Meeting with Meshal: Goodbye at Fuzzy's

     For our seventh and final meeting, Meshal and I met for lunch at a different place last week to commemorate/make special the last meeting. We went to Fuzzy's, which was a big deal because he admitted he does not like seafood the first meeting we ever had. But I convinced him on the grounds that A) if he was going to be a TCU student he had to at least try one of their fish tacos B) their queso is one of the most amazing foods near this campus and C) I was going to pay for it. Reluctantly, he agreed. We arrived and I proceeded to order my customary tempura fish sandwich (which is a curveball, but everyone needs to try it once it is an incredible sandwich) and chips + queso. He ordered a fish taco and a breakfast burrito, then we sat down for the last time (until next year, perhaps) and waited for our food to be ready. 

    

     Per usual, our discussion began with soccer. Mostly that my intramural team went farther than his in the playoffs last week than his team even though we lost to them in the regular season! He was quite unhappy that I brought this fact up, so we changed subjects to discussing American football instead. He said he literally knows nothing about the sport except that it is huge in the U.S. and somehow is more popular than soccer. So I explained to him the basic premises of football and some of the rules, how kids in Texas grow up worshiping football and the players, how I played throughout my middle school and high school years. I then told him how the process of getting recruited works (though I definitely had no personal experience with it) and college football. Then, I told him my opinions of how college football is WAY better than the NFL.

     "What's the NFL?"

     Yikes.

     We grabbed our food and proceeded to gauge his interest in the seafood before him. I watched as he took a bit and...success! He actually enjoyed it and bought another fish taco! Fuzzy's truly is an amazing place if it can do that. Lastly, we talked about our summer plans. I told him how I'll be studying for the MCAT all summer and doing lab research. He laughed at me.

     "That sounds awful, I'll be playing video games and sleeping...have fun being busy!" he retorted.

     He will be heading home for about a month though, so he is definitely excited to see his family back in Saudi Arabia. He hasn't been home since he moved here at the beginning of the semester and seems tired of living with his two brothers already, which is understandable seeing that he's the youngest of the three living together. He's also excited to get with his old soccer teammates and hang out and relax, but he's afraid that not using english on a 24hr basis will take away from what he's learned this semester. I told him he will always be able to call or email me if he needs to!

     Meeting with Meshal has been a very fun experience this year, as well as an eye-opening one. He is the first person from the Middle-East that I have truly gotten to know or speak to, and I'm glad I had the opportunity to become his friend. 

All Night Long, a Humorous Dancing Story

    Last week was a weekend full of red formals. Alpha Chi Omega’s formal, Red Carnation, was on Friday while Sigma Phi Epsilon’s formal, Red Garter, was on Saturday. It was a whirlwind of rushing to obtain tuxedos fitted, planning with multiple groups of people at multiple different restaurants, rushing up to Frog Fountain to take pictures while keeping hair up and dresses down in the gusts of wind, and dancing the night away. First was Red Carnation on Friday, and it was during this night that perhaps the most fun moment of the weekend occurred.

           

    After a delicious dinner with a good group of gals and their dates we arrived at the bus loading right on time for our age group to head to the venue. We waited. No bus. We kept waiting. Still no bus. Bus! We missed it. After waiting for a whole hour AFTER we were supposed to leave, the bus came and went with a bunch of line-cutters that left us stragglers extremely frustrated and angry. At the last second, before we threw in the towel on the evening, another bus showed up and gave us the means to get to the venue…not all was lost! And for good reason too, because the fun was just beginning.

           

    We got to the venue tired after the bus ride and honestly not too eager to deal with a sweaty mob of drunk, grinding people. So we did what we do and sat down at the table nearest to the buffet line. A group of us sat and chatted while the music boomed around us, then a girl approached us with a plate in one hand and a fork in the other.

           

    “You guys have GOT to try the macaroni & cheese at this place…they have SHELL NOODLES.”

         

    Everyone at the table leapt to their feet and rushed to the buffet table where a massive heated plate contained mounds of white-cheese covered shell noodles, one of the best kind of macaroni noodles in my humble opinion. I got two plates.

        

    The food did wonders for our weary souls, and we were reinvigorated to have a good time and hit up the dance floor. As our group made its way to the party a bus showed up to go back to campus. All of us were getting into the groove as seemingly half the people simultaneously left. This did not phase us even a little bit. We were all over the floor, pulling out all sorts of wacky dance moves out that should never be used in a public setting – the kind a dorky dad embarrasses his teen daughter with. And it was a blast. The fourteen of us or so shut down the place as we kept the DJ going strong until the venue kicked us out, long after the brunt of the party had left the place. Lots of laughs were shared and many pictures were taken, it was only the beginning of an amazing weekend but it got off to an auspicious start.

Food and Drink (Humor Post #3)

   Seeking refuge from the hectic college studying setting last night, Elle and I went to Railhead BBQ in Willow Park, Tx – my family’s restaurant – for dinner. Good for my family (and my college career) the place was very crowded with families and parties boisterous with laughter. The bar area in Railhead, in particular, always seems to be brimming with laughter whether during a thinner lunch/afternoon crowd or a packed, elbow-rubbing mob. Come to think of it, a bar (if full) usually is a place seen filled with laughter and friendships both old and new. People are comfortable with their friends, telling old jokes and remembering stupid memories. Or people are very uncomfortable and trying to branch out, resulting in stupid conversations and self-embarrassment, resulting in awkward laughter (either at oneself or at others). Alcohol gave rise to civilization (it was safer to drink than the water, hence the daily consumption of wine/beer in Rome, etc.) so it has had a very long history of helping people bond and live and, simply, have fun with one another. As the fizzy carbonation bubbles up out of the bottle or glass so does laughter bubble out of the people drinking it, releasing stress after a long day at the office – its own type of Relief Theory. Just an interesting thought, thinking about the effects of alcohol on laughter when it is already a predominately social phenomenon.

        

    Anyway, as we sat down at our table, we were much too excited about food (something common for us) and filled with giddy energy at the mere thought of our Railhead fish tacos that would inevitably end up in front of us. And by giddy energy I mean I was acting like a five year old in a restaurant, and I found it hilarious at least. I was shooting the straw wrapper off my straw at Elle, I was dumping out the sugar packets and stacking them into towers, I was drawing pictures on paper towels with the squirty ketchup bottle. Finally, our appetizers came to ameliorate some of the wild energy and open arteries, and we jumped right into the healthy assortment of fries, beer-battered onion rings, and buffalo chicken tenders. We tore into the food like we hadn’t eaten in days (when it comes to appetite, hours might as well be days to me) and annihilated the platter.

          

   “So, what’s new with you?” she asked rhetorically.

            

   “Did you hear about that Reese actress getting stabbed?! Ahh what’s her last name…” I replied.

           

   “Witherspoon?!” she exclaimed.

          

   “No, with a knife,” I responded matter-of-factly. She busted out laughing at the randomness of my corny word pun and could not stop for quite a while; needless to say I caught her extremely off guard. Her laughing eventually got so hard that, even though I had said the joke, I couldn’t help but laugh along with her, and from there it only became a crescendo of laughter. 

The Soccer Meeting

          Last week Meshal and I had our sixth meeting already, crazy to think about! It was another meeting at the intramural fields since we both play on an intramural soccer team. We jogged around the fields for warm-up and caught up on the week… I tried not to lose my breath, as I am still relatively out of shape (but working on it!). He told me that his brother’s car had broken down that day, leaving him in an interesting spot. He does not own a car yet and relies on his brother (also in the IEP) to transport him to and from home some ten to fifteen minutes away, so he said he will basically always be either here at school or at home and not much in between. He said that was one thing he missed about home – his family owns multiple cars and his dad owns a car-repair garage as well. Had his brother’s car broken down back in Riyadh they could have just fixed it in the garage downstairs for free with their dad! Meshal remains hopeful, now that he also has his own room in the brothers’ new house, that he will also be getting his own vehicle in the next few months.

            As we jogged our second lap around we began actually talking about soccer and how long we have played the sport. I told him I began when (I think) I was about four on a team called the Rugrats. After a couple seasons I moved to a completely new team called the Knights, but the majority of my soccer career I played on a team called the Thunderbirds. I think I joined this team when I was seven or eight years old and still have several friends from the team. I played left defender almost exclusively during those years and onward, and our team was perennially dominant. Once I got onto the team we kept a core group of players, probably about eight of us, that remained year to year with a few add-ons and drops each season. Therefore, we all were pretty close to each other back in those days. One of my best friends from high school, Alex, was on the team, so when he moved to Aledo in sixth grade a few years after me we became much closer than just friends from the same soccer team. Funny enough, I was on the team with Hans (I still have a hard time not calling him Harry, since that was what he went by back then)…he was one of the original players on the team I believe! I quit soccer, unfortunately, before my sophomore year of high school to play football, but I have had a blast playing it in intramurals this year.

            Meshal told me that soccer is huge in Saudi Arabia, and he has always loved and played the game. All of his friends at home in Riyadh were fans of soccer, so it really has shaped who he is and who he’s associated himself with. We talked about his playing practically every position on the field at one point or another…he told me, “Just get me on the field, and I can play!” He is very confident in his ability as a player. We then began to discuss our favorite teams as far as international teams and club teams go. My family is from Germany on my mother’s side of the family, so I have always been partial to the German side when it comes to national competition (when the U.S. isn’t concerned, of course). Due to this I am also a fan of the club Bayern Munich, though my first club interest was/is Inter Milan for a relatively silly reason: my team, the Thunderbirds, used their jersey designs and crest as our own! Meshal told me his favorite club, but it had a very complicated name, and I have never heard of it so I honestly can’t remember what he told me, but he is a die-hard fan of the team!

Twain Reflections

I’ve always been a lover of quotes and bits of wisdom. I enjoy remembering them and passing them on, pretending I know a lot more that I do about many subjects. Much like brevity is the key to wit, I enjoy succinct quotes that are easy to remember yet packed with sagacity. Reading over all these quotes makes me wish that I had gotten a chance to meet Samuel Clemens or at least attend one of his lectures… he seems to have a great number of opinions on a great number of subjects, so it makes me wonder what he would be able to say to me in his witty southern drawl. I feel like much of what is in this book is relatively obvious, yet it makes me jealous that someone could say it in such a better way than I ever could.

            Among my favorite quotes in this book was this little gem about Joy…

                       

                        “Grief can take care of itself; but to get the full value of a joy you must have

somebody to divide it with.”

            This quote resonated with me, and for a while I couldn’t really decide why. I think when I read this I had one of those internal “A-ha!” moments that you get when you finally understand something you never realized was there in the first place. Grief can be very singular and very lonely, in fact I believe it is mostly so. Most people don’t want to be seen crying in front of others if they can do it alone in their bed away from it all. Depressed people (I assume?) don’t want to go hang out with friends in a noisy, bustling place with action and fun. They stay alone and do nothing and find it hard to escape. But humans are a social creature, and we have only gotten more social as technology has erupted and produced such wonders as the phone, the computer, the internet, and social-networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. Because we are social, we feel joy most amplified when we are with others whom we love or enjoy company with. Doing something that elicits self-pride like acing a test or winning a race is cool in itself, but nothing feels sweeter than when others gratify your success and affirm your happiness. Similarly, causing others to be happy is one of the primary causes of one’s own happiness.

            On a quite different note, one of my favorite parts of this book is Twain’s relentless criticisms of the vices of humanity in comparison to other creatures, namely when it comes to stupidity and opinions. The section on Religion struck me as one of the funniest because of his obvious distaste for hypocrites. One of my favorite quotes from this section:

                       

                        “Man—he is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself, and cuts his

throat if his theology isn’t straight.”

            I can’t disagree with this quote even a little bit, and it also irks me to see so much hypocrisy from highly religious people. People who use religion as an excuse to do something that is, in fact, against their own religion is, to me, something that I have a very hard time reconciling when I evaluate a person. It really is ridiculous to me that humans possess the mental capacity to ponder religion and other-worldly phenomena, yet blatantly dishonor whatever it is they believe in at the same time by shooting up people who believe something else.

                        

Twain Assignment - Man

       While Twain is quoted saying, "Nothing is more tragic than a young pessimist" I sometimes believe I fit into this unfortunate category when I reflect on our race. There is much good in the world, I cannot deny that. But  neither can I deny the terrible, horrid evils that persist and thrive as well, especially after this last week in the U.S. alone. Therefore, perhaps my favorite quote from The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain is on the subject of "Man." It goes - "Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to."

       Humans, at our most basic level, are animals. We are filled with that primeval id which, if we are not careful or if we find ourselves in a bad situation, can come rushing out and reduce us to beasts. While our minds are (as far as we know) the most developed and the most capable of containing knowledge on the Earth, we are the only animal to embarrass ourselves in the eyes of Mother Nature and in front of each other with the stupidity of our actions or with the evil of our actions. While a mouse cannot write or read or balance complex mathematical equations it also cannot do something outside of its nature to cause itself embarrassment in front of other mice. Mice, like other animals, do what they need to do to survive as easily as possible and the feeling of embarrassment is lost upon them. Humans want to accomplish more; we have more to gain but much more to lose, and therefore feel the sting of embarrassment when we fail. And then we blush.

Meeting with Meshal: Technical Problems and Video Games

Last Tuesday Meshal and I met once again in the Union Grounds sandwich area and grabbed lunch together. This time, however, he was a bit stressed. “My computer is broken, so I can’t play my online games… it’s terrible,” he said dejectedly as he sat down and threw his bag beside the table. As I have previously mentioned, Meshal is quite the avid gamer from FIFA to first-person shooters. Mostly, however, he is a fan of online PC games and role-playing games (RPGs) such as World of Warcraft. He claims he used to be addicted to WoW before he made himself quit, but he has recently gotten into different, smaller based games of a similar nature. His laptop had fried somehow and he couldn’t get it fixed so he has been reduced to playing games on handheld devices like his phone and Samsung tablet. This was where the problem was stemming.

“TCU wireless is stupid,” he complained, “It’s impossible to set up on this tablet!”

“I can try to set it up,” I replied, but I was not so sure of my capabilities as an IT consultant. I agree with him, stu-wireless is stupid. It’s a pain in the @#$% to set up and it logs out constantly. CONSTANTLY. But, due to the fact that (1) I’ve had to set it up on two phones and a computer over the last two years (as well as deal with updating everything again when I change my my.tcu.edu password) and (2) he did not even know what a my.tcu.edu profile was or that he even had one, I figured I could at least help him. So the next half hour turned into a struggle of getting off SETUP-stu-wireless and onto stu-wireless, signing into his my.tcu.edu account and changing his mobile devices settings, and guessing and checking with all the random number/letter passwords and usernames on a list he obtained from the student help desk.

Finally, we were successful. So he then proceeded to ignore me for the last fifteen minutes as he excitedly and intensely signed into a game that he needed to catch up on in a conquest to destroy some opposing army.

I know what it is like to be sucked into a game that takes precedence over all else at the time and makes you a hermit. During the summer and winter breaks, when I actually have time to do things that actually are not productive, I go on massive video game binges for hours at a time during the day. Sometimes it’s a very old game that I play and try to beat again for the sake of old memories and nostalgia. Sometimes it’s an RPG that can take hours and hours and hours of gameplay to even barely scratch the surface of what lies in the game.

While I have extensive gaming experiences from before I came to college, my best friend wants to enter a career in making video games and, therefore, knows what true gaming is all about. He goes to Baylor (boo I know) and is in their Film, TV, and Digital Media (FTDM) program which, apparently, is considered a “lone wolf” major within the school, not hindered by the overly religious policies of the University; as a program, it is considered one of the best in the nation in Video Game Production and many professors actually have strong connections in the field of video games, film, television, and hardware designing. For example, one of the professors there was the guy who came up with and developed HD television! Talking with him and Meshal always reminds me of my broken XBOX at home (probably for the best) of how much I’ve changed in that aspect of my life when it comes to free time, which I’m not even sure exists anymore. Alas, summer is approaching, at least!