a stab at autobiography

I'd like to offer a little background about myself to anybody reading this. I was born in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia and grew up there for the better part of my childhood. I spent the school-year there, summers in southern Wisconsin, and winters all over the place. I was the son of an Arab businessman and an American college-dropout turned homemaker. I was brought up for the most part in a Muslim private educational institution that, as i decided later, brainwashed kids as part of the cultural endoctrination of the youth. My father commited suicide with a car in '96, and from then on tension grew between my American mother and my Saudi family who financed the lifestyle we lived. I'm not going to say I wasn't spoiled, I'm sure I was at the time. And really, thats no surprise given an upbringing as a Saudi aristocrat. Anyway, my fathers death was tremendous, though it wasn't something completely new to me. I watched cancer kill my grandfather two years earlier. And my sister had been killed in an accident when I was younger still. But at the time of my fathers death, I had no idea it was a suicide. I was fed this bullshit story of heroism and courage and sacrifice about how he was driving his car and swirved out of the way and hit a pole because a kid was chasing a soccer ball in the road. I found out it was suicide from my drunk grandmother - not to be too harsh. I actually spent a summer living with this grandmother and her cowboy husband in Wisconsin between freshman and sophomore year in highschool. She's not a bad person, she just gets drunk every now and then and lets something slip; she ran over my dog with a conversion van, no bullshit.
Enough of that though, I'm not trying to be tragic, or meladramatic, this is all just part of the story. Anyway, my mother and saudi family had a falling out in '99 and when we were in Wisconsin over the summer my mom found out our house had been sold. Oh yeah, and contributing to the falling out was that my mom had met Sami, a half-Saudi half-American who would later become my step-father, and whom my grandparents didn't approve of. Well, when they sold our house we moved to northern Virginia so Sami could get his MBA from Georgetown. Oh yeah, and he's 7 years younger than my mom.
I'd spent plenty of time in America by that point, but actually going to public school here was such a tremendous contrast from a muslim private school. I didn't have a great time. I was horrible at school. I'd never had to go to school in english before, and so I couldn't write a paragraph, I had to do math in arabic and convert numbers to english at the end and shit. I'd never studied American history, didn't really know who Abraham Lincoln was, and so on. Also, I didn't have any friends. I'd gone from one of the strictist theocratic educational institutions in the world to a school with girls everywhere (which intimidated the hell out of me).
This was essentially the case through most of my life so far, I moved around a lot in Virginia. Between 6th and 10th grade I'd been to 5 different schools. On the upside though, the lack of social life meant I could get my shit done for school, as bad as I was in 6th grade when I'd first moved to the states, from 7th grade to graduation I never missed the honor roll.
I'm gonna take a minute also to bitch about my parents, who were the whole time too involved in their own dramatic episodes to be supportive about anything. I wasn't allowed to play sports, play instruments, et cetera, and was constantly told I was retarded. That, more than anything, is what drove me to do some of the things I did; I was captain of the swim team even though my parents had protested it the whole way on account of certain physical inconveniences I have. I played bass for a band and cut a cd. Actually, now that I mention it, I want to talk about my former band for a little while. Freshman year of highschool I was, again, new to the school and had no friends or desire to socialize. Sophomore year I found a clique of people I really liked, but a new school had just been built in our county, so essentially all those people I hung out with were gone by junior year. So i made friends with a few older kids; seniors, dropouts, graduates. I was completely indulged in the punk scene. I played loud angry music, did drugs, and loved every second of it.
I could write a book about that year of my life, but in the end I buckled down and finished high school strong, got into GW, and now here I am playing music, doing drugs, and still loving every second of it. Oh yeah, and over the course of everything, I got pretty smart.