So all 5 of you who read this should be extremely grateful to certain “friends” of mine for keeping me awake because now I have the “time” to actually write on my blog. Or actually write on a word document that will be transferred to my blog. I knew I should have turned on the air conditioner before I went to sleep 3 hours ago, but we have been having electricity problems and our electricity goes out multiple times a day and so I decided to use as little electricity as possible. But then I just woke up all sweaty, got up to turn on the AC, laid back down, looked at my phone and saw the time, and knew that they were coming. As hard as I tried I could not go back to sleep, because my “friends” were coming out to play. These “friends” I speak of are numbered in the dozens or hundreds…I don’t know exactly, but they only come out to play an hour before dawn (i.e. right now) and they do not know about personal boundaries. Every morning me and Lauren (they are really good “friends” with her) wake up with dozens of hickeys and we realize that they went a little farther up our legs, around our face, maybe spent too much time on our neck area, which considering where we are is totally inappropriate and against the rules. I call my “friends” our little vampires and they are bed bugs that live in our furniture and they are permanent houseguests. Permanent. The only way to kill them is to get rid of your furniture. There is nothing that I can do to stop them from crawling all over my sleeping body at 4 in the morning drinking my blood and so as the ultimate testament that I am not ‘high maintenance’ is the fact that I’ve lived like this for months and I have not freaked out. (except I might right now because I just ‘popped’ one that is inside of my pants on my thigh….I choose that descriptive word because when you kill them they are full of blood and so the blood squirts everywhere and they literally pop….i’m kinda grossed out right now because I didn’t think that thing I felt on my leg was real…cause I’ve been imagining bugs on me for the last 20 minutes…now I have a squished bug body mixed with bug guts and my blood inside my pants. A normal person would take them off, but I don’t think that I can stomach that right now. Ohmigosh I just killed another on my left thigh…I think I’m going to cry or hurl or both).
For my personal mental sanity I’m going to move on.
So a couple of days ago I had my first DTR in the Middle East. DTR is Provo talk for “Define the Relationship”. Let me just explain how amazing and non-awkward it was. His name is Muhammad (which if it had to be someone then the chances were likely that that would be his name…judging by the fact that 60 percent of all guys are named Muhammad). I met him a week and a half ago because he is helping me gather research for my capstone…which is on Iraqi prostitution…because he happened to have a phone number for a girl who works in this industry. He didn’t tell me, he told my friend Arturo who then told me and then I met him. It was meant to be. So this guy is pretty good looking – and for the first time in this paragraph I’m not being sarcastic. But he kinda reminds me of a drug dealer – hes not – but he has this shady/sad/emo look about him. So he meets me and he decides that he loves me a little. Which is flattering, but unfortunately I do not feel the same way. So for the past week and a half he has wanted to tell me and finally decides that 2 days ago was the perfect time. So we meet (and I know what is coming) at noon in front of this huge clock tower on campus and I decide to make this conversation so much more awkward by bringing up his “friend” (not vampire bug, but his hired friend) and I ask if I can meet her, that I need to interview her for my capstone. I was also thinking that this would deter him from telling me that he loves me a little, but it doesn’t. So this is our conversation (minus the stuff in the parentheses which is just my after-the-fact commentary). Oh and it was also in Arabic and English and so communication was just amazingly clear haha.
Him: I like you
Me: Why?
Him: Because you are beautiful and very nice (yeah I know that this part is unnecessary but the vain part of me just wanted to throw that in…especially because my friend Ibrahim told me last night that I was “not attractive”)
Me: Thank you, I think that you are very beautiful too (I didn’t know a masculine word like handsome in Arabic)
Him: I would like to have a relationship with you (now I’m just going to assume now like I did then that this relationship was different from the relationships that he has had with other girls)
Me: I would like that also (okay not really, but I find it awkward to disagree with people), but there is a big problem because you are Muslim and I am Christian
Him: There is no problem
Me: ummmm ummmm Well you see ummm I am not allowed to date/marry (those words were interchangeable in this conversation) a person that is not a member of my religion
Him: Yes you can, you are American, you are free (At this point I wished we were A) a little more oppressed in our society or B) we didn’t let everyone else know that we could do anything we wanted)
Me: Well yes, that is true, but in my religion we are not free. (Not true, but at you can see honesty is not real high up there on my personal qualities) I can only date another Christian.
Him: Yes you can, My Muslim uncle married a Mormon girl in Texas (didn’t see that curve ball coming)
Me: Yeah but my family would be very mad at me if I did
Him: I will go to America and speak with your father (he is moving to the States next summer for school)
Me: ummmm well ummmm you see I really like you and umm I wish I could date/marry you and this makes me really sad but…..
This conversation then continued much the same, and after awhile I think that he got the idea….kinda. So I thought that this conversation was rather amusing, but in all honesty I like hanging out with this guy – as friends – and he is someone that I would even want to be friends with in the States. So I’m not trying to make fun of him, he is one of my favorite people here, I’m just making fun of this incredibly awkward/random conversation that I had.
Ummm I’m too tired and too lazy to write a conclusion paragraph, so…
Goodnight, sleep tight, don’t let the bed begs bite.
So this is obvious a sidewise picture and its of Laurens neck and all those spots are the places where the vampire bed bug sucked her blood.
This picture didn't turn out that great, in real life there is a greater difference in color between the bites and her skin...as in they are a lot reder. Gross huh? There are like 50. 
So this is a picture of Muhammad...the guy who loves me a little...but who I found out last night is cheating on me haha. He is in the middle, my friend Arturo is on the right (and although he looks Arab he is actually not), and a guy named Abu Ramin is on the left. 
