Personality Flaws

number 812: Always believing the worst things people say about you, but doubting the good.

yellah Masr.

I'm halfway through my application to AUC's full year program. It's terrifying me.
I hate applications, official looking forms, and the fact that I am putting my life in the system's hands. Eggs in the proverbial basket, so they say. I just hope that there is a basket there when I keep chucking eggs into it because I have no idea what is going to catch them if Egypt falls through.

Meanwhile, I feel like I am waiting for my life to start - and at the same time stuck in a limbo that refuses to let me do anything about it. A limbo of my own making, mind you. It's sad that the time when I really need the motivation and drive that a conference creates, I couldn't get myself to one. I lack everything that I need to move on - drive, determination, motivation. I don't know where I lost it, and I don't know where I can reclaim it, either.
There is this invisible barrier between me and everything I want right now, and I don't think I have what it takes to break it.

an Unaccomplished lady.

Spring break has been a dark void in which all of my time seems to disappear into nothingness and without any evidence of it passing. I have accomplished nothing in the past few days. And I have three more to finish everything.

I'm failing. again.

five years.

The War in Iraq has reached its five year anniversary. One year for everyone I know that has died there. This war - against terror, against tyranny, for democracy, for peace - I have always been against. I hate that I, as an American, am associated immediately with the missteps, the decisions to allow people I know to continue dying. And some have said that they would support one hundred years fighting. That is terrifying to me. When will it end?

Tibet really is on fire.

perfect moment numbers 70 & 71

70. After a night of Saturday standard debauchery, I woke up and watched the snow swirl down 8th street. And it was the type of sweeping snow that can't escape for the buildings, so it swirls in small cyclones mixing snow with leaves and newspapers and flower petals from the street.

71. Rolling down my windows, listening to the piano mix with saxophone and trumpet on the radio, and driving with my hand catching the breeze and the sunshine. I drove aimlessly around Atlanta and felt like home. I wanted to go sit under the magnolia blossoms in Piedmont Park and daydream or sleep or write or share my thoughts with the world.


these two perfect days were less than a week apart. from snow to sunshine in four days flat.

I think I smell a Rat.

I wish I could be that bad ass. Banksy lights up my life.

Tibet's on fire.

Pictures have an incredible power. This one struck me, much like my visit to Dharamsala did this summer. It is so violent and emotional and it makes me want to move or scream or travel to the other side of the world.

The world is swirling with talk of homelands and people, displacement and responsibility. Discussions around China, the Olympics, and Tibet in the past few days - spurring from anything like Bjork's outburst in Shanghai to Steven Spielberg's abandonment of the Olympic games - continuously remind me of my feeling of...I don't know how to put it...solidarity with the Tibetan people. To be fair, there is still so much I do not know about China, about Tibet, or about their history. And it is not just in the far east that I have found or felt this. The recent news of Israel building new settlements in Gaza also creates a similar feeling within me, simultaneously frustrating and baffling me. Kazakhstan recently mandated a "reteaching" of Kazakh culture and language, a cultural re-education that some have called dangerous. All of Africa is on fire, in a metaphorical term, and constantly people do not know homes, families are being separated or killed, and so many, so many have died. There are still people living in poverty in my own city left over from Katrina, two and a half years ago. The recent procurement of an independent Kosovo has also created a heated debate about the future of the former Yugoslavia.

I tried to explain this to someone - this feeling of confusion and empathy and anger - they were similarly confused, but not as to why people, nations, leaders allow this to happen - but to why I cared. There are people not only pushed from their homes, but their homelands. Cultures are being forgotten, dissolved, I said.
They countered - so what? I have my own problems to deal with. Like whether or not I get money for the alcohol I will be consuming over spring break.
Don't you want to learn about everything that happens beyond your own personal bubble? Or worry about the impact it will make on the world? I ask.
No. They said. And that's fine by me.

I crave to know more, to do more. Always, I want more. I have, since I was little, been trying to learn all I can. I constantly attempt to educate myself - though not always in the way Georgia Tech insists. I want to create an impact, to create a legacy that will change lives and conceptions and nations. I want to be old and look at my life and think that it had been greater than the sum of its parts. This person, in previous conversation, had said that they wanted to live as they did now, with children and grandchildren and never have to leave the country. But how can you not be curious about what happens to everyone else?

Curiosity kills cats, they say.

Well, apathy and megalomania kills everything else.

March.

March, the third month of the year, is named for Mars, the Roman god of war.

And war, in its many subtle and vicious forms, is a good way to describe the past few days of my life. And unfortunately, I think I'm on the losing side. I'm already battered and bloody, metaphorically speaking, so we'll see if I can make it to April without giving in. I already feel like the living dead, and it's starting to show, too. (my voice is attempting to come back after disappearing less than comically this weekend.)

I can't believe how fast this year is going, and I don't know if I can handle the speed. I mean, Friday starts spring break. Which gives me about two months before I leave for the other side of the world (about a year exactly from when I left for India). It's terrifying me because I haven't heard an official response from the school just yet - and I have kind of thrown all of my so called eggs in that basket. 2008 is a big year, and I feel like I am still waiting for everything to start.