Life After University

When does one stop becoming a university student? Right after they take their last exam, or after the graduation ceremony?

People of the world, July 14th will always be remembered by me as the day I finished my fugly years at Birzeit, or Birzift University. In a fitting manner, my last exam was permeated by classical music sounding out from the teacher's cell phone, in order to soothe our nerves, before Mozart gave way to a Nancy Ajram song. In my mind's eye, as I skipped down the steps and out of the gate, behind me campus resembled an Alice Cooper stage set, fireworks fireworks and more fireworks.

I had dreamed of this day since my first week back when I was a sanfoora. My parents and older cousins would always tell me that I would regret my attitude toward university, as these years would be "the best years of your life." To each their own but they were in fact the worst years in my life owing to a number of factors.

• A sense of humor is not celebrated nor advocated
• The uppity faculty members who won't look you in the eye because your name doesn't start with Sir/Lady
• The students. The goddamn students
• The academic atmosphere which is encouraged to stay conventional

Graduation for those who finish after a summer semester is usually in August. That's what I keep telling everyone, and I'm slightly worried because their reaction has been the same: Are you sure?

Even if it wasn't, it's no biggie because graduation ceremonies are the gayest things since Tim Gunn came out. Which is fine if you're all for sappiness and smart dressing, but I'm not too bothered about attending or not.

Due to my increasingly dormant partner in crime Hebz, I've been too scared to find out the answer to whether a new blog must be made if I wanted to change the name of it. Hebz has another semester left, so I can always write here using that as an excuse. Oh I've just been struck by a sudden light of inspiration: from now on I'll include my memories of Birzeit, in addition to the increasingly non-related university shtick I post. And believe me I have a lot of pensive recollections.

By starting this blog, the bitterness and hatred of studying at BZU eventually ameliorated into good-natured humor. Well as good-natured as the circumstances would allow anyway. Whenever something pissed us off we wouldn't sit, cross our arms, and glare ferociously at the world like we used to back in our first year. I'd whip out a notebook and we'd start brainstorming for a post to put together on the blog. Sometimes we reverted back to our sanafer stances but that wasn't our fault at all. So yes, WRITING HAS BEEN THERAPEUTIC.

For me, [cliche warning ahead] it's time to step out into the real world. For my family, it's time for me to gain back the weight I've lost during the past three years, to develop a more positive and relaxed psychological state because as my mama keeps telling me, it's the only way I'll ever regain the thickness of my hair again.

Real World: find a job. There are some students are start working during their last semester. I'm not one of those students. I used to be in such a rush to finish just so I could work and bring home the moolah, but I've forgotten how good it feels to sleep at 5am and wake up at 2pm the next day, something I haven't done since I graduated from high school. Eh, I'll start looking next week. Or after Ramadan. Ok fine, next week.

Job Prospects

NGOs pay good money. I fucking hate NGOs and their policies. Plus I've heard that they are laying off a lot of people because they're scared that come September, all that USAid cash will stop flowing in.

Teaching is a massive no-no in my book. That's all.

I suck at translating. I also don't enjoy it.

I wish I was a waitress back when I studied. That sounds so wrong and so promiscuous in the context of Palestinian Arab culture. Efft.

I think I should just work on publishing my first book. It'll take years out of me, and I'll end up living in a sewage garret at one point, but then my book will explode on the scene and shake the world. J K Rowling used to be my role model. She's richer than the Queen now.

Family: My aunts like to point out that wink wink nudge nudge, watch out for a 3rees/suitor to come any day now for you! Suitors are also up there with teaching, another massive no-n0. I can't tell that to my aunts though; they'll think I'm deranged. So it's all about tight smiles bordering on grimaces and a few inshallahs to placate them.

Even though once again in our Palestinian Arab culture, I'm running out of excuses. Hey, you graduated from high school, that's good enough for the geezer generation. Hey, you graduated from university, that's good enough for the parents. Hey, you started working, you'll be doomed to a life of singledom and celibacy now. You can take the Arab out of the fob, but you can't take the fob from the Arab.

One thing I'll be doing soon--and hold your laughter I'm still quite sensitive about this topic--is learning how to drive. Whenever I'm in the driver's seat, the parent/uncle next to me suffers from a serious case of frozen Petrifying syndrome. What, can't help it if I've got the Schumacher genes in me.

For now, it's definitely onwards for me. Using Gaddafi's catchphrase, ILAL AMAM!

Happy Birthday Albi

A year and a day ago, we were both sitting at one of the three computers in the Women's building library summoning up the courage to make this pet of ours work. Incidentally, the three computers are now banned to anyone who is not a graduate student. Anyway, the hard nosed librarian, an extremely fussy prude of a lady, swooped down upon us as we tried to suppress our giggles at the silliest exaggerated welcome note, and  stood guard behind our backs as she breathed severely through her nose. What are we doing? How dare we waste our time on social websites? How come we're on Facebook when its banned on campus? Oh, is that so? This isn't Facebook? Then what are we writing? We patiently explained to her that we were starting a blog, ignoring the fact that she was an insufferable nosy witch. What's a blog? It's a website thingy where we get to write whatever we want. Suddenly, she became less stiff. Really? How interesting! Oh, I see it's called Life on Birzeit Campus. I should very much like to read it!

And with that, she stepped closer to our chairs, her face between our shoulders, squinting at the computer screen. After 5 minutes of us not typing anything, just sitting there trying to communicate via side-along glances, she walked back to her desk, then began walking between the book shelves eying us merrily.

We went home with a sense of mission accomplished. Since then, we haven't looked back. We're immensely proud of our pet, and the sudden disappearance of it for a few weeks at one time almost unhinged us. It's hugely gratifying to finally write down our thoughts-before that we resembled a gooseberry with permanent prickles sunny side up. School work has never come in the way and so we never felt the impending gloominess of shutting it down due to academic tasks. In fact the blog has actually taken first priority over any silly assignments. But we're still model students of course.

We kinda feel we should fire up a compilation of our favorite posts or something, but naturally we're lazy so we'll leave the browsing up to you.

We'll also be celebrating Saturday between 3 and 4pm not at Rukab, that heinous haven that now costs an arm and leg just for booza, but at their frenemies Baladna.

Thanks for reading. And recommend this to others. We can't do all the self-whoring ourselves.

Cheers!

Second Semester (Oh No!)

Tuesday was the first day back-let the semester thus commence. However, keeping with our timeless tradition, we'll actually drag ourselves to the university the week after this one (add and drop week).

This break went by pretty fast, and our eyes fill with tears-a la freshman year- as we think of the dreaded Birzeit University. If the uni had memorabilia to sell, such as mugs and sweatshirts, we wouldn't buy them, not even for memory's sake. There's something awful being associated with a university neither of us can find in ourselves to embrace willingly or not. It just seems like an obstacle most days, something that blocks our impetus for what we really want to do, mainly just making a damn difference on whatever level. And being surrounded by masses of airheads and blockheads gets pretty annoying. As well as dealing with under qualified teachers. And the snotty administration. It's all so bureaucratic, you know?

Ok, that was bleak. And while we do harbor these sentiments, we're usually way more adept at hiding them and enjoying the positives, as hard as that may seem. Providing that there are no strikes this semester, then last day of classes are on May 5th. New countdown!

Disastrously transitioning on to the subject of new identity, we (Arabiat ) decided to not exactly split, but allow for one of us to use her own name to post, mainly because she's in desperate need of character building and suffers from an unhealthy dose of insecurity. That, and the fact that she's more in the know-how seat, and has a lot to write about.

To the rest of the students everywhere but here, enjoy your last weeks of holiday. Or we'll enjoy them for you.

Drink Up Ye Merry Yo-ho Yo-ho

Milestone!!!! We have reached 100 blog posts! We really are made out of steel and non-alcoholic beer mixed with something called Canada Dry and shot through twinkling lights of rainbows and bedazzlement! So we feel that the time has now come to introduce to you all our pets. Let us hear you say, OneVoice, awwwwwww.

The little fella up there goes by the name Diego-Angelo. He is an anti-social masochist who veers toward the hermit life, despite having the best damn glass bowl in the country filled with brightly colored stones. He makes works of art from his faeces. He is still a cute baby, and enjoys playing hard to get with a cousin's other turtle, pansily named Lala.

Second up is the resolutely defiant Shit. Shit is so named because of its shitty color, which is a rich blend of greens and browns and greys. Its sexual identity is ambiguous, and has defied death a total number of 30495 times. Shit is somewhat suicidal, which is a bit of an oxymoron there, but it loves jumping out of its bowl (which admittedly, gets cleaned approximately every 83 days) in the early hours of dawn. It is now currently enjoying its 4th year living, despite all of its other friends' death two weeks after taken into domestication.

Conspiracy Theories Regarding Our Pet

It's been more than a week since our last post. There's a reason for that. No, not exams, but that this blog was temporarily disabled by Google. We were what they called, a positive negative. Basically, there's a lot of spamming and porno blogs (called splogs) and when they get deleted, innocent blogs like ours unfortunately get caught up in the whole deletion process. At first, we thought that since we also couldn't access our gmail account, something more than fishy was going on. Yep, we thought the intelligence agencies were behind our asses! Oh, we're kinda paranoid. Then we came to the conclusion that it must have been Mossad who chose to victimize us, since they have a penchant for royally effing things up. We were on some kind of paranoia roll for a few days, always looking behind our shoulders, never making eye contact with anyone, learning a few Krav Maga chop suey moves. Eventually we took the daring step to figure out how we can retain this pet of ours, and things were looking extremely down after the first couple of account recovery forms were submitted. This is all a ploy to get bloggers to read and understand the Terms of Service for both Google and Blogger, as if we weren't sick of research. Our phases can by summarized as follows:

Paranoia. Heart in mouth.

Confusion. Ray of hope. Despair.

Beyond despair. Comatose. Unresponsive even to Johnny Depp pictures.

Anger. Rage. Shredding of vocal cords.

Eerie calm. Beginning of acceptance.

Disregard for everything living.

Acceptance grows. Formulation of new plans.

An early email. Shrieking joy.

Happiness. Content. Abundance of love.

The information we submitted to recover this blog was rendered insufficient and therefore we were advised to create a new blog. This is when the hard acceptance began to sink in. Then one day we received the mother of all emails, and we began doing the happy dance. Aaah it's good to be back. But we're in the midst of exams so we'll holler at yall sooooooon!

SALAAAM

Hello bitches! Coming to you from the fruity tooty land that has known no calm since the days the dinosaurs roamed the planets..yes, including URANUS. This high school boy humor (or elementary..hmm) will unfortunately not be the staple of this pet blog of ours. Presented to you from the cleanly divided split personalities of two old hags, our grand total of two readers will be subjected to the mass abuse and whiny injustices that come with dragging our sore asses to the 'best' university in the Ramallah and its surrounding fob villages area, as well as highly amusing and thoughtful anecdotes of life under --ta-dum-- the occupation.

The original name for this treasured chest of ours was actually supposed to be Life on Bir Zift Campus, but maturity settled in at the last moment, after much hair pulling and bloody scratches between the hags.

Until then, bosom buddies!