Ah, stupid analogies. (Or was that a metaphor?)

More to come.

Monday, November 04, 2002

-you know it's bad when you have to finish an assignment due in an hour and drop off an application for a class you want at an office that closes in 30 minutes, yet you stop at a graduate school building because it has the best vending machines and you need a mountain dew.

-you know it's bad when in fact machines that stock mostly mountain dew are sold out of it, so instead you opt for the only full vending machine, the $1.50 Starbucks frappucino.

  -you know it's bad when the bottle you just paid $1.50 for is empty in approximately 2 1/2 minutes. and you drank it while you were walking.

-you know it's bad when it's 4:25 p.m and you still haven't had time for a shower, so you wonder if your daylight savings time hour could be transferred to give you an hour to get ready for the day. which is half over.

  -you know it's bad when you think you have your contact lenses in the wrong eyes, but you don't have time to check, and perhaps the problem is you're just dizzy.

  -you know it's bad when you contemplate missing the same class for the third time in a row. and it's the class you took to raise your g.p.a.

  -you know it's bad when you want to start a magazine, are currently editing a magazine, and just stopped writing for a magazine... but you can't decide between magazine and newspaper journalism.

  -you know it's bad when you have no idea where you put $40, and you can't go to the bank because it's a forever-long walk, and you can't use your account at the atms on campus because they closed your account. because you didn't deposit anything in it in time because you were too lazy to walk to an on-campus atm.

  -you know it's bad when the only ending you can think of for a stupid list like this is the cheap way out: you know it's bad when you have an assignment due in an hour but you so loathe the class that you spend time writing stupid lists like this.

Sunday, November 03, 2002

Weird thing #1: I woke up to the beautiful-ness of this day outside my window, and then the phone rang. It was Patrick, telling me about my sister Christina's away message on Instant Messenger. "Taking a shower, leaving for Washington D.C. in 20 minutes..." Is your sister coming to visit you? he asked. No, I said. So I called her. Sure enough, she was. She's a freshman this year at Marist College. Two girls who attended colleges nearby decided to drive to D.C. to see their little sister, who is Christina's friend from high school.

Weird thing #2: I'd been cleaning my room for a while, with some music on, when I heard violent splashing in the bathroom. I walked by the bathroom door, and there was a small, elderly Asian woman with a toilet plunger in the bathtub. She was maniacally plunging away at the drain, wearing a nice skirt and up to her ankles in water. My roommate had called the landlord about our clogged shower drain, and he'd sent his wife over to work on it.

Weird thing #3: That evening, I rode the Metro to American University to meet up with my sister. The "up" escalator carried me out of the underground and immediately I saw her, talking on her cell phone and looking right through me like I was a ghost. "Christina!" I said. "CHRISTINA!" I literally had to walk up to her before she saw me. She was with the three other girls, sisters, who'd gone to my high school at some point. Suddenly, the ethos of my hometown was transported to D.C., and I was disoriented.

The two older sisters gave me all the news on who'd gotten married, who'd gotten pregnant and who'd gotten rich. Christina spent much of the night talking to the younger sister, comparing party stories. We wandered around downtown.... very late, very dark.... to the White House and Capitol Hill. They blithely took snapshots of each other and posed in front of random things like beds of flowers.

Christina was going to spend the night with the other girls, but before we parted ways she hugged me super-tight, like she did when we were little.

I got home that night around 11 and felt like I'd already been asleep and dreaming.

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