“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 

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?