If I were making a list of the things I won't miss when I move out of my parents' house next month, the daily drama would certainly be near the top. Para ejemplar (ooh, Spanish. By the way, I ran into my former high school's Spanish teachers at Wal-Mart the other day. Ew. In the words of Daphne G's friend Chris, "Oh my God. They're in the candy aisle."), my sister is attending freshman band camp this week (because, you see, she returns to school next week and I TOTALLY DON'T), and somehow in between passing out three times in the scorching July heat and dragging all her band geek friends over to our house every damn day for lunch, she managed to misplace her arm-mounted music stand thingy.
Tonight she tore the entire house apart looking for it. I, meanwhile, kicked back and watched a rerun of Law & Order, because I had just gotten home after a nine-hour day at work. As pandemonium raged throughout the house, the phone rang. It was Rachel. Rachel and I have the habit of talking on the phone for hours at a time without realizing it (or caring), so what happened next was kind of unsettling. My sister picked up the extension and started listening to our conversation until I interrupted and demanded to know who the hell was on the phone. She needed to call her friend to see if she had an extra arm-mounted music stand thingy, and she had to do it RIGHT NOW, THIS SECOND.
I tried to say goodbye to Rachel, but I was interrupted by first my dad and then my mom, both of them demanding that I GET OFF THE PHONE ALREADY! Because Bush issued a statement the other day declaring it "not rude" to randomly hang up on your friends without informing them as to why. I mean, I hang up on Rachel accidentally more often than I'd like to admit, so why doesn't everyone just chill about the arm-mounted music stand thingy until I can say a proper goodbye to someone who called me long distance to talk about Very Important Things.
And yes, I remember a time when having forgotten an item at school or in my locker or losing my homework was, like, a life and death event, but it never ended up mattering all that much the next day and I just felt like a jackass wasting all that time worrying and searching. No one's dead, I just lost my algebra. And hell, the entire last year you don't care whether you turn anything in or not.
So yeah, I won't miss the daily crises, the all-hours homework sessions, like, how long can it possibly take to do some fractions worksheets because I'm home from work now and I want to watch my tape of The Practice. Seriously, my brothers can -- and do -- drag their homework out to miniseries length, and not just once in awhile. It's every damn night. Why would you do that to yourself?
Anyway, it's time to start packing up all my miscellany. I did an inventory the other day and found out that I only have a quarter of the number of books I thought I had. I have, like, twice as many CDs as books, which is overkill when you consider that I only have about eight CDs that make it through any sort of rotation on a monthly basis. So I've got my huge boxes and I'm ready, I think, to pack up the tape collection and all the confusion that goes with it. Really, it turns out I don't have very much stuff, and I'd burn the TV Guides if I hadn't paid so much for them over the years, but they'll probably finish out their existence in a cardboard box of some kind, waiting for the day that they get to become one huge incendiary device. The whole storage unit -- BOOM!
It's going to be sad leaving some of this behind, but there's a lot of it I don't care if I never see again. I'm just glad to have been promoted to college student, even if I am the low man on the totem pole once again. At least I get the discount price at movies with my fancy student ID. Which I'll need when I go to see The Runaway Jury. It's so cool that they're making that into a movie. It just better not suck as much as The Firm movie did. Grisham should be ashamed of himself with that one. That and A Painted House. Tripe, I say. Tripe!
And what is all this about Jeopardy! doing away with the five-day limit on returning contestants? This is going to end badly. What happens when some ugly person has, like, a 37-day winning streak? I don't know if I'll be able to handle all that.
Reading: Skipping Towards Gomorrah. Watching: An infomercial about making money through classified ads. Listening to: Rockin' the Suburbs Eating: Junk. Why lie?
