines out there. Apparently, there’s more to it than that, and it’s not getting better that I’m not a kid anymore and now I realize I’m enough of a grownup to go to jail, and not juvenile hall, if I slaughter someone.

A friend, upon reading the progress of this post, pointed out that I may be referring to an introvert, and that I may be right to introduce them to the wonderful world of ‘Anagram Magic’ which comprised the most part of his childhood, explaining that it’s ‘getting fun out of people without having to talk to them or go through with the formalities of human communication, kind of like prostitution for introverts.’  Needless to add, it’s on my most visited tabs now. Birds of a feather flock together, no? Well, maybe just together but not really talking anyway.

Also, today I realized that the one thing I may have added to humanity’s stock is the discovery of a new strain of headaches, ones that are so bad that the pain starts leaking to your neck. I'm not really sure I’m enthralled by my contribution, but it’s definitely better than nothing.

I Was Gonna Write A Blogpost About How I Feel, But This Pretty Much Sums It Up.

Of Nothing In Particular.

I’ve grown into the habit of watching a couple of episodes of Gilmore Girls over my morning coffee. I found that it eases one into reality quite smoothly, much more competently than real life does. I don’t think the luxury was ever offered in the first place.

I haven’t been able to talk much lately, a lot has been happening. And now that I can, I realize I don’t want to. Communication is overrated, if animals can do without it then it’s probably how the natural course of things meant for it to be. Where has evolution got us anyway? I don’t see felines waging war on canines anywhere.

And words to the wise, never underestimate the comforting powers of re-reading your harry potter book series. If there’s a handbook on how to reset your psyche, they’d be listed as #1.

Why Do You Always Say Yes When You Really Mean No?