some people say it's been too long. that's why i'm here, to prove them all wrong

i'm going to tell you a story. a story that spans decades (well, one). a story of my younger sister and craig david's second album, slicker than your average. let's head back to high school again, shall we? but we're not going to stop at my senior year this time. no, we're going back to the days before the ipod: the days of the CD player. (if i remember correctly, i got my first ipod for my birthday in tenth grade. it was a green ipod mini and i loved it dearly. for the first month, it only had twenty-eight songs on it. but that's neither here nor there. the point of this aside is to show that this story starts somewhere in the beginning of tenth grade, or the year 2003 if that's a better reference point for you.)

my sister and i, like most kids our age with an hour and a half long bus ride to and from school every day, each had a CD player. my last CD player, and the one that i had during this story, was red and beautiful and didn't skip every time the bus drove over bumpy road which was kind of a big deal at the time. along with the CD players, we took turns carrying a small CD case that held about ten CDs, although we stuffed it with almost twenty. (we would periodically switch out these CDs with the ones in our collection so the choices never got stale.) and while other kids on the bus would ask to borrow our CD players from time to time, it was this CD case that was really the star. because who just wanted to listen to the same twelve songs day in and day out? and our music taste was (and still is) very eclectic so we had everything from maroon 5 to papa roach to jessica simpson to sheryl crow to ludacris. whatever you liked, we probably had it. and you can bet that people asked to borrow CDs all the time.

most of the time, people returned the CDs before they or we got off the bus. occasionally, though, people would forget and we would get it the next morning. this wasn't a big deal. especially since a lot of the times the people borrowing the CD would leave one of theirs in our case as they swapped out. one day, a kid forgot to give us back a CD before he got off the bus. that CD was craig david's slicker than your average. he didn't just leave it in his CD player overnight, though, and the next morning he forgot to bring it back. the morning after that was the same. and the one after that. aaand the one after that. eventually, he said that he had lost it. his younger sister was at that age, though, where she didn't know when you were supposed to shut up about things and loudly said, "you didn't lose it. you listen to it in your room all the time." my sister said that she could burn him a copy of it if he wanted (yeah, morals and ethics were a little foggy at that time), but he insisted that it was lost and refused to give it back.

over the years, we'd joke about the stolen CD, and every time i was near a place that sold CDs i would find myself absently looking for it. i never saw it. we never bought another copy.

fast forward to last week. my sister was graduating with her master's degree, and i thought that the time was now right to replace the stolen CD. i mean, a ten year mourning period is beyond sufficient, don't you think? so i went on amazon and ordered it. it was delivered saturday morning. (i was not home.) BUT sometime between ten:thirty-six, when the fedex guy says he dropped it off, and around six, when i came home, the package disappeared. "it may have been stolen by a neighbor," amazon told me. stolen. again.

and that is when i realized that the reason we had never replaced the CD was not because we were in mourning, but because it was not meant to be. somewhere deep inside of us, we must have known this. it was time to accept it. (except i didn't, of course, and amazon is going to replace it.)

*Slicker Than Your Average - Craig David

please don't turn around and grow up way too fast

i was twelve years old when my mom had the older of my two younger brothers. i had spent ten years of my life as the middle child of a family of five, and i had liked it that way. after living so long with two sisters, i wasn't quite sure what to do with a brother. none of us were. but we went baby crazy when he came home, and he's still one of my most favorite people ever.

anyway, almost thirteen years later, he graduated from sixth grade yesterday, and i couldn't be more proud of him. i know a lot of people who have issues with sixth grade graduations, who think that the first school milestone that should be given a graduation is the completion of high school, who think that giving kids sixth grade graduations is equivalent to giving everyone who tries a trophy and banning criticism, and to them i say that while i do agree that kids these days are being taught to take all criticism as a personal attack on themselves which i feel is hurting them more than being told that they could do better ever will, i find nothing wrong with a sixth grade graduation and they can stop trying to rain on my parade, thank you very much. 

the graduation was even more awesome than usual school assemblies, and that's saying something because i absolutely love elementary school assemblies. (for both the sappy reasons and for laughing at the children, because, come on, elementary boys are hilarious even whey they don't mean to be.)

point of the story here, though, is that my baby is all growed up. or at least very much on the way of becoming so. and that makes me both happy and very sad. 

*Hourglass - Mindy Gledhill

and i won't forget you. at least, i'll try

so yesterday my family (or part of it) and i went out to the national harbor for my husband's last graduation of the season. (i tell you, graduation season drags on forever for us.) it was nice, and i wish i had actually written this blog post last night like i meant to because it already feels like years ago and parts of it are fuzzy. lesson learned: my memory sucks and/or i suck at blogging and/or i was drugged. since i didn't eat or drink anything there, though, the last one is a little far-fetched.

i did see a friend from school that i haven't seen in years, and i mean years and years. not any high school friend that i graduated with but someone from the years when my cheeks were still super chubby and i was too shy to talk to anyone. it always surprises me when people recognize me slash remember me. i know that sounds really self-deprecating, but like the narrator of the princess bride, i rate high on forgetability. i just don't feel like i make a lasting impression on people, and the fact that most people who do "recognize" me are mistaking me for my younger sister just goes to prove my point. i'm mostly completely okay with it. when someone remembers me from the days where i was making it my personal goal to be the most wallflowerish wallflower in history... well, i find it both shocking and kind of amazingly awesome. 

there was also a point in the ceremony, when they were drawing names for free airplane tickets, where we were all very suddenly evacuated from the building. since that very morning i had been making comments about how the people staying at the hotel must have been freaking out because it was so overrun with saudis, my mind immediately went to either a) someone threatened the room's safety somehow (a history of bomb threats being made to my grade school led to this one) or b) something happened to the hotel and we were all going to be blamed because why wouldn't they blame the congregation of saudis? did you not watch what happened with the boston bombing? anyway, it wasn't long before we were let back in, but i never did find out exactly what happened. some people were speculating that the fire alarm went off again (there was an incident that morning where someone was stupidly smoking in the hotel and set off the fire alarm), but no one could confirm it. i'm a very curious person and would still like to know. 

events like this always fill me with a love/hate thing for saudis (and arabs in general). i mean, on the one hand, i really do think it's great that they can hold on to their culture (while still experiencing the new culture and assimilating without giving up their identity) and everyone seems so genuinely proud of their country and achievements that it's infectious. on the other hand, there are some extremely judgey and stuck up people (like the woman i had never seen before who very openly pointed me out to her friend while whispering something before they proceeded to laugh at me. i mean, who does that?) that make me remember why i never really feel like i fit in with them in the first place. ah, the joys of having a foot in two cultures and never really being fully in either one. 

anyway, it was a fun day overall and now i am off to read. (i have a list of books i'm trying to get through before my family leaves the country, because once they're gone i'm planning on taking a few book-free weeks to really get my novel edited. i doubt i'll get through them all, but here's to hoping.)

*Everything Will Be Alright - The Killers

don't you hesitate to buy my love

i left this morning at nine:forty-five to go to the sacm graduation (the final celebration for my master's degree before i have both feet steady in my phd program) and came home at six. i don't think anyone fully understands what a time suck graduations are until you're going home from one. and then it kind of slips your mind before the next one so you leave every single one with that gnawing feeling of, "but wait... what happened to the entire day?" and since most of the day is spent in rooms with artificial lighting and no windows and too many people you don't really realize how much time is passing. it feels like you've been there for three seconds and three hours all at the same time. it's like you're in some kind of time warp black hole kind of thing where there are hundreds of people who don't know each other that are all celebrating the same thing. i dunno. it's weird.

after the ceremony (where they gave us absolutely no food. for someone who went for the food, i was disappointed. and hungry) we stopped by the job fair. aside from the companies that weren't hiring women, the one company that was so super excited by the fact that they started hiring women six months ago (but not for any of the cool jobs, they're pretty much secretaries) that it kind of made me sick, a chemistry company that outsourced their IT department, and a pharmaceutical company that wasn't hiring IT at the moment, everyone was super excited for IT graduates. here's what you go home with when you are an IT graduate looking for a job:

• twelve pens (two with highlighters on the other end) and two pencils
• two notebooks (about the size of your hand) with attached pens
• a triangle highlighter with three colors
• six USB flash drives (for a total of eighteen GB of storage): one looks like a giant pill, one an ambulance, one's on a keychain, two mini ones, and one normal one
• two of those to-go coffee cup thermos things that i'm totally blanking on the name of
• a t-shirt and baseball cap
• a light up bouncy ball 
• a stress ball
• a measuring tape
• a keychain
• a clip thing or something (i really have no idea what it is)
• one of those id carrying case things that attach to a belt hole
• two bottles of zamzam (the special water from makkah)
• six bags: a leather briefcase, two small backpack/laptop case things, and three of the reusable shopping bag type bags
• a ginormous pile of brochures and catalogs
• three jobs pretty much promised to you and others that you're "really likely to get"
• a really bad headache

pretty much a ridiculous amount of things. i'm obviously choosing a potential career based on which company bought me the nicest present. companies that only had a pen, you're not looking too good. (except for you alyamamah university, because i really liked your pen.)

*Buy My Love - Wynter Gordon (i never listened to this song. google suggested it.)

aint it so cool gettin in and gettin out of the volgenau school

when i was in third grade, i sat in my doctor's waiting room (dr. haymen i think his name was?) with my family. there were little chairs and those toys where you push wooden beads along colored wires and books. i went for the latter and picked up a hard cover book with a missing dust jacket titled excalibur. though i didn't get a chance to finish the book at that visit, i left the office with a new found interest in arthurian stories. i never ended up finishing the book, actually. i remember asking for it once as a present, but i never got it. enter my fourth grade teacher who shared the same interest in all things medieval. we had an entire section of the year devoted to it in which we read and wrote stories about knights and castles, made ceramic castle candle holders, and ended with an authentic medieval feast (no utensils were allowed, we used pieces of bread instead of plates, drank apple cider, and the only lighting came from the candles in our handmade candle holders). it was awesome. as the years went on, though my obsession with king arthur never actually died down, it did get covered up with other interests and obsessions. (i like to obsess.) the other day while watching merlin, all of the traditional arthurian elements came into the story: he knighted characters like lancelot and gawain, sat around a round table, and merlin put the sword in the stone (yeah i'm a season or two behind the rest of the world). and suddenly my fourth grade self, who was apparently alive and well for the past fourteen years just waiting for this moment, came up to the surface with as much excitement for the whole thing that i had back then. and within the course of the forty minute episode, my obsession jumped right back to the top.

the only problem with this is that i recently bought a bunch of books and now i don't want to read any of them because they have nothing to do with king arthur or his knights.

oh, and off topic but because i said i would post it, here's the video of my convocation speaker's rap. he sent it out in an email with the lyrics to all of us saying how he wanted it to go viral. with only around seven hundred views, i think he's going to end up being a little disappointed. but he is an awesome guy, so you should watch it:



*Convocation Rap - Dean Griffiths

you know how the time flies, only yesterday was the time of our lives

to balance out the blog post from this morning, WOOOHOOO I GRADUATED!!! and our convocation speaker rapped his speech. it was pretty awesome, i'm not gonna lie. once a decent video finds its way online i will post it for you all to watch and get jealous. he even brought a famous tuba player to accompany him. i mean, you really can't top that, i'm sorry. i don't care if michelle obama spoke at whatever university she spoke at. an old man rapping wins everything.

also, maybe time has flown by and i haven't accomplished anything major yet, but it's not like i'm not working on it. i mean, i really have learned some really cool things in school. and i really have been working on the whole becoming a published writer dream, too. kinda. and i really do try my best to like help people and whatever. that counts for something, right? and i mean, come on, i'm only twenty-four. though that may seem old some days, i still have time to accomplish stuff.

i've noticed that morning tiredness makes me pessimistic and night exhaustion makes me optimistic. both tend to make me grumpy, though, but i can hide/get over unnecessary grumpiness when i have half a mind to. you know, in case you were wondering.

i'm super tired. graduation was such a time suck. i got to school at twelve, took thirty seconds to walk across stage, and left school at five.

*Someone Like You - Adele

there was a time in my life when i didn't know where to go, and now the time is right and i still don't know

so i once again find myself facing another graduation day. and once again, after already completing a semester of my next degree, the whole celebration seems a little after the fact. but that doesn't mean that the butterflies that my stomach grows just for graduations aren't there. (actually, my stomach harbors butterflies to let out for just about every thing that could even possibly be mistaken for an occasion, but the graduation ones are different.)

i was a whirlpool of emotions the day of my high school graduation. the two most prominent of those were sadness and terror. leaving the sheltered hallways of my high school to take my first step into the real world without the teachers and students that i had spent more time with than my family was a big deal. a very big deal. before my undergrad graduation, i was more nervous than anything else. the idea that my time spent in-between school and real life was coming to an end scared me, to be completely honest. it didn't matter that i was doing my master's. i was already a semester into it and i knew it couldn't last forever. adulthood was looming big and scary just a year down the road. this morning, though, the nerves do not come from fear of the next step forward. i've already taken a few steps towards growing up since my last degree, and i find that i am looking forward to finally being done with school. (though i won't be for a while. gah.) no, the butterflies have gathered just to work me up over the passing of time.

it feels like just yesterday that i was telling my kindergarten teacher that i wanted to be a farmer, an artist, and an author. it was yesterday that i was using gummy worms to learn math in first grade. just yesterday i was moving across the country to start fifth grade in a new school, in a new state, with a semi-new language. it was just yesterday when i spent a year in saudi arabia, eating lunch on the stage in the elementary section and starting to overcome my debilitating shyness. it was yesterday when i spent my first day back at school in virginia locked up in the auditorium because i hadn't gotten my tb test after spending a year overseas. it was yesterday when i started mason afraid to be alone. it was yesterday when i finished my first degree at mason relishing every moment i spent alone. it was yesterday that i wrote the story, yesterday that i wrote two and a half novels and started to get over my fear of having my work read. it was just yesterday. all of it i swear.

and when i think about it, think of all the memories i have stored up and the degrees i'm collecting like they're limited editions, i panic. because it doesn't matter that i have two degrees in computers and am working towards my third. i still don't know what i want to do with my life. i still don't know how to balance books and computers without pushing one to the back burner. i still don't know how to walk the line between what's expected of me and what i want without disappointing someone. i still don't know how to fit religion and culture and family and dreams and fiction and reality and loves and distastes and personality and friends and responsibilities into a neatly composed package that is myself. i don't know.

instead of celebrating everything that i learned, that i know, this graduation is just bringing to light everything that i have yet to figure out, that i don't know, but probably should by now. guess i should go get dressed for it.

*Still Don't Know - Icona Pop

nothing else to do, may i waste your time too?

it seems my whole graduating thing has been stretching on for months. probably because it kinda has, but that's not the point. remember the post title that says, "the sun comes up then goes away, so does graduation day." yeah, my graduation apparently didnt hear the memo and thought it should last a good half year. yesterday was (i think) the final ceremony/graduation/celebration/whatever to announce the ending of my undergrad college career [that ended in six months ago in december]. it was the one hosted/put together by the saudi embassy so there was just a bunch of random students thrown together from all across the country. 600 random students to be exact. it was fun. probably because i knew people there and the food was good. i have to say, though, i don't think i heard a single one of the speeches completely and only a couple of sentences of the ones that did manage to catch my attention a bit.

and now i dont think i have any major plans for the summer until june 25 when i will fly halfway around the world to the desert house (otherwise known as jeddah). oh, except for my plans to do a serious cleaning of my room, because it is in desperate need of it. and i need to organize my bookshelf because it is a mess.

so i'm pretty sure that i had a point going into this post, but then my brothers distracted me and it flew right out of my mind. that happens, you know, because my mind is not the best thing to hold points in during the summer. or ever.

* Sassafras - Green Day

you did your walk of fame and that was it

okay so last night i decide i'm not gonna set my alarm or anything and i am going to sleep in because it is the first day of summer break and stuff. so i dont. you know what time i woke up?? eight twenty something! gah i am disgusted with myself and my inability to sleep in anymore. and that was after forcing myself back to sleep twice. i need to go visit my younger self and figure out how to sleep into the double digits.

also, because i know you guys were all just so worried about this, the excitement for graduating did kick in yesterday. it was about the time that i saw a bunch of friends i hadnt seen in forever and we were being herded to the loading dock and wondering how the circus elephants fit there every year. we have very deep thoughts for recent college graduates, do we not? i'd go into graduation detail but it was really just a couple of five minute speeches and then a few agonizing hours of reading through names while me and my friend really had to pee. oh, and the IT school was the second to last to get called. feel sorry for us. but my brothers wore suits and they looked adorable.

another thing, is it cheating to use the same song for post titles two day in a row?? cause i kinda thought so when i wrote it but i really don't feel like going and searching through my music for something else.

*Fly Away From Here - Dropline

sun comes up then goes away, so does graduation day

my graduation is in exactly five hours. i have to be there earlier than that by i dunno how much. i still have no idea what to wear. i'm thinking i should have thought more about this before the day of because at least then i would have time to either buy something or even wash something. i never realized how unprepared my closet is for occasions like this (at least when i havent done a real load of laundry in forever). a hoodie and jeans would be inappropriate, right?

shouldn't i be more excited for today?? i'm thinking yes.

maybe it is because i finished in the winter and this past semester seemed to have taken years rather than months so the whole thing just seems a little after the fact. it's as if i suddenly went back to my high school to join that graduation. the fact that i'm still going to the same school doesn't seem to make my brain feel any differently about this. i've already graduated. i'm already done. why am i doing this again?

should i be waiting for tonight to come so i can check this off my imaginary to-do list?? i'm thinking no.

anyway, i should go back to searching my closet. hopefully the excitement will kick in later. oh, and if any of you are in the fairfax, va area and have nothing better to do today, you should totally come! yes, i suck at invitations, but i would love to see you! george mason patriot center at 2:30. no tickets required. i'll be the one that probably trips and falls while walking across the stage.

*Fly Away From Here - Dropline