24/08/2002 - 3:51 p.m.

Living in America

I'm finally connected to the Internet! It was a very very anguished seven hours that I waited to get the connection, but I played with my Sims. I've decided I love that game and that now, through the help of Diaryland and the Sims I no longer need to speak to real people ever again. Ohhh, that sounds a little scary even to me.

You know in Return of the King when they run out of water, Frodo has lost all hope and the book becomes absolutely torturous even to read (much less imagine how they experienced it)? Well, that's sort of what yesterday was like.

We got up at seven and left by eightish. Everything was in two cars and ready to go. My mother decides that we can't go the way we would normally go because of some road construction, so we're going to go another way and entirely avoid Marshalltown. We're about halfway there and we have to make a turn on to a road that goes both north and south (a right turn and a left turn for those of you who don't function directionally). Just before the intersection there was one of those huge road signs that said which way a particular town was from that intersection. One sign pointed north saying Conrad, the other pointed south saying M-Town. I told my mother that we had to turn north because we wanted to go to Conrad (also it was very obvious on the map that we needed to take the north turning road). She chose the defensive.

What do you mean? We're not going to Conrad, are we? Why should we take that road.

That's the road that goes north, we have to take that one.

But we're not going to Conrad.

No, I know we're not, but if we turn the other way we'll end up in M-Town, and we don't want to go there.

Well, I'm turning south because we're not going to Conrad.

And so she turned south and as soon as she did it I announced that we were going to Marshalltown.

Why are we going there?

Well, that's the way you decided to go! I told you to turn the other way, I don't know why you turned this way.

Now what the hell am I supposed to do? You've got the map, what am I supposed to do!?

You should've listened to me in the first place.

Oh yes folks, this is life in my family.

It was somewhere in the high 70's (which is like, 24 C or something) and my dorm has neither air conditioning nor an elevator. This was not my problem, oh no, this was my parent's problem. We drug all my stuff upstairs and had to put together my lofted bed in what my mother refered to as "the most miserable heat she'd ever been in". It wasn't that bad, but her complaining sure was. And, of course, they didn't have free cold water, no, they had pop, so she managed to dehydrate herself as well.

My dad was doing his silent pissed off act, you know, no matter what you do it's wrong and he's upset.

Can I just say that I'm very glad that I'm gone?

At this very moment I'm listening to something that is very definately not English, and it took me about ten minutes to work that out (boy bands singing as badly as they do it's often hard to work out that the language you're listening to is English). The CD belongs to my roommate Polly. She's from Hong Kong, very nice girl.

Have yet to have seen anyone that I know, and in some cases that's good (Jess, Shiloh) and in others not so good (Turtle, Polar). Mostly I'm a childish scaredy cat whose uncomfortable holding conversations with fallen idols.

Fall shows are The Laramie Project (yea!!!) and Three Penny Opera. I can't audition for either of them, which is a little too bad about Laramie Project, but I can still do crews.

I forgot my Emerson Lake and Palmer CD, I hate myself a little for that one.