unpack the luggage

Hey. My blog lives on. Do not taunt my blog or it will bite your ankles. Do not yell at my blog or it will cower in the corner. Do not throw water on my blog or it will multiply. Do not eat my blog or you will suffer a severe tummy ache. Do not attempt to pat my blog on the head or it will leave little bloggy pellets all over your hand. Do not tickle my blog because it will kick and scream. Do not try to change my blog, for it is interminable. Do not expose my blog to direct moonlight or it will howl. Do not stand on top of my blog or you may fall down. Do not take pictures of my blog naked and post them on your website, or you will be facing legal action. Do not insert my blog into any of your orifices because I am not responsible for what might happen. Do not feed my blog candy or it will crazy go nuts. Do not attempt to perform magic tricks on my blog - it will not be amused. Do not phone my blog after midnight, for it needs its beauty rest. Do not go dancing with my blog or you will be put to shame. Do not even think about telling my blog it hasn't been good about updating because it will go postal on your ass.

she'll be comin round the mountain

A lot of the big super popular journallers will get on with entries like "Hi. I'm really not sure what I want to say and I don't really want to keep writing this journal because I'm bored and have more important things to do with my life, but you readers who love me are making me keep writing even though I clearly don't want to. Oh foo. I guess I'll just keep moving my fingers over the keyboard and whatever comes out is what you'll read, but it takes no effort, nope, none at all, on my part. Look, I've almost filled a paragraph while managing to say absolutely nothing of substance. How about that?"

That's what the journallers do, instead of just, you know not updating. Bore. Snore. Whore. Gore. Pore. Sore. Lore. Fore. Tore. Core. Store. Chore. Shore. Door. Roar. You're. Moor. Floor.

All right, so that covers that. What I don't understand is, why do people feel the need to explain why they aren't updating? I never do that. Or very rarely. Nope, I just leave ya'll hanging. I don't give a flying fuck if you've got nothing to read. Hey, it's your problem. Go buy yourself a Shakespeare anthology and go to town.

I've had an interesting couple of days. Kim had a party on Sunday night. Actually, Allen had a surprise party for Denise, which later migrated to Kim's. I brought my video camera along, which I never do, and I don't know why. We got lots of good footage. Let's just say that none of the attendees will ever be running for public office, at least not while I'm around.

Some highlights of the party:

• Me yelling "SURPRISE" at Denise at the top of my lungs as I walked up to Kim's apartment. The surprise party part, had of course taken place about 4 hours earlier. I got shushed.
  
  
• Me yelling "I don't give a fuck" or something comparably potty-mouthed while Kim was on the phone with her mom discussing her graduation party. I got shushed. Again.
  
  
• Playing with their little electronic globe thing. You know what I'm talking about, those little glass globes with the cool electricity thing inside it, and when you put your hand on it, all the light moves to your hand? Well, all the guys had to put their penises on it, because Adam said it felt really cool. I put my boobie on it. It didn't feel all that cool though.
  
  
• Penis art. Adam showed us the hamburger, the snail, and I made Fred do the fruit bowl. There were a couple guys there who weren't theater kids, and I don't think they were amused by the freedom of the nudity, but whatever.
  
  
• Anthony's dirty stick. Not telling. Dirty! Oh my!
  
  
• Allen opened a Smirnoff on my ass and soaked us both. I had on this pair of pants, the ones my mom hates, with the great big hole in the ass. Everyone thinks they're sexy. They are soooo comfortable, but they have the hole. So I always wear boxers with them so I don't look like a skank (hey, I'm not that girl). Anyway, I was standing in the kitchen and bared my ass cheek for some reason. Allen jammed the top of his bottle on to my ass and twisted it. Smirnoff everywhere. It was the funniest thing that has ever happened to me.
  
  
• They made watermelon Jell-O shooters with way too much liquor. They naturally refused to gel, so they froze them instead. Grrrrreeat. Tasty. Oh they were bad, ya'll, so very, very bad. We drank (ate?) them anyway. Hey, we're in college. Don't be judging me.
  
  
• Allen tried to flush my Birkenstock down the toilet. He would not give it back to me. I forget why he wanted to flush my shoe, but I'm sure he had his reasons. Don't judge the man, damn it.
  
  
• I put my head in the freezer at one point, and I remember thinking it was the best idea ever and I never wanted to leave. Eventually the top of my head got cold though.
  
  
• The guys all sang happy birthday for Denise at midnight, accompanied by a mulitple strip tease. Great. It's not a theater party unless we all get naked, right? Right.
  
  
• Allen and Bryan put Kim's panties on their heads and pretended they were superheroes. At this point, the party is officially getting rowdy.
  
  
• A whole bunch of us congregated in the bathroom to shave Justin's chest for him. I believe that I was just cheerleader, I don't think I ever actually wielded the razor, which is most likely a good thing. C-log Mike (not Mikey) tried to get in the bathroom to blow his nose, but the room was full and we were drunk so we were messing with him and holding the door and not letting him in. The next thing we knew, the door frame had jumped a few inches inward. My man had busted the door down. Oh my, so funny. We called him The Incredible Hulk for the remainder of the night.
  
  
• We tried to shave the cat (hey, we had a razor). Mikey stopped us. It's fun to make a drunk man feign sobriety to stop you from doing something boneheaded. Just try it sometime.
  
  
• Adam petted my head until I fell asleep and then he made me lay down on the couch. Apparently I fought him all the way to the couch and then sat there in annoyance, not laying down, until I finally keeled over (not on purpose) and stayed in that position for the duration of the evening. Yay party.
  
  
• The next morning I had to go on a great search and rescue mission for my other shoe, which you'll recall almost got flushed. I found it behind the toilet, soaking wet.... thank you ALLEN!!!!
  

That day (yesterday), several people (Jason, Bryan, Kim, Mikey, and Adam) were going to Nags Head, and Cash, Denise, Justin, Allison and I were going up to Cash's cabin in the woods. I thought it was a shame that we were all going out of town to party, but were going to different places. Oh well. I can't imagine that the Nags Headers had more fun than we did. Cash's cabin ROCKS, ya'll.

This was the most fun road trip I've taken in a long time. All 5 of us piled ourselves into the Beast and rode 3 1/2 hours to Staunton. You wouldn't believe the amount of stuff Allison had brought for one overnight. No seriously. You think you have an idea, but you really don't. Multiply your idea times about 14 and you probably have it. It was crazy. We just barely fit it all in the back of my car. For an overnight, ya'll. I actually consolidated all my shit into one bag because they wouldn't both fit. Then we had to stop and get batteries, because the tape deck does not, of course, work. We were in 7-11, marvelling at the cost of the batteries.

ANGELA
These are so expensive.

JUSTIN
Don't buy them.

ANGELA
Holy God. Who knew batteries cost this much?

CASH
It's cause we're at 7-11. Don't buy them. We'll just talk to each other.

ANGELA (yelling out the door into the parking lot.
ALLISON!!! The batteries are going to cost like 16 bucks!

ALLISON
I know!

ANGELA
Damn... someone's going to help me pay for these, right guys?

JUSTIN
No! Just don't buy them!!!

I didn't buy them there. We drove to Food Lion (much to the guy's dismay) and Cash told us we had 5 minutes before he drove off and left us. Allison somehow convinced Justin to buy the batteries, but I went in with him to make sure he got the right ones. We bought a whole bunch of 'D' batteries, which Justin kept dropping on the floor, then he'd have to get a new package, because hey, you don't want batteries that have been dropped. Those are some bad batteries. Right.

I had a raw sweet potato in my car (don't ask me why) and Justin decided that it needed to ride on my antenna during the trip. This decision will become very important about an hour down the road. So he takes a pencil and drills a hole in the potato and jams it onto my antenna. It rides there happily. "Yea," we think, "our road trip has a mascot."

So we're on the road to Staunton. We girls were crushed into the backseat and to make up for the lack of room we sang. A lot. Loudly. MMmBop. Cash complained that he was driving the special kids on the short bus. Cash got a bit cranky after a while. I don't exactly blame him, necessarily. He called us "the harpies." Haha.

We left Greg (who was supposed to go with us) a whole bunch of nasty voicemails. Like 12. Telling him how much he sucked for not picking up his phone so he could go with us, and how much he was missing out, and a whole slew of insults in that vein.

We played the game with the truckers where you make them honk their horn. Most of them did it, too. That game is unnecessarily fun.

We also played the Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll game, where you go around the alphabet and name something starting with every letter that either has to do with Sex, Drugs, or Rock and Roll (hence the clever title). It eventually becomes only about sex, naturally. You have to recite the entire list before you can add the next item, so it gets difficult. You try to stump each other. Here is our list (warning, this list is not for the faint of heart, the pregnant, the easily offended, or those who demand that their sexually atrocious fetishes be somewhat coherent):

Anal
Beavis and Butthead
Cock-blockers
Deep-Dicking
Erotica
Fingercuffs
G-string Gay Strippers
Hard-on
Inseminate
Jack off
Kwik-Stop Drug Dealer
Labia Lube-Job Licker
Mutual Men's Masturbation Meeting
Nocturnal Narcotic Nuphomaniac
Orgasmic
Pigs fucking Catholic School Girls in the Ass
Queers Quoting Queefing Queens
Rabid Rank Rug-burn
Suck the Sweat off my Sack, Sailor
Tube Top Titty Fuckers
Uh!! Uh!!! Uh!!!
Vaginal Lesbionic Sex
Wack off Wally Doll
X-Rated Rapists
Yes! Yes! Yes!
Zippy

Well, that was horrible. So naturally, we called up Greg and left it on his voicemail.

In Charlottesville, I made them stop so we could go to Liquid. Liquid is a smoothie store that has all natural ingredients. They make the best smoothies ever, and they would add ginseng or bee pollen or whatever you needed to make your day better. So hip. So fun. So out-of-business. Oh man, I was angry. I had hyped it the whole way up there, and it was competely gone. I should have known better, Murphy's law being what it is. So we went to the Fro-Yo place next door, which was fine, except the chicks who work there are soooo snotty. Have you ever been to Charlottesville? It's the worst. It's like, they all belong to this special club, and they can tell that you don't belong, so you should collectively kiss their sweet-smelling Gap-cologne scented asses.

On the way out of town, we all yelled things out the window such as "Charlottesville should kiss my ass!" It was fun. Damn them.

Also C-ville has streets like 12 1/2 Street. I hate it there. I mean, I used to like it and have reason to go, because my best friend Nicole went to UVa, and they had Liquid. Now that both of those selling points are gone, C-ville can seriously bite me. Seriously. I will never go back, NEVER! Damn you Charlottesville!!!! I shall destroy you and your Abercrombie-loving brethren!!

Okay, I'm done.

So we got back on the highway, exhausted from our adventures, and proceeded to sleep all the way to Staunton. Cash said he liked this leg of the trip much more than the first. Much more peaceful, he said.

In Staunton, they had a TV station in a strip mall. That was very quaint. There were mountains everywhere. It's kind of creepy, the whole mountains everywhere thing. Denise and I both agreed at this point that we enjoyed visiting the country, but did not want to live there. Too remote. Too far away from the ocean, and the rest of civilization. Little did we know...

We went to Food Lion and got some beverages and snacks. Back to the car for a 30 minute drive to Cash's farm. Here's the thing. They say city kids are crazy. Oh no. I've met city kids and they pale in comparison to country kids (I am neither a country kid nor a city kid, incidentally. I thought I was a country kid until this past weekend, and I now realize that I grew up in a black hole, neither city nor country. Do not hate me. Pity me and send me some money). Anyway, country kids. Yeah. Cash was FLYING around this incredibly windy twisty mountain roads as though it was nothing. We kept asking him to slow down. He was doing the speed limit (55), which is even more frightening. You could tell that he wasn't trying to freak us out, either. That's just the way country kids do it. It was scary.

So we get to the farm. We all climbed up in Cash's brother's tree house. We went out into the cow pasture and looked around. Cow poop is gross, and that's all I care to say about that. Justin played basketball with my (Fred's) theater hat, and then Denise got hurt.

She got a rope burn from Cash's dog's rope. Those suck. I know because my childhood dog Sandy had a rope too, and whenever we would play, she would run around me and give me rope burns on my ankles. Not on purpose, but it really sucked anyway.

Justin did his level best to freak out Cash's mom. Then we all piled back in the Beast for the 20 minute drive up the mountain. Have you ever driven up a mountain dirt road? Your car probably wouldn't make it. My car has balls, though.

JUSTIN
I keep waiting for there to be a smooth patch, but it never comes.

We eventually reached the cabin (not a moment too soon) and ya'll, it is beautiful It was slightly overcast but it had the coolest view. We took all our stuff inside, and then it started pouring. There are no phones up there, and the cell phones only gave an intermittant signal. The one radio plays only country music, and the reception is crackly. There's a wood stove in the sitting room. Everything in the house is made of wood. The house was built in the 40's. There are dead animal carcasses on the walls and dead ladybugs all over the place. There is a swing made out of an old bus seat. The basement and attic are extremely dirty and scary. There is no shower. There is a chandelier made of deer antlers. There is running water but it is cold and there isn't much water so we couldn't flush the toilet often. There are no doorknobs on the doors. Am I painting the right picture? I hope you are getting the sense of how cool and quaint and rustic and far removed from everything modern it is.

Cash cooked hamburgers on the grill, fresh hamburgers off the farm. They were so good. We drank a lot, bonded, played some games. Cash kept going outside to get firewood or whatever and would constantly reappear at the window holding an axe and looking scary. So that was good to get the blood flowing. Cash took me outside to show how dark and peaceful it was. It gets amazingly dark in the mountains. I know I really sound like a city brat, but it just amazed me. There was no ambient light. It was so quiet and beautiful. It made me really happy to realize that in times like these when you feel so trapped into society and all the people and hustle and so forth, it is still completely possible to get away from it all. That amazed me. I wouldn't want to be up there all the time, but it was wonderful.

Then Cash suggested that maybe we should get out the hammock and sleep on that, if it wasn't going to rain. I vetoed.

ANGELA
Umm, no, hello, I'm in an unfamiliar place, I am not trying to sleep outside next to these woods when who knows what might come out of them.

CASH
Oh no, it's all right. Worst you'd find up here would be a black bear.

ANGELA
Oh, really, is that all? And here I was worried. Silly me.

We instead slept 3-deep on the hide-a-bed, which was very cozy. The next morning all 5 of us got on the hide-a-bed and laid there for a while, listening to the Indigo Girls. I remember thinking how at peace and wonderful I felt. I didn't want to leave. Then we got up and things started getting rowdy.

Cash finally convinced Denise and I to take a walk with him. I needed to pee first, so I went to the only bathroom, which also adjoins Justin and Allison's room. They were definitely tearing the walls down, not even trying to be quiet about it. So I went right in and stood there against the wall and asked if they were having fun. I stopped 'em mid-thrust. I'm so proud.

Outside, Cash showed Denise and I how to launch clay pigeons. This was more fun than I thought possible, even though all of my pigeons got launched into the ground and crashed. Oh well. Denise and I now have a new, and relatively inexpensive, hobby. We took a walk to some of the other cabins, all of which are old and saggy and scary looking. They mostly only contain firewood, but the one other domicile is very creepy. Not the one we stayed in, but the other one. We walked around in it (Cash swears it is haunted) and then we convinced Cash to go upstairs. They made me go first. I got about halfway up and turned around and saw a large white suit hanging from a rafter. It was creepy. I booked it back down the stairs. I have the willies just thinking about it. Cash explained what it was, but I can't remember what he said, and we didn't believe him.

We took video of Justin on the toilet. Hey, we had the videocamera.

Back in the cabin, we started cleaning up. Denise and I invented the fun game of whenever Justin and Allison start screwing around we run in, jump on the bed and punch Justin in the leg until he cries. It's really fun. So we played that during clean up, and then Allison did a weird thing. She started pushing on Justin's bottom with her fist. It turned out she had put a marshmallow up there and was jamming it inside him. Okay, weird, gross, weird, and gross again. But it gets worse, as you knew it must.

Justin pulled the marshmallow out of his ass and put it on Denise's neck.

Then he got it from her and wiped it on my neck.

I picked it up, made everyone else help me hold him down, and fed it to him.

To clean himself, he squirted an entire tube of toothpaste into his mouth and then slobbered it all over me.

We ended up covered in toothpaste and had to clean off with the cold water.

I am sad to say that none of this fight ended up on video except for the aftermath of me saying "I need a towel" and Allison cleaning Justin and I off. We left a marshmallow in one of the crannies (high-up, so the mice can't get it) for the next time we go up there. Ahh, memories.

We cleaned the rest up and drove all the way up the mountain so we could see the whole valley. It was a cool view. The drive down the mountain wasn't nearly as bad as the drive up had been. I said so.

DENISE
Yeah, this is fun!

ANGELA
Well, I don't know about all that. It's not fun exactly...

DENISE
Yes it is, it's fun. Go faster. It's fun.

ANGELA
It's not your car, you whore!

DENISE
Oh yeah. Hey, don't go faster.

CASH
Thank you for the advice.

Back down the mountain, we ran into a lot of friends of Cash's dad, all of whom called him David, all of whom had the coolest accents. The funniest thing is how Cash dons his accent when he talks to them so they can understand him. He actually said (without irony) "Well doggone it" to one of them. It was grand.

Back in Staunton, we went to the best place ever, Wright's Dairy-Rite. They have amazing food and a jukebox which is FREE! Damn! All jukeboxes should be free, that's my contention. It poured rain while we ate, and then we got back in the car and headed home. Nothing eventful happened on the return trip. We did a lot of sleeping, and the sky did a lot of raining.

So we had a great couple of days. We bonded and shit. I can't wait to go back up there. I hope we get a chance to have a big party at the cabin before I leave for KY. I want to see what the night sky looks like when it's all clear. Cash says the stars are amazing. I believe him. And I want to show Fred how pretty it is; he would love it.

Denise summed it up best. "If this is how my summer is beginning, this is going to be a kick-ass summer." Amen to that.

Naked Week is next week. Everyone come to the naked party. (Um, just kidding mom. No naked week, no naked party.) (Everyone else: I'm not really kidding, come to the party.) (Mom: No, there's no party. Seriously. NO party here. Maybe just a gathering.) (Everyone else: A NAKED gathering.) (Mom: I'm just kidding!)

rest

I'm done! I'm done for the semester! YAHOOO!!!!

I am so excited. What's really cool is, Fred is SO excited. It's great. He's a college graduate, now, kids. Everyone better start bowing down to him and doing what he says.

I may update more often from now on. I don't know. I probably won't, actually. I've been really busy, but it's not like I'm going to be much less busy this summer. I've got history class, I've got a senior thesis to plan and an exit exam to study for, 2 websites to design, a boyfriend to hang out with, and then once I get to Louisville, fugget about it.

Today my mother got an invitation from the Yorktown Committee. They are planning a little fancy boat and walking tour thing. So she decided it would be fun if Fred and I went, too. It's like, free food and ghost stories. Yeah, I'm up for that. She called the dude who is in charge of it, to ask if they could bring us. The guy said he didn't think so, then he said definitely not. My mother has a vendetta against him now.


MOM
Well, that's one boat tour that I'm not going on.

ANGELA
You're pissed off, huh?

MOM
You bet I am. When we start our bed and breakfast, guess who's not getting recommended by us?

ANGELA
They don't know who they're messing with.

MOM
I'll show them, boy.

Hours later:

DAD
So are we going on this walking tour thing, or not?

ANGELA
No, mom's pissed off because they didn't want Fred and I.

MOM
I'll show them.

I'm going to try to make a quiz. They have a million out there, but mine's going to be special. Just you wait.

i'm super, thanks for... oh never mind.

Ya'll, I am in the best mood. The best. Such good things have happened, I'm going to have to put them in list form. I must give a disclaimer that most of this entry will sound like bragging, which it unabashedly is. Hey, I'm happy. I'm doing some good things at the moment. Suck on it.

1) The other night I was driving home from one of my many late nights. I stopped by the side of the road and there were a whole bunch of deer standing in this field. Now, you know what normally to do when there's a deer standing near your car, right? You roll down the window and yell "DEER!" as loud as you can. It's mean to the deer, but very amusing to the humans for some reason. Actually, this may only amuse County-bred humans. Moving on. The other night, I rolled down my window just to watch the deer, since they were so close. I thought it would be cool to commune with them for a bit. Most of them backed away, but the one closest to the Beast (the Jeep's new name, remember? I'm going to keep saying it until you are good and sick of it) decided that I was a foe, a mortal enemy if you will. The deer raised its tail and started breathing very heavily, and there was absolutely no mistaking that my car was about to be used for a spirited game of Deer Polo. I mean, I felt threatened. I floored it to get away from the deer. Then I thought, "Wow. How cool. I just had an instinctual moment, where that deer and I spoke a common language. We actually communicated. We understood each other. This is the coolest thing ever." Then I realized what the deer and I had actually said to each other.

DEER
Get the fuck away from me, you Nazi pinko commie pig slut whore-human.

ANGELA
Yes! Absolutely! Whatever you say! Take my money and please don't hurt me!

I am a wus. I am not Jean Claude Van Damme, or even Dennis Miller. I am, at best, Lamb Chop, in terms of pure unmitigated studliness. Oh well. Nobody's perfect.

2) Alpha Psi Omega (the CNU theater frat for those of you not in the know) is finally getting underway. I feel like we're really doing some stuff that's exciting. I actually did my duty (whenever I hear that word, I think of doody. Like you made doody, ha ha ha.) and made changes to the constitution to be handed in at the meeting today. I am really sorry that I missed our meeting, as the AFKAPs (our fancy term for "pledge") had to turn in the results of their first mission: the scavenger hunt. They didn't come up with a live squirrel, but I hear they did really well with most of the list. Oh yes, and they won't tell me how they managed to get my steering wheel cover out of my locked car, either. AFKAPs are sneaky, especially this particular batch of AFKAPs, so watch your back.

3) Call Me Madam. This is one of the shows I'm working on right now. I am just in the ensemble, but I get to sing soprano and hit my first ever career Bb. Actually, it's my first time singing a Bb on stage, period. So I'm just wetting myself over that. But also, I get to be a dancer. I mean there's a couple numbers in this show where we do some honest-to-god dancing. Like Fred could be proud of me dancing. My dance partner and I have never managed to really nail the rhumba lift, but we'll get it. Anyway, so I feel and look like a dancer for the first time in my whole life. Why am I so obsessed with needing to be a dancer? I may never know, but I am, and so I shall be.

4) What You Will. This is another show I'm working on right now. It was written by Steven and it's really fun to do. Fred and I play lovers (who break up by show's end, but oh well) which I think is appropriate to be our last CNU show together. The show is very avant-garde and involves, among other things, talking birdcages. We all love it.

5) Cowboy Mouth. The last show I am working on at the moment. This time I am directing, and ya'll? My actors rock. Justin and Ashley did an improv through of the whole show tonight and they rocked it. They were intimidated by it at first, but they jumped in feet first and discovered so much and did so many interesting things. By the end of it, they were really glad we had done it. It is so amazing to work on this show. I mean it's a great show already but it is really proving to me how much the journey is the destination and it's all about process and just do the work and so on. The two of them bring so much energy as well. I can't wait to see what happens. I love directing. I bet all experiences aren't as good as this one is so I should just consider myself lucky and shut up. Oh yeah, Fred jumped in for his cameo without having even read the show, and he was great too of course. I'm just like a little mama hen bragging on all my chickies, aren't I? I'm so proud at this moment that I don't even care.

6) Lucy Latchum liked my speech. I went and met with her today and she only had minor changes and she hugged me and gave me a Reese's cup. I'm excited and freaked about next week. I hope it goes over well. I find that you can rarely go wrong with something that's from the heart, which this very much is. So I'm not too nervous.

7) Tap dancing is the greatest. I think I just pick this up faster than I do other kinds of dance. I don't know. I find myself just wanting to tap all the time now. I have Fred and Karen showing me all this different stuff and I am just voracious with it. I want to practice until I get it perfect. I don't tire. I annoy people, I'm sure.

8) A theater school wants me. A very expensive theater school, to be sure, but a theater school nonetheless. They're located in downtown Manhattan. All of my New York friends, plus Steven, plus a whole bunch of people from Call Me Madam are telling me that I need to go there, I need to spend the money and so on. I hope the training is good, for that much money, but I mean... I spend 7 weeks in Manhattan being an intense theater student? Yes, please. I am still going to wait to hear from Actor's Theater of Louisville, because I think the training there would be better, although how do I know? I don't. I don't know anything. Anyway, I'll either be in Louisville or NYC during the last half of this summer. Can't wait.

9) (Mike, I'm sorry, but this story is too good.) On the way home from CMM rehearsal tonight, the interior lights in Mike's car started to fade. At first we were just sort of mildly amused by this; the engine and battery lights had been flickering for the whole ride, but we weren't concerned. Then the lights started visibly going away. Then the odometer flinched and died. We drove down the road like this, Bryan and I giggling wildly, when we started suddenly to slow down. Mike said, "I think we're dying," and started to pull onto the shoulder. And yes sportsfans, two minutes later we were marooned on the side of the road with nary a hope of rescue.

Well, except that we called Fred to come get us.

And the roadside assistance people.

And a tow truck.

All right, but for about 35 seconds there, it was really scary. Get this, after the roadside assistance chick showed up, she just put down some flares and left us there. Alone! What? What is that about? How is that helping us, I ask you? What if an axe murderer had showed up? What if the tow truck and Fred never came, and we starved death? What if we picked up the flares and started waving them around like a Fourth of July celebration gone awry? What then, roadside assistance lady?

The highlight of this breakdown, for me, was Fred's dramatic arrival on the scene. He pulled in front of us and started to slow, then started to drive like a maniac, pulling into the ditch, backing towards us, and all sorts of (presumably unintentional) antics.

MIKE
Is that Freddie's car?

BRYAN
Uh, is he driving like a madman? Yes, that's Fred.

Fred proceeded to come and talk car-talk with the guys, which I love. I forget that he has all this car knowledge, because it rarely comes up with me. I care naught for cars. As long as the Beast is running, I'm fine with it. But when a car breaks down, he goes all super technical (his dad taught him everything about cars, apparently) and then I get to marvel at my superman boyfriend who knows everything in the WORLD. I know, I know, I'm a dork, but seriously. There's a lot that I admire in Fred on a regular basis, but the car thing is easy to forget about, so it's fun to have it thrust on me. Yahoo for Freddie.

10) The last and possibly best thing I want to talk about: on Tuesday my buddy Adam brought me some NerdsRopes. He didn't want them, they were leftover Easter candy, but he knew I liked them and gave them to me! How cool is that? I love my friends. And you know, I gobbled them up before you could say "card shark," too.

So that's a few highlights of my week so far. It's only Wednesday, too. The thing is, I'm surprisingly chipper despite the fact that due to sucky rising gas prices (what exactly do they mean by summer gas, anyway, and why does it cost $0.50 more per gallon?) my car now costs over 20 bucks to fill up. Which means that although it is Wednesday, I have exactly 7 dollars to last me till Sunday. And a quarter tank of gas. I don't care. My week has been great. I hope the trend continues.

LIVEJOURNAL HAS ARRIVED!!! Go check me out. I'm hot like a tamale, ya'll.

Sarah Gates rocks my socks, ya'll know it. Oh yeah, the last evening of one acts is tonight. You don't want to miss it, do you? Do you? Show up. Huuuuckin DO-IT!