And curses ring out instead of the psalms

Today is a day that will live in hilarity.

I got up this morning at 5 in the morning in order to leave my beloved Desert home. After going from Tucson to Las Vegas to Tulsa to St. Louis, I ended up at my mini van around 4:30 in the afternoon. I had the cutest old man drive me in the shuttle - he told me, "Now, I only have one rule, and that rule is that women are not to take their luggage. That's my job. Just so you know." Love it, as Vanessa says. Anyway, 4:30. I got in my car, called Emily to make sure I knew how to get to Litchfield (east on 70, north on 55), and was on my way. That is, I was on my way for 5 minutes - after that, my tire exploded. You may ask why a car that had all new tires would have tires that didn't work... and you may ask why I didn't freak out, but calmly, albeit in a very annoyed manner, pulled my car into the shoulder and called my dad, then Triple A. Seriously, my tire was in shreds. It had slashed the entire circumference of it, leaving me to drive 70 miles per hour on the rim. So that was scary.

While I was waiting for AA Roadrunner to come save me, a Berkley police officer drove up. It was strange - he seemed so nonchalant; not that there was anything to be... chalant... about, but I didn't even feel like he was trying to be helpful. He pulled up, and kind of waited for me to go to him. That was fine, but he made me sit in his car and wait for the triple A guy in there. Having never been in a police car before, I tried to observe cool police gadgety things, but all I saw was his laptop, and on his laptop? Solitare. "This is all we really do," he commented in a bored tone. Weird. So after the guy showed up, changed my tire, and told me a better way to Litchfield (north on 170, east on 270, then north on 55), I thought once more I was on my way.

About half an hour later, I was once again foiled in my attempts to see Emily. Illinois has this weird thing where it'll be all nice and sunny out, and then all of a sudden the heavens shoot hail and water bullets at your car and try to kill you. I had to pull over twiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiice. It took me an hour to go 18 miles. I kept praying, too, that I wouldn't die. Now we know that God answers prayers.





Oh life.

P.S. The Monroe babies are adorable. When Iain yells, "Let's run!" and then laughs really loud in a kind of fake way... I just want to scoop him up and take him to Greenville with me. I don't think the Monroes would mind too much.

Words are a lovely try for something more

I'm finally home for my 11 day summer vacation and I could not be more content - the content that fills you up and makes doing anything seem unattractive. Mmm. I need to call a bunch of people, and see a lot of friends, but right now sitting on my bed for 5 hours doing nothing but drink diet coke and read sounds the most appealing. I think I'll stay here.

It smells like rain. I think I almost forgot what it smelled like here when the dark thunder clouds roll in. I was lying on my bed in that half napping, half thinking state when it wafted in through my open window and took me by surprise. It smells like home in the same way that my clothes smell like home when my mom does my laundry. I think that if I smelled that love potion made by Slughorn in the Half Blood Prince the smell of Arizona rain would definitely be one of the three scents I'd smell.

Oh. Something that is worrying me right now. I took this short-term memory test online on this website that I found from StumbleUpon and I literally failed every test that required me to remember something for more than 5 seconds. When I'm old and can't remember even my own name, I hope some nice person will take pity on me and not let me kill myself accidentally.

Andrew and I made a homemade chicken pot pie yesterday. I think we started around 6:30 and didn't finish until after 9. We had to go to the store twice because when we were there the first time we forgot the main ingredient - the chicken! And we had to cut the vegetables ourselves, mince the garlic by hand, and peel a potato and some carrots without a peeler! It was the hardest I've worked on a meal. And it kind of sucked. Not worth the effort in the least. But it was pretty fun.

The end.

The pills stopped working long ago

So I had a Sales final that's due tomorrow at noon. The assignment is to basically summarize the entire book. An entire text book. By tomorrow. At noon. I didn't start until today at noon. But this morning I packed up my things and settled myself down for a long, lonely spell at the library and 6 hours and two trips to McDonalds later, I am finished. 14 pages, sucka.

6 hours sounds like a lot of hours to spend in a library working all day when there are inflatable obstacle courses and velcro walls outside on Scott Field, big circus-colored balls waving gently in the wind of a warm, but not too warm, spring day. But I like libraries, although I like older ones better and this is fairly new. But libraries just seem to breed knowledge. Like the books are so excited to know so much they whisper their words into the air and every so often my head catches one and I work a little faster. If this were an old library, I would try and find a corner to hide in and do my work - the kind of corner that you could only find if you didn't know it was there. And then I wouldn't feel like I was wasting the day by working on things I should have done last week. I would feel like I was Anne of Green Gables studying for Queens, or Matilda learning about hummingbird heartbeats. I would feel noble and pure and, most excitingly, fictional. Because fiction holds that sort of charm that realizes it has a specific purpose. An eternal specific purpose that others can read about and learn from no matter where or when. But now I'm just Anna, sipping Diet Coke from a paper cup and straw, sitting in the sterile, but not quite unpleasant Ruby E. Dare library. For now, at least, I'm content with that.