A spontaneous flow of events

A about two weeks ago, me and my friend, Ahmed Farrag, ran into this very cool group of foreign students; Bernice and Elroy from Singapore and a bunch of Japanese students. Fortunately, they were all leaving Egypt on the same day. Farrag managed to contact them and knew when they were leaving and wanted to go say goodbye at the airport.

The two friends from Singapore were leaving at 12:30 PM. Farrag went and I really wanted to but I could not cause I had important stuff to do. He was able to find them and talked to them but in the strangest way.

They were already past the customs check point when he called them and because he couldn't pass over they had to talk to each other with the luggage scanner in the middle :D He even put the souvenirs he had for them in the scanner and let it pass to their side so they could take them.

The Japs were leaving at 5 and Farrag decided to wait at the airport until they have arrived. I thought maybe I could finish my stuff and go wait with them and that's what I did. It took me so long to get to the airport because it was so crowded. I had my laptop with me so I thought why not bring it up and do some work and for the first time I used my laptop on a bus. It was good to make use of the time I spent on the bus actually but the road was like lumpy and my laptop was shaking too much. 

I finished some good amount of work though and I was happy about that.I arrived at the airport at 4:30 -too late- and found Farrag gone (He had to leave to work). The problem was his phone battery died earlier in the morning and there was no way to get hold of him or for him to tell me he would leave.

We were supposed to meet at the airport, meet the Japanese, go back to his work place where they were throwing him (Farrag) a welcome party to which he could invite people (me) and then go out. I ruined the first part of the plan by arriving the airport so late but I did not want to ruin the whole thing. I decided to go to Farrag's work place. I did know the where abouts of where he works but I did not know the exact address. I called a common friend and asked him and he told me where the building was. I went thinking I would ask what floor the company is when I reach the building and somebody would have the answer .

To my surprise, the building was composed of four different towers that just share one ground floor. Additionally, no one seemed to know what company I was talking about. Farrag's phone was still unreachable and the only way to find the place was to google it. I called my sister at home, gave her the name of the company and she googled it. She gave me an address and a phone number that turned out to be the ones I wanted. I called and talked to Farrag, finally. He came down to tell me that the party was over ( my second failure of the day). We then went up cause I wanted to 

see what the place was like.

I met his boss and the company's co-owner, AUC computer science graduate, Mr. Ahmed Marzouk. He was very friendly and a very interesting person to meet actually. We had an interesting talk about computer careers. I told him about my decreasing interest in working in the field of my study, CS, and he was telling me I should stick to what I have been studying for five year now. He referred me to Islam, a co-worker of his and maybe a co-owner to whom I am to see him some time in the near future, hopefully.

We left, me and Farrag to where we did not know but we were going to hang out somewhere. We walked up a bridge that goes over the Nile to stand by its fence for a little bit and enjoy the scenery. Ahmed was wearing leather/classic shoes and he did not want to walk or stand anymore so we went to El Sawy Culture Wheel, a culture center, which was right beneath the bridge we were at. You can have a nice view of the Nile from there, too.

We went inside and ran into two high school friends of his, both named Ahmed, too :). They were attending this concert at the place and I was not interested so we left them. We sat down and talked and then his two friends came out, they were not so keen on staying till the end of the concert. We all sat down chatting about random stuff. They were from different back grounds, mass media and pharmacy but it was good talking with them both.

I don't know if that sounded like an interesting day to you, but it totally was for me. I liked how my day was totally spontaneous; when I woke up I was not thinking I would have such a a series of event in my day. 

I met three new "potential" friends, had fun talking to Farrag, and I went to and back from the airport, like 32-kilometer ride, almost in vain but I did not beat myself up much about it (that's weird for me).. 

P.S. A few paragraphs of this post were written on a subway ride to college...I think I began to type on the laptop in pub. transportation :D

My day today!

Since I am the only male child my parents have, I am exempted from military service. I have to go through a pretty painful process for getting the exemption paper work done. So I decided I would start today. took all the pre-required paper work..stuff like my parents' id's and my sisters' birth certificates and went to where I should have got a family record..a piece of paper that says lists my family members names i guess. The place, which was totally empty on Saturday, was now so full that you hardly can see the desk where the employees who hand you the papers are behind.
Since I had a meeting at Cairo University's faculty of economics political sciences - FEPS-, I left and told myself I would go back on a later day.

I had to go to FEPS to meet with a group of NESA alumni. NESA -Near East/South Asia-is a student exchange program supervised by the U.S. dept. of state on which I went to Montana to study more than a year ago. We had to meet coz we want to organize a reunion for NESA alumni from all countries.

Originally our meeting was scheduled on 10:30 put it was moved to 12:00. Lucky me, I did not make it to the meeting place until a little after 12:00. I was planning on going to my college after but since we started the meeting after 12 and my college was like an hour away, my intention to go to college began to fade away.

FEPS is a very unique place. I think it holds a special place since it's the only place were politicians come from in Egypt. Well, the only government owned place coz I think people study politics at the AUC as well. Anyway, the place is cleaner than and building in CU or Helwan university i guess. It's definitely cleaner than my college, I can tell. Students seem to have more privileges here than anywhere else. The place is warm compared to my college. warm as in cozy. I like to be there, for short.

We had a decent meeting. People were brain storming for ideas and we came up with pretty good ideas i think (Thanks to Allah). The meeting was over around 2:15. Went to make "Al'dhuhr" prayer or whatever people write it in English. I was close to the faculty of engineering where a lot of my high school buddies went. So I decided to skip college for the day and go do something good with my day. I went hoping I would find people I know which was what happened.

I ran into a middle-school kid, Mo'taz, whom I have not seen for too long. I then met with my dear M. Osama from high school. We had a good talk about our graduation projects. My buddy Mahmoud Raouf was the next one I met. He has recently grown interest in photography and they now have this exhibition at the college in which he's participating with 3 of his works. Me, Mohammed and Mahmoud had a good time then talking about the pictures and other stuff too. I always like to hang out at their college. I feel I belong there as I originally wanted to do engineering after high school but my grades sent me to where I am right now: Computer Science. I think I made my peace with computer science but still it's like marrying someone you did not like and trying to grow feeling for them.

We went to have Al'asr prayer when I met Mahmoudy, a NESA ex-participant from 2008 which was a good thing too. After the prayer I decide I should go home and luckily Mahmoudy lives near by me so we went home together. As we were walking to the place where we could take a microbus or something back home, a colleague of his passed by driving his car. Mahmoudy shouted at him. The guy who was really nice offered us a ride and we accepted the offer.

I went home, ate, slept. I woke up at 10:30 pm. to find my older sister has stopped by. She was visiting my aunt who lives like 15 minutes away.

I don't feel so good about skipping college today but I think it was worth it. It was a good day today.

What's wrong with me?

I dunno why but I have been not so productive at all for sometime now and it's not like I mean it. It's just happening to me. I always want to do a lot of things and I tell people I will do them. Simply, what happens then I forget about these things..really I forget everything I said I would do.
This sucks. It ruins my image and people's trust in me and above all it eats me up inside and makes me doubt that I actually can do any good at all.

Typical scenarios of what happens involve:
Over sleeping.
Getting busy with one thing and having no time to do the others. I move those undone things to another day but as days go by and I completely forget.
Waiting on others to do their parts so I can do mine. They forget or whatever and I end up forgetting or whatever as well.
One urgent thing that needs to be done pops up out of the blue. Me panics. Me puts every other thing aside and works on the flipping thing.


What I tried to do about it:
Using a calendar: worked for two days only.
sleeping less: does not work. I feel exhausted and sleep even more the next day.
ordering things according to their priority: never worked.
--
I don't know how I could end this misery

Finest Presentation

So I have this softskills class and now we're doing presentation skills. I had to do a short presentation like 10 minutes long or something on a topic of my choice. 

I chose to make a presentation on computer typing as I recently ran into this typing website www.typingweb.com and I took the typing test they have there. I can't remember what speed I had back then but I am sure it was not very high, anyways. 

I think this presentation is the finest of all the ones i made so far in terms of organizing. It looks decent..to me at least. Tomorrow I am giving the presentation and I hope those who'll be listening will benefit from it. 

Below is the presentation slides posted on www.scribd.com

Typing Compressed

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