Einmal ist Keinmal

I am not sure if it is just God that I should be thanking, afterall, it’s the global warming effect. Whatever it is, Lebanon has been struggling with a powerful storm, with a lot of wind and even more thunder. The reason I am thankful for this storm is that it seems to have calmed the spirits of the people burning tires and killing each other.
I bet you’ve all seen it all a million time on TV. What’s funny about it is that personally I was in a retreat, organized by IndyAct in order to put a five years plan to save the world, one way or the other… No wait WAIT! Don’t close the window just yet. You see, The retreat started on Friday and ended on Sunday.
On Friday morning I was gracefully sleeping in my bed, I planned to wake up early that day, I had a course at 10. However, at 9:55 I wake up at the sound of a powerful blast that actually pressured my ears. Taking in consideration the fact that I have miraculously never been close to any explosion, I was consumed by the frightening idea that the explosion was right next to me or something. I was shocked that my room is safe and everything. I jumped to the window in the living room to see where the explosion came from. I certainly didn’t jump to the bedroom’s window cause that one gives a view on the Dahieh, no explosion ever takes place there.
What I see is a column of smoke going up. It was obviously not as close as I had feared, I took a couple of picture for memory purposes! Then the news came on TV and that’s when I really started to get scared. My whole family uses that road to go to work, including my father, two of my uncles, and three of my cousins, not to mention my dad’s cousin! Slowly I was ensured that they were all ok!
A few hours later I was in a small residence in a touristic area. And peace reigned for 48 hours, then in the final meeting on Sunday I get a call from my ex, she’s panicking begging me not to go home to Beirut and go instead to jounieh. She was yelling at me telling me my hometown is in turmoil or something. And before I hung up I receive another call from another close friend of mine repeating the same shit! Then it was my uncle’s turn and the whole family. By the time we were done with the meeting we turned the TV on and no shock was waiting for us. Just a bunch of young men acting like total jerks, burning tires and running around riding small mobilettes…
Then there were shooting and then there were chaos…

October, November, December … and January the come back
As it is the case everytime I disappear, though I never intend to disappear in the first place, I do have a lot going on with my life. Yes on October the winter depression did come back and it’s been difficult to shake it off. But that’s not all, my social life has been more active, and again that’s not all. By the start of this year I broke my dating hymen and dated for the first time in my life! Don’t ask me for details, all I can say is that it was a very happy phase of my life but it is over now and I don’t want to talk about it. Meeming (that’s the verb deriving from meem) has been going very well, we celebrated our first year anniversary and we have many plans. My lab plan didn’t take off yet, because the more I know, the more I know I am lacking, now I am focused on studying how to commercialize and advertize my plan. Plus I need to narrow my project to a very concrete level… Still a lot of brainstorming to do!
But I missed writing not that I wasn’t writing anything. So starting today I will link on this blog everything I write anywhere else on the web and just to keep you folks updated, I have written a few things on the meem blog:

• As I wonder why politics refuse to let us go This one is quite old, back to the time when the Iranian president was bragging about how there are no gays in Iran… I stole the link from Shlemazl :P.
  
• Be normal, Be different
  
• Because a woman is undefinable and so irresistable…
  
• Always look at the bright side

Plus there are entries from all the girls, from all styles and with all sorts of talk… Check them out they are interesting. Et merci Nomade pour avoir pris le temps de le voir. And to avoid any misunderstanding the comments are monitored by the lady in charge of the blog, Shant, any comment is welcome but the first time a person makes a comment, it won’t appear till Shant approves the IP address of the author. So it might take some time.’
Other than this I have been working on a new website: Biologus. It has been a long time I have been working on it, but didn’t have the time to properly take care of it, it’s still under construction, and I will also gradually move some of my science work posted here to that website, the point of the website is to be… a website! Not a blog, in addition to the fact that I have the intention to put its address on my CV so I want to work on it to gradually turn it into a professional website. SO far I have uploaded five articles to it:

• Embryology of the nervous system
  
• Nervous system's birth defects
  
• Paranthropus
  
• The deepest cut
  
• Myotonic Goats

Let me see… what else has happened? Well two of my articles have been published in the Beirut Marathon magazine, the first was titled “Running and evolution” (or something like that.. I know! I know! I suck! I should get a copy but I don’t have one) and the second was titled “Why running is better than a diet”. It must’ve been 6 articles by now, but the Marathon has been facing organizational problems and stuff… No problem.
And I have one article published in the Haigazian University Herald… Now that was funny thing, I was asked to give an article by a friend of mine, I presented three and gave her the choice. She chose one of them Titled “iro0n Maiden” and in it I talk about the… Iron Maiden! Not the band, but the torture device, pretty cool huh? And that’s not it, when I saw someone showed me the magazine I was shocked to see that I was the least qualified people who posted anything on that page, there were a woman from a famous newspaper in Lebanon ( I don’t remember the title of the magazine) and there were a University Professor and I don’t remember the third… When my friend wanted to write a couple of words under my name to introduce me she wrote “Bio Graduate from the Lebanese University”… She didn’t want to write “Just a no one that no one else than me knows”:P