before reloading

You remind me I live in a shell
Safe from the past and doin' okay but not very well
No jolts, no surprises, no crisis arises
My life goes along as it should
It's all very nice, but not very good

was driving my Volvo, listening to Business 1060AM, while heading to MIT to return a book to the library. It was a very interesting read: Closed-End Fund Pricing: Theories and Evidence. My phone rang; it was my business partner calling from Saudi Arabia regarding a holding in our portfolio. In my head I thought: “(NYSE:TOL) Toll Brothers: ‘Toll Brothers to Webcast Live its Presentation at Salomon Smith Barney's 16th Annual Global Industrial Manufacturing Conference on Wednesday, March 12, 2003.’ Oh yeah, their annual meeting is on the 21^st somewhere in Pennsylvania, I don’t think I’ll be able to make it. We need to make a final decision on where we think the housing market is heading. Toll has 90% of its 2003 estimated sales already on its backlog.” I answered the phone. “So, what’s your final say on Toll?” my partner asked. I reiterated my conviction that it was still a bargain and we should hold on to it. After dinner that same night, I checked my planner to see what was upcoming tomorrow:

07:00 watch “Squawk box” on CNBC while reading the Wall Street Journal and drinking coffee

14:30 check any holdings-related news. Call office and discuss any issues. Execute some trades if needed.

Then the weekend came. Friday is a big day because I don’t have to study so I can read Business Week and The Economist while drinking more coffee. Around 10 pm I left home to visit some friends and play cards until midnight. After playing cards we went to Loews Cineplex to watch a movie. When the movie ended I went back home to sleep. Saturday was, more or less, the same. The last time I went clubbing or did something different/interesting was during my sophomore year (I went to play cards with some friends in Pennsylvania). Last weekend my friends went skiing; I stayed at home to read the 2002 annual report of Berkshire Hathaway, a holding company controlled by legendary investor Warren Buffett. Things were different when I was in high school. Life was fun. Why did things change? How did I become this boring person? Or was I boring all along? I tried to remember what I used to think a few years ago.

When will I ever graduate from high school? I can’t wait to go to college, to experience “the best years of my life”. They will be filled with parties, road trips, new experiences and … yeah more parties. I will study, but only enough to get an average GPA. I will devote all my free time to socializing and activities. I will join as many clubs as possible at whichever school I go to. And even if I go to MIT, I will not let it get the best of me. I will always be me. Nothing will change. All the fun I’m having here will be dwarfed by what I will do in the next four years.

I’m a senior in high school. I just came back from the beach. We played football. We played soccer. We had three wrestling matches but, of course, I didn’t compete. Then Moe, our grill specialist, prepared the best burgers and grilled chicken in town. As the night fell, we sat and listened to Hamad playing the guitar while we smoked shisha, flavored tobacco.

Tomorrow we’re going to Bahrain, the small island-state off the eastern coast of Saudi Arabia. We’ll watch Analyze This; a friend of mine said it was a great movie. After the movie, we’ll go to Chili’s for dinner. And, last but not least, a trip to Bahrain would not be complete if we didn’t go to Casa Blue, a coffeehouse with a live band on weekends. Drinks, snacks, and shisha are served. If we’re lucky, we’ll find some girls from Saudi there, too. I’ll probably go back home before 2 am. I hate to drive when the causeway that connects Bahrain to Saudi Arabia gets filled with drunk drivers going back to Saudi, usually around 2 am. Most of the guys will stay until the morning in a bar or a nightclub drinking like there’s no tomorrow. I don’t drink, and there is no place for a sober person in a group of drunken Saudis.

On Saturday (yeah, the Saudi week starts on Saturday), a new week will start. We’ll be back in school from 7:20 am to 2:25 pm. Well, not exactly. Despite the school’s attempts to lock us inside by building high walls around campus, we still managed to go out. We always updated our inventories of the school’s official “permission” slips. They were sheets of paper, obtained from the school’s principal, giving a student permission to leave school. A student had to give those signed slips (we forged the signature) to the school’s doorman to be able to leave. The school redesigned the slips at least once every semester but we were always able to get a copy of the new slips. We would go to the local photocopying store and print 100 copies. Then the school started to use colored slips. It cost us 100 Saudi Riyals (around $26) to make copies of those. We knew the doorman very well because we brought him lunch when we came back to school a few hours later. The school changed doormen every semester and sometimes during the semester but that didn’t matter. It was just another business risk.

Sometimes the principal got a chair and sat next to the school’s door in a desperate attempt to keep us inside. And while some students climbed over the fence we had other ways. We had keys to the school’s service doors, but didn’t want to use them a lot because they were costly to get. Also, we didn’t want the school to suspect such a thing and change locks frequently.

When we couldn’t get out the service doors because the school’s administrator got a chair and sat next to the service door (or asked someone to), we reverted to extreme measures. The school did not have brick walls all around campus. It had high fences in some areas, vertical steel beams that were 6” apart. We parked our cars next to that side of school. If nothing else worked, we asked a stranger on the street to bring the jack from one of our cars to extend the space between the fence’s beams. Even if we had no place to go, the excitement was enough. Some students who never attended classes went inside in the morning, just to try to break out of school an hour later.

When we broke out we did all kinds of things. After eating at Fuddruckers, we went to Haagen-Dazs or to Seattle’s Best. Then, around 1 pm, the “mission” began. All the guys in town knew that between 1 and 2:30 pm they had to go to girls’ schools. First, it was the end of the school day at King Abdulaziz’s Girls’ School. After that, we flocked to Al-Faisaliah. Then, after cruising around there for a while, we went back to catch the end of the action at our school. School was fun, even though I didn’t always join those who broke out. Actually, I occasionally did. Okay, to be honest, I almost never joined. I stayed in class.

Next June I will graduate from MIT with a Bachelor of Science (or what I like to call B.S.) in Finance and a minor in Economics, a thing that appeared so distant just four years ago. I will go back to Saudi Arabia to work for the company that sponsored my education—Saudi Aramco—for at least four years, or pay them back the cost of my education. But I will also have another job. I will be a partner at BlehedNaim Investments, a small offshore investment fund. I can imagine a typical day:

This routine will go on for four years. During those four years I will lose any hair I haven’t already lost. I will have to somehow squeeze in a relationship and an engagement because my mom will keep telling me that it is time for me to get married. She will ask me if I have “someone in mind” or if I want her to “look around and ask”. The assumption, of course, is that she would most certainly find a “perfect” match if she looked long and hard enough. I doubt that I’ll be able to squeeze in a relationship into my busy schedule. After I get married she’ll start asking me when my wife and I are going to have children. Our society does not like it when a married couple does not have children within a year or two, unless they have a valid excuse. I will continue to wonder how I became a boring person and whether I was boring all along.

A few days ago a friend of mine told me I was a boring person. He defined it as someone who finds boring activities exciting, which are, in turn, defined as activities that do not involve music, sex, drugs, or alcohol. I’m boring because I work all the time. I’m boring because I don’t go clubbing. I’m boring because I can predict what will be on my daily planner for the next fifty years. I chose to forego some of these activities for the sake of my future, a decision many of us make, because I have a longer-term view of life, fun, and excitement.

Yet sometimes I wonder if I am working too hard and giving up too many things. I wonder about the trajectory of my life, whether I will find time to share my life with someone. I don’t want to end up alone, because then, all the money in the world could never make me happy. Although the remark came from my very shallow friend, it still made me wonder about the decisions I have made in the past and the way I chose to live my life. I hope I made the right choices. B4