Jitters

And at last, here we are, the day that I leave what I know and enter the unknown. Sounds pretty cliche, but that's what it is. At 9 PM, I board my flight on Air India and spend seven hours trying to sleep upright on my way to Paris, which, as we all know, is full of the French. All of that is a pretty daunting prospect, but what can you do? I have yet to pack, but I realize that the few belongs that I have scattered around my bags are the only bits of my life that I'm able to carry with me. Bleak.

But here I am, sounding like my house has burned down and my life as I know it with it. I'm sure that there will be happier entries to come once I've settled in.

However, before my semester beings in Scotland, I'm traveling for a bit. So I've started a travel blog for that purpose. Don't worry, I'm not abandoning this. The other one will be filled with pictures and things I see during this hazy period before I get to my apartment. If you'd like to visit, by all means, click on this link.

Until then, au revoir!

K.

PS. I have no idea if that's spelled correctly. I took Spanish, for G-d's sake. :)

Maybe They're Not So Bad

When you've spend all of your previously parent-free time around those who have raised you-- like I have for the last few weeks-- you tend to forget that they can be pretty neat people. My revelation came yesterday as I was walking out of the mall with my mother, bags filled with sweaters, socks, and jeans for my stay in a cold and very wet little country. The shopping spree had ended with me tallying up a rather steep debt to my mother, who had paid for everything with the credit card. On to the bill, I added the cost of my Naots (buying Naots in the States is not cheap), my worry beads, and my passport. Since I had taken care of all of that in the previous weeks, I had assumed my mother had taken the money from my savings account. Mom needed to go to the credit union again, so I figured that she would dip into my account again to pay for the clothing I had just bought.

As we crossed the parking lot, laden with the spoils of The Gap, Mom turned to me.

"Didn't you say you were going to sign over a paycheck?"

"I did!" I exclaimed, a little miffed. "Two, in fact. I put them on your purse."

"Oh, ok. Just as long as you're contributing to all of this."

"Wait, what? Contributing? I've been telling you to take money from my account to pay for all of this." There was silence on her end. "You haven't been taking money out, have you?" The last bit was more of a statement than a question.

"Nope."

"So, you've just been paying for all of this."

"So far, yeah."

I nearly dropped the bag into a puddle. "But Mom... I told you... Well, now I feel incredibly guilty."

"We want to make sure you have everything and you never expect anything from us. So don't worry about all of this yet. We'll work it out later."

All of the crap I've been buying for this trip has cost well over $500. Not only that, in the words of Hugh Laurie, "plane tickets don't grow... on a tree" (if you haven't heard his song "Mystery," you should look that one up). Nothing has been cheap. And yet... they've taken care of me, which is incredibly sweet.

I must keep this in mind when they piss me off. :)

K.

Seeing Things Through New Eyes

As someone who has written 100 posts, I should have realized that saving a day's piece as a draft within the Blogger Dashboard is a bad idea. It becomes obsolete way too easily and then the credit you've built up from writing that particular post has been absolutely lost.

See, I had been complaining that I couldn't find the shoes I needed, my passport hadn't arrived, I couldn't find a nice travel map widget that suited my country-hopping future, and blah blah blah. An hour later, the passport had arrived, I'd ordered my shoes through 2-Day airmail (let's hope they fit), and I'd settled on the fact that I'm going to have to set up a whole new and aesthetically displeasing travel blog on a site that specializes in such things. The other things I had whined about in that unpublished entry haven't necessarily been fixed or even confronted yet, but the damage had been done. I'll just have to delete the damn thing even before it had a chance to breathe the free air of the Internet. Kind of sad in a way.

I still have other things to worry about. For instance, I'm going to my eye doctor tomorrow to see about getting contact lenses. The last time I tried that I was in ninth grade, a significantly more easily frustrated and less medicated person. I drove myself to tears trying to wrestle with the contacts, only to abandon them to grow dusty in my medicine cabinet. Now, I must get over my adversion to touching my slimy eyeballs if I ever want to see something in the distance and take a picture of it. And, in a rainy country like Scotland, it would probably be easier to wander around and take in the sights without raindrops on my lenses. Plus, interestingly enough, I always find my time at the optomistrist's office entertaining. My doctor has never worn a pair of socks on his be-loafered feet (not that I have seen, anyway) and he looks oddly like Mel Gibson (but without the crazed glint in his eyes). He also has called me "Kaitlyn" for 21 years, which is not and has never been my name. At my last appointment, some synapses must have connected for the first time in two decades as he stared at my record sheet because he began calling me "Kathryn," which in fact is my name, but not one I would prefer. But he messes with my vision, so I'm not going to call him on it.

It does make me feel good to get some of these unpleasant things over with, though. It almost makes me think that I'm gradually becoming a new person and shedding off the worries and impediments in my way to enjoying stuff. Hell, I might even be cheerful a week before I leave. But, as my marathon session of watching House episodes while avoiding getting ready for four months away from home tell me, people just don't change. And I know that right before I board my plane on the Air India flight to Paris, I'm going to be sobbing my tear ducts dry and the flight attendents are going to have to drag me through the terminal. Sigh.

Oh yeah, you heard me right: Air INDIA!!!! To PARIS!!

K.