Friday, February 17, 2006

You know my leaving you here will maroon you to a fate worse than death ARE YOU SURE YOU'RE SURE? He replied Yes!

The day was a drizzle yesterday and for the most part the complete lack of classes brought on a sense of responsibility and self purpose that would and could only lead to my doing my homework. Pitiful!

Actually COLD! The day actually turned my fingernails BLUE!
Yes it was a cold one yesterday.
Fu was kind enough to let me know that the situation wasn’t good and maybe I should have/get a pair of leather gloves. It almost made me weep for my gloves I had in the states.

After ordering a pair of Caesar salad from the restaurant Choices. I must say Choices attempt at the restaurant institution of the famous Caesar salad was sad. The dressing came in a packet which is almost a cardinal sin! The lack of respect for the requisite salad mixing and the precise combinations of cream, cheese, anchovy paste and spices was missing in this sloppy broken attempt (broken means the oil is coming out of the sauce whether it be a dressing or a sauce). Being this broken meant that the dressing was kept too warm. It makes me worry about the safety concerning the raw egg component of the sauce. With the chipped Parmesan cheese that was a sad smoked tasting affair sliding its way down to the bottom of the salad box I could only eat and put up with the black fringes that decorated the lettuce like lace on a Victorian aged dress.
Let us not even discuss the chicken that had been reduced to cedar wood by some overly enthusiastic cretin.

After munching down the first salad as I waited for Fu to finish with Malik’s.
Malk’s is the bloodsucking bookshop that copies out the papers we need to read.
Of course they didn’t have the book my poor professor ordered ages ago.
They never order enough because here in Lebanon it is common practice to photocopy entire books.
One scholarship student who gets all their books paid for buys the original and the rest of the students pay a whopping $15 for a $100 text. Well the rest apart from me.

What gripes me is the lack of them handing us a file with these course readings and articles on so we can pull the out in our careers later. These packets are cluttered with texts from 20 years ago and for the most part resemble all the other classes’ packets thanks to the WONDERFUL LACK of coordination among instructors. This means that we read over the same material in all the classes at the beginning of the semester wasting our time and delaying our classes to cover what we covered in other lectures only to have to rush through the important NEW items later as another politician gets a parade in his honor.

In the academic world having papers so old is tantamount to milk left on the kitchen table for 4 warm summer days.

We are further insulted in that as you get packets they AREN’T bound and are usually stapled on the Arab side of the page.
Oh the irritations of having grabbed the page on the wrong side and ripping it out of the side as you read left to right.
Not to mention the fact that pages are usually missing from the copies you need.

You don’t get to find out until there are a couple weeks to the end of the semester.

Yes! Pages 89-93 are missing in your copy now try to figure out what they forgot to copy from the text your prof. had some poor Graduate Assistant (GA) copy.

The quality of these copies being made by what are human beings with the coordination of monkeys often leaves a LSD appearance to the copy. The whole sliding line of text in the middle of the page with the lower half of the copy’s the paragraphs making a leaning tower of Pisa just to spill the important conclusions into the un-photocopied area that blisters the edge of the page white.

As you can tell I have gotten over my initial glee of reading the assignments.

Now for that long slog through the wilderness of the doldrums to arrive at the stage of the final exams. The trouble is that this quarter will also have several papers sprinkled throughout which should make the attempts to maintain my own elusive state of calm relatively…impossible!

Thus far we have covered Choices and the fact that one should NOT choose Caesar salad, Malik’s bookshop and the crimes committed by the copyright infringing Lebanese as well as the general issues of … oh wait I have almost forgotten.

In addition to the quick statement previous concerning Lifestyles gym here in Lebanon I had not added that one should be prepared for retinal damage.

Nowadays lasers come with the warning labels that would in the past be used to cull idiots from our ever fragile gene pool these days you get told that coffee is served hot not by common sense but by the writing on your warm styro cup at Dunkin Donuts.

There should be a warning n the gym door at lifestyles. If you are a male member you will be subjected to blinding exposure! That’s right you thought those nude festivities in the locker room at high school were the end of humiliation YOU WERE SOOOO WRONG!

The Lads at lifestyles love their bodies!

And that goes double for some of them, even if those bodies are a wrinkly mess of skin and hair resembling that 2 month old apple at the bottom of the fruit basket nobody wants to touch for fear that the fruit may actually bite them.

The lads at lifestyles
Can
Will
and DO walk around “air drying” and burning the retina of anyone who mistakenly glanced in their direction.

This would be fine if you were on cell block F of the local QUALONG people’s republic of China prison number 153 but the fact that you are paying for a membership to see this is all the more humiliating.

To anyone that is a member of Lifestyles I intend no offence in my writing other than the one I intend but please SPARE US the “FULL MONTY”!

Then of course there is other news. News far too sensitive to be revealed over a mere humble blog such as this and far to humbling of an affair for me to claim to have EVER and I do MEAN EVER claim to have been part of. That being said and having absolved myself of the guilt for lying to say that I had covered everything when that impressive, scary, and heart wrenching event would not be included in this small catalogue of my life and the things that get stuck in it.
Yes my opinion is stuck in my life and now that you have reached this far you have a piece of it guaranteed to be stuck in

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

hey i have a suggestion for a topic of discussion : "the lebanese mentality of relationships" how they percieve friendship ? what does friendship mean to them if it ever exists ....... do they have hidden agendas from this whole encounter ? what?

1:04 PM, February 19, 2006  

Post a Comment

<< Home