We Got A Gun In The House

My mid-year exams are going to start on Monday. And so far I've studied a few pages. I just can't be troubled to study. I'm going to get terrible marks. So instead I've been doing my guitar exercises. I'm having trouble picking really fast. My teacher's given me sound clips of how the exercises should sound and they're ridiculously fast. I'm supposed to pick by moving my wrist but I can't help moving my whole arm. I'm not sure if it's something I'll get better in time slowly or if it's something I ought to master now. Well whatever the case is after I'm done with all the other kinds of exercises I'm going to go see him and see.

With all the free time I've got on my hands these days. I've spent the past couple of days going into Yahoo chat rooms looking for chicks to chat to. It's something I do every year or two. I got myself one Iraqi, one Syrian and one Indian added to my Yahoo messenger contact list.

I thought I was going to get more studying done by going over to Dudu's place every day and have him explain all the material to me. But the bastard wakes up at around midday and I'm supposed to get back home early (around three in the afternoon) leaving not much time to get any studying done. Maybe I'll go to his place tomorrow. The other thing that has been discouraging me from going to his place was petrol. The petrol crisis isn't over yet. It's not as bad as last year, it might take an hour to get petrol on a good day, but I can't be bothered to wait that long.

I did fill up the car today though. Nahida and I left the house ten minutes before the Friday afternoon curfew finished. We even crossed a checkpoint and I think there was still five minutes to go and we got stopped just so they could check the trunk. We waited perhaps fifteen minutes in the queue at the petrol station.

These midyear exams I've got coming are a piss take. Some teachers have assigned material that they haven't even lectured to us. There's one subject in which the only way day he chose to lectured us, I wasn't able to make it to college.

Suzy on the phone told me that chapter three of some subject was included. I don't remember anything about chapter three. She then explained that the day he began to lecture us about it only her and three other girls were there and that one of the girls at some point told the teacher that he's doing a lousy job at explaining (which he does) and then the teacher loses it, stopped explaining and said the third chapter was included and that it was up to us to understand the rest of it. I don't get how the teachers are pulling this off, they know that we can't always make it to class.

I've also been spending a lot of time going through forums to figure out how to improve my audio drivers in my mobile phone. There's a new method now to customize my W810i that doesn't require bruteforcing. I can also do things like remove the annoying noise the camera makes when taking a picture or remove the operator logo. But it's all a bit scary in case something goes wrong and I might end up with a bricked phone. So far I've managed to access the files and folders where all the fun takes place but I still don't have the confidence to apply the strokes that'll change my phone. I'm still not sure if I have to go through the trouble of backing up everything in there either. And there might be some checksum thing that I might have to be aware about.

Oh and about tidying my stuff. Haven't done it. I think I finished planning it or I nearly did. I'm so damn lazy. I can feel a new 'me' emerging ever more carefree and lazy. I feel like a nirvana of laziness is overcoming me. It's wonderful.

I spoke to Kiki yesterday. He's been living with his sister in Amman without a residency and he's trying to figure out a scheme to get asylum some place. He says the UNHCR office there is open only one day a week for Iraqis and only for a few hours too, if you're lucky enough to get an application you'd still have to wait for months and months for an uncertain decision. I don't know what the UNHCR is supposed to do but it sounds like a sad deal if getting just an application is a challenge. He's also got a new idea that involves going to India to study Microsoft and Cisco networking. Which is a great idea. But Kiki is an idiot, and as much as he loves computing, he doesn't really have the head for it. And those are hard courses as far as I understand. It's typically him to think of pursuing some pipe-dream.

India on the other hand is getting a tooth removed for seven dollars in Sweden. Seven dollars! That's the price of an emergency dentist session for an asylum seeker in Sweden. And if it totals into twenty-eight dollars then he'll be fully compensated by the Swedes. Surprisingly to me, after seeing an x-ray of India's teeth the dentist there admired the work that had been on India's teeth.

India started to quit smoking today. And so has my brother. My mum tells me that one of his kid's friends said that his dad had died from smoking at the age of forty-seven, and that's what pushed my brother to quit.

I think my mum's getting pissed that my dad's new girlfriend has moved in with him. I was telling my brother the other day about how having such a dysfunctional in the UK makes me rather stay here in Baghdad than go back there to live with them. My family is crazy, everyone in it is pissed off at the other for some reason.

Fozzy is back from the farm. He's been at the farm for ages. Ever since I came back from the UK, he's only visited two or three times. He's here to get fix the deal so that we can receive rice grain from the government so we could mill it for them. But for me his arrival means that he can withdraw money from my dad's accounts and hand some to me. He hasn't given me any money yet and I think Nahida's trying to make some manoeuvres to try to stop me from receiving a lump sum for fear that I blow it all too fast. But as soon as I get my money and these midyears are over I'm going to get me a couple of whores for a hundred bucks each. I'm still not too sure I can pull it off though.

Last night Fozzy said that people shouldn't be emigrating abroad and instead should be returning to their tribal villages where they'd be safe. And from there people could work to making Iraq a better place. From their villages they'd be able to have a say and influence their respective leaders with their own opinions. I think he's right, the bottom line is that nobody from Baghdad for example would want to go back to their backward living villages of origin. Two million Iraqis probably consisting of the more privileged tier of Iraqi society could make a difference, but those two million have fled.

Nearly every home has a gun in Iraq and it's been that way for ages. I thought we had a handgun and a Kalashnikov. But it turned out that the Kalashnikov went off to the farm and I don't know what happened to the handgun. Nahida's brother who often sleeps over has been telling Nahida that we ought to have a gun and I've been nagging her about it too for a while too even though I don't know how to use one. Well she finally got one and this is what it looks like...

I have no idea what it's called, there's some Russian print on it. But it looks like an antique doesn't it? Nahida's brother is saying that she ought to give it back from whoever she got it from because if our house gets searched they'd confiscate it. He says the only kind of guns that are permitted are Kalashnikovs.

I should go try to study now even if I'm only going to do it for ten minutes. And I'm hungry too.

Had dinner, and I took the time on the internet to find out what the gun is. On the gun there are several engravings: a Cyrillic serial number: БД-2729 four times, the Iraqi army logo twice, and '1945'. I wasn't getting anywhere until I began searching for World War II Russian machine guns. And I finally found it on Wikipedia as the PPSh-41.