A friend from Amsterdam should be here in about 8 hours for a visit.

The Lebanese government has a major stake in a plethora of telecom companies scattered across Lebanon. People are highly encouraged to buy dial-up for about $7/month, primarily because they’re forced to pay an outrageous amount in fees for the phone call made to connect. This amounts to about $0.16 per minute.

DSL prices are still extremely high. For about $200/month, you can buy a 2.3 Mbps line. They’re talking about deploying a 100 Mbps fiber line for all Lebanese residents at some point in 2011, but I’m rather skeptical. If the Ministry doesn’t reject it, the Israelis have another reason to violently set us back a few years.

It was beyond anything I had ever experienced before. The visual hallucinations were vivid, and it was my first time experiencing synesthesia. We connected speakers to my laptop and played various genres of music: metal, classical, techno, alternative, et cetera. Each produced its own wild assortment of colors and sensations. It was as  if the room had suddenly come to life; the sonic cloud massaging my ears and my neck with a feeling that the world couldn’t possibly be more beautiful.

The texture on the kitchen tiles had acquired an aura that separated it from the blandness of the clay. It began to swim, and faces grew out of other everyday objects in the room. Just as I was about to question my sanity, I looked at my friend (who saw the exact same things I was seeing) and said, “Let’s go outside.”

It was an intense argument. My friend, being a cautious conservative who’s afraid of taking risks, was utterly against the idea of going into public while tripping. It became a philosophical conversation strongly related to everyday life, and about 15 minutes later, we walked to the bike route nearby.

Its colors couldn’t be adequately expressed with words. The sun formed a perfect reflection in the water, and the bugs buzzing around my head weren’t enough to bother me.

About 4 hours later, the distractions became minimal, and I was left with the compartmentalization of my thoughts. It’s strange, when everything is broken into little pieces to be slowly analyzed and touched. We realized that our collective mood was manipulatable through the means of sunlight and music. There was giggling, mourning the loss of loved ones, relaxing, sweating, and nausea.

Overall, it was a mentally exhausting experience, but lovely, nonetheless. I won’t be doing it again for a while, in order to preserve its meaning.

Plug in the value for x (age). This can be expressed with Haskell as the following:

f' x
  | x <= 14            = floor x - 1
  | x >= 15 && x < 60  = floor ((3 / 2) * (x ** (4 / 5)))
  | x >= 60 && x <= 80 = floor x - 20
  | otherwise          = 0

For the most part, it was a bad trip you would read out of a textbook. I suffered from a severe panic attack, but completely avoided mentioning it to my friend out of fear that I’d also ruin his trip. I was trapped inside my own head, fighting off the vivid, nightmarish realization that my life was certainly going to come to an end. I creeped into a small corner of the room, asked myself if I was happy about how I had lived my life, and tried to accept the inevitable fate: I was going to die.

It was impossible; and inexplicably frightening.

When the drug finally wore off, the same questions stuck in my mind: Am I happy about how I’ve been living thus far? Why is death something to be feared? Can I overcome this?

To be continued.

So far, over the past two weeks, I’ve sold my car and my TV, given up the rest of my possessions, and moved to Montreal. Being able to switch from French to English—and back to French—mid-sentence feels awesome.

I shouldn’t get too used to this, though. There are many more places to see.