Seventeen Days

People tend to think I'm cold and emotionless and somewhat like a robot. But then I have Nobody Knows Me At All by The Weepies playing in the back of my head because I want nothing more than a shoulder to cry on. A literal shoulder with absolutely no other purpose than to replace my pillow.

I want to forget about everything and sleep for three days and do nothing productive. But I have an assignment due tomorrow and a meeting to prepare for so it's another night where I'm up for the most part. The unproductive sleep will have to wait till winter break. It's been waiting for almost two years now. I doubt I'll have time to sleep in winter break either.

I want to sleep. I want to download music and read lyrics all day. I never want to leave my house. I want to move out of my house, into a new house, and never leave that house. I want to quit. School and AIESEC specifically. Maybe family and friends too. I want to stop feeling like I want to quit. I want the year to be over with already.

I want to go against everyone's expectations and call somebody and cry and talk and cry for hours till I feel better. I can't find anyone to call right now. I want to send somebody an email but I think I've sent somebody too many depressed crying emails already. I'm trying to wait patiently for seventeen more days but I feel like I can't hold it all together for that long.

I hope no one ever reads this. If you're somebody reading this, please disregard it completely. I need to vent and I have no where else to turn to.

She said, "baby, it's 3 AM I must be lonely"

It's 5 AM (it was 3 AM when I wanted to write this). I'm unreasonably cold. I can tell my face is pale as shit (oh, the irony). My stomach is upset because of the ridiculous amount of coffee and junk inside it. I hit a brick wall three hours ago, and there's nothing I can do.

I have a project due in about 11 hours. I know how to finish it, but it just requires more brain power than I have right now. I just woke up. I slept on the uncomfortable green floor of the lab for a little over an hour. I feel like I'm still asleep. But somehow I have to find the energy to keep my eyes open long enough to compute the classification error of my neural network using a test set AND write a report about it. It's fucking hilarious.

It's 5 AM. I've been here since 10 AM yesterday. That's 19 hours. I probably won't leave here till tomorrow by 9 PM. That's 35 hours. I'm going to have spent 35 continuous hours on campus. So far I've only slept one hour. I don't know if I'm going to sleep more. All I can think of right now is sleep. And toothpaste.

The worst thing is that I have a meeting tomorrow. And not just any meeting, this is my first ever team meeting with my Projects members. I still need to create my content. I still need to figure out how I'm going to feel alive then. I still need to figure out how I'm going to make this project work. But leave AIESEC aside for now, I hate how it always just has to come up.

I wish Hany was here. I wish I could call him right now and wake him up and cry because I don't know how in the world I'm going get through the day. I wish he could comfort me and make me laugh. I wish he was here.

It's 5:40 AM.

Somersault by Zero 7

You're the prince to my ballerina
You feed other people's parking meters
You encourage the eating of ice cream
You would somersault in sand with me

You talk to loners, you ask how's your week
You give love to all and give love to me
You're obsessed with hiding the sticks and stones
When I feel the unknown
You feel like home, you feel like home

You put my feet back on the ground
Did you know you brought me around
You were sweet and you were sound
You saved me

You're the warmth in my summer breeze
You're the ivory to my ebony keys
You would share your last belly bean
You would somersault in sand with me

You put my feet back on the ground
Did you know you brought me around
You were sweet and you were sound
You saved me

You put my feet back on the ground
Did you know you brought me around
You were sweet and you were sound
See I had shrunk yet still you wore me around
And 'round and 'round

Your Brain is Made Up of Ten to the Power Fourteen Real Numbers

We have Members Now

Time management and procrastination don't work well together. If anyone has ever told you that they're a procrastinator that somehow miraculously can get the work done, that person lied. Maybe that's the toughest thing about AIESEC. Forget team management and leadership and exchange and facilitating national and international conferences. I'm still trying to figure out how in the world I will be able to maintain my GPA this semester. I'm wondering if it's possible for me to still have friends by the end of my term.

I won't lie. 95% of the time I wished I could quite. 95% of the time I felt like I was wasting my time. Ninety five percent of the time I think it used to be more fun as a member. But then there are days like yesterday. Yesterday was our first meeting with the members. It was long and exhausting and I almost died by the end of the day. But still it was amazing. The spirit in that room (RARE 203) was so high and so motivating. And the response we got, oh my God!

I have an assignment due tomorrow that I'm no where near done working on. So I guess it's another night of little or no sleep. I guess I've gotten used to it. I have AIESEC meetings everyday for the rest of the week and I'm matching a TN form. (If you don't know AIESEC you won't know what that means, but it takes up a lot of time.) But still, I'm enthusiastic. I'm motivated. I'm that other 5%. We have members. And they like AIESEC dances. It's going to be a good year.

"Breaking up is like Losing a Toe"

I spent two years of my life in a wasted relationship. I hope my ex-boyfriend never reads that because it's mean. But it's true. Two years of wasted invested time, emotions and money. Yes, boyfriends are generally expensive. And if you add up all the money you spend on one for roughly two years, it's a lot of money. And you could have bought yourself something pretty with it.

I've been in another relationship for seven months now. People who know me think I've undergone a brain transplant. They say I'm another person with this one. I know I'm another person with this guy. But I never had brain surgery.

There are two types of relationships. For me at least. I could be emotionally attached or detached. Of course the former relationship was the detached one and the latter was the attached. I realized that either way, it ends, it's sad, you feel like you lost a toe. But maybe being attached, I could feel something more. And then it wouldn't be wasted. That's what my brain underwent seven months ago.

Adeya Ra2y 3am

No one reads my blogs. I know that for a fact, because my life isn't all that interesting to read about. And it's okay, I like the fact that I write to a non-existent audience. It eliminates the possibility of "stage fright" while I'm writing.

My best friend Passant Rabie (full name included so that one day when she googles it, she'll see this) is having the hardest time writing her first column for Caravan, our university's biweekly newspaper. Passant Rabie is one of the most opinionated and eloquent people I know. But today, she's written two half-columns and she "doesn't know where to go from there."

I on the other hand, probably don't know where to go from here either, but I'm just going to ramble on for the sake of rambling on. I'm making grammatical mistakes as I go along and I don't even care. But if I was writing something to be distributed to a couple of thousand AUCians I don't know, I'd be getting stage fright too. I was just saying before that I don't care what people think about me. I think I lied. Because I just realized that I probably would care if people thought my writing sucked. Or that what I write about is bullshit. But then I don't care at all what people would think of me going out in my pyjamas. I'd explain this, but I don't think I can.

The Age of Spritual Machines (DotCom)

Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, and even Google, they all make the world just a little bit smaller. People you probably would never have known in your life could end up being your best friend. Okay, maybe that was a bit of an exaggeration, but still, the Internet has become an emotional bridge between strangers. Everyday people meet their boyfriends or girlfriends randomly online. They get in contact with a long lost kindergarten friend. They see the picture of some pretty girl in an album on the profile of a friend of a friend and they're automatically in love. No really, I've seen that one happen.

I have this second cousin that I haven't seen in YEARS and whom I have probably never had a real conversation with because she is a lot older than me and I am a lot more immature than my age permits me to be. But then I randomly meet her online, start reading her blog, and suddenly I know more about her than I ever did before.

I have this friend on Facebook. This girl I never met, only emailed back and forth and chatted with a couple of times for AIESEC-related purposes. Now, she's my friend on Facebook, and I know what she looks like so well that I'd probably be able to spot her in a crowd. I know her activities, interests, favorite music, favorite TV shows, favorite movies, favorite books and favorite quotes. I even know that "Soukaina Chlyah is going to Istanbul, Turkey on Wednesday!"

I wonder if she'll ever Google her name and find out that I wrote about her in my blog. Because that just happened to me. I'll write Heba Zaghloul right here so that if anyone else ever tries to Google me, they'll get directed to this page. Then they'll get to read all about me. It's every stalkers paradise.

Has it been six months already?!

I wouldn't say it feels like just yesterday we were sitting in a café in City Stars with Hany trying to hold my hand for the first time, but it doesn't feel like six months ago either. I guess time passes by quickly when you're 200 kilometers apart. Six months later, in the same spot where things started to unravel and while your boyfriend is an hour late, is a perfect time and place to start reflecting. (AIESEC terminology.)

The first thing Farah (my best friend since high school who is NOT in AIESEC, surprisingly enough) told me when I said I liked a boy from Alexandria was that it was perfect because I've always needed my space when it comes to boyfriends. I thought so too. But I was wrong. She was wrong. We were all wrong. I'll even admit, there have been some frantic phone calls consisting of, "how come you don't call me every two seconds, don't you love me?!" And if you know me at all, you'll know that sounds nothing like me.

The truth is, long distance is hard. People will say it doesn't count as long distance if you're in the same country and just a two hour train ride apart. Fuck that, this is a long distance relationship and it is hard. But six months is a good sign of just how much we were able to hang in there. And sure, there are still those frantic phone calls and random fights. But I'd say we're just about learning how to perfect it. And we still have a long way to go.

You can expect every blog to be as random as this...

Everyone thinks I'm crazy for going out in my pajamas. I, for the life of me, can't understand why. So I decided to ask someone, Nadia (fellow AIESECer), what's so embarrassing about being in the street in you pajamas, and she said it's embarrassing. Another thing I could never understand, embarrassment, but that's another story. Why in the world would I feel embarrassed if random people in the street see me looking ridiculous in a Mickey Mouse shirt and flowery pants? These are people I don't know, people I probably won't see ever again, and people who know absolutely nothing about me. Yet they should be significant enough to draw up some emotion inside me and force me to spend an hour in my room color coordinating my make up to my carefully picked clothes. Why am I the only person that sees that as crazy?

Never mind the fact that it's a waste of time and energy and brain power. I can't find any logical reason for making an effort to make myself look any different than the way God made me. Yet I do waste some time color coordinating my make up (if choosing between black and brown eyeliner counts) to my carefully picked clothes every day (it was only once that I was lazy enough to go to an EB planning meeting in my pajamas). It's sad that we (the rest of the world and I) would habitually do something regardless of whether or not we are convinced by it and whether or not it's really necessary. My conclusion is that we're all sad and hopeless creatures that live by rules society has created for us without realizing that these rules are dumb and there's nothing wrong with breaking them. We're all doomed.