Learn English – Looking forward to ” see” or “seeing”

There are a number of verbs expressing perception, emotion, wishing and thinking that do not normally have a progressive form, and it's reasonable to think that look forward to should be among them. In fact, both I look forward to . . . and I am looking forward to . . . are possible in your example. The progressive form implies a more temporary state and, for that reason, is probably more likely to be used in speech than in writing.

Your friend is making two assertions; one seems unsubstantiated, and the other seems tenuous:

(#1) The word 'seems' is a synonym for 'because'
(#2) 'Seeing as' is no longer a preferred phraseology

The first assertion should be easily verifiable using a dictionary. However, after checking several on-line dictionaries, even the OED, I was unable to find any evidence that 'seems' could be used as a conjunction, or that the word 'seems' has some secondary or tertiary meaning along the lines of 'for the reason that'. Perhaps she was confusing 'since' with 'seems', since 'since' can be used that way.

Olympics is so going to win this dilemma haha especially since the gymnastics is on later!

As for assertion #2, it's hard to tell what "preferred phraseology" means; however, I did find one dictionary that mentioned 'seeing as' is a more informal form of 'seeing that'. And, using Google's Ngrams to look at the trend line, you can see that 'seeing that' is more often used than 'seeing as' – but there's no evidence that the phrase is falling out of favor (in fact, it seems to be trending upward since 1990). Perhaps more significantly, no instances of 'especially seems the' were found.

I would say that you are right, and she is wrong – but I'd avoid gloating, especially if you wanted to remain friends.