In Which Travel is Stressful, but the Expirience Fulfilling

I know, it's taken me a week to write anything. Sorry to disappoint all, hmm, seven of you? I got home much later than scheduled on Sunday and have been de-stressing myself for a while. Besides the basic woes of traveling and interviewing at my top college choice, my mother lost her job on Friday. For now, I present you with post-travel commentary. A recap of last night's episode will be put up tomorrow morning, hopefully.
Honesty time: I didn't watch all of Project Jay. Not out of spite against Jay, though at one point I realized Austin was my favorite part of the episode. It was just not as comment-worthy. Maybe I'll catch a rerun.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy this quickly penned piece- expect something mus more interesting next week. Not only is it PR finale week, but I'll hopefully have lots of nice pictures from my weekend. I am working at my second job. Church camp counselor. For the sex education conference.

Prologue.
If you don't know, it takes about an hour and thirty minutes to get from one end of Rhode Island to the other, length-wise. It takes about half an hour to get from just about anywhere in Rhode Island to the city of Providence. It's a nice place.
Because we don't spend much time in our cars, as a generality Rhode Islanders are excessively lazy about traveling. Twenty minutes to a certain store? It has to be done on a weekend, and you'd better bring friends and go out to lunch, too. Who has the time to spend forty minutes driving just to get something you need? An hour drive is a day trip. More than an hour? Damn, you'd better spend the night somewhere.
The time of travel between my town in Rhode Island and Ithaca, New York is no less than six hours, and depending on the mode of transportation, can exceed ten hours. By train, it's seven hours. Of course, that's a train from Worcester (forty minute drive from RI) to Syracuse (an hour and twenty from Ithaca, which doesn't have its own station). That is, if you're not delayed three hours by snow.
Ithaca is pretty snowy.
I've lived in Rhode Island all my life.
Traveling sucks.

Thursday.
I realized that I am a truly resigned part of the American workforce at the same time I realized that two consecutive weekdays off of work was the most pants-pissingly exciting thing that had happened to me in months. It is a notch below "winning a contest" and, sadly enough, a notch above "great sex".
I slept until late-as-heck on Thursday morning, waking up to pack and shower. Then there was the lovely seven hours of not know where the fuck I was (one of the two major differences between train and bus, the other being the inclusion of the fabulous concept of personal space). I was picked up at the station by the boy and his friends complaining of snow squalls. I discovered on the ride home that "snow squalls" is a term for snowflakes teaming up and trying to beat one's car into submission.
We got back, I met some more of the boy's counterparts and we hung out until bed time was decided.
Oh, and by the way- the boy got a big haircut. He didn't mean to. The elderly Korean man who cut his hair told him he looked like a girl, and, well, one thing lead to another. I suppose I'll allow a picture, just promise me there's no drawing of big glasses or stinky cheese:

Jen said he looks like Tim Curry, which after comparison seems accurate. Which is great! I have a short list of "old guys I would totally make out with", and Tim Curry has been on that list since I was about ten, creepy as that is. Eddie Izzard owns the top spot on that list, as if you couldn't guess.

Friday.
We slept until the boy had class, and I basically lounged about until he came back. We went to lunch, at which time I distributed my peace offerings to his friends. They included a cheap harmonica, candy, weird Valentine's Day personality exploration cards (you know- "what is your biggest regret? do you like ice cream?"), and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. After lunch, I went to my first college lecture, about astronomy. And, yes, among other things, in my first college lecture, we learned why the sky is blue.
After that, I cuddled the boy some more, then went to a laundry-doing party, aptly titled the weekly Pants Party. I also watched the entirty of Sin City in fast forward without any special effects. Huh! Eventually we went out to dinner at the Ithaca Commons, choosing our cafe by spinning around and pointing.
Listen, I love Ithaca. I would want to live there if my boyfriend wasn't there. There's so many hippies. When you live in the woods in New England among misplaced rebel flags, your dad warns you that giving up meat for Lent is probably dangerous and a Subway restaurant being built is the biggest news in years; it's refreshing, almost euphoric, to enter a brightly colored cafe and see the food all labeled vegan or non-vegan. I'm a hippie at heart, in the worst way. A spiritual love-everybody queer feminist tree-hugger.
Don't worry, friends. I'm not a PeTA member. Don't tell the other hippies, but seriously: fuck PeTA.
Where was I? Right. At the cafe, had a quesadila and listened to a very mellow and lovely live artist. I only heard him address the crowd once:
"Anyone from Buffalo? ...no? Well. Um. I saw some writing on the wall, there, that had new meaning to me as a new parent. It said, 'I fucked your mother!'. And underneath that, 'dad, go home, you're drunk.' ...No one here is drunk. ...That comes later."
The boy and I skipped out for a few minutes to do some "shopping". We went "shopping" at a lovely pink building with no windows. It didn't have a name, but the door said it was an "adult novelty store". At this "novelty store" they sold some "water pipes", along with lots of "personal massagers" and "pornographic videos". You're not getting me to take a picture with my purcahse, but maybe it looked something like or perhaps identical to this thing, who knows. If you don't know that's probably not work safe, you ought to be getting at trouble in work anyway. If you're in private but just squeamish, don't worry, it's pretty darn non-threatening. We saw this one as well, which was pretty darn threatening. I'd suggest children not follow that link, A, because it's an 18+ website, and B, you'll probably have nightmares. I'm pretty sure this is turning into a sex blog? Except that I'm not a sexpert, like most sexy bloggers- it's like you're going on the journey of discovery with me. Hope it's a nice and not-creepy ride!
We went back to the school with the intention of going to bed, but ended up doing that talk-all-night bonding thing, that I can only imagine happens all the time in college.
By the way, the women's bathroom in this particular dorm had a sign on the door that said "Women Shouldn't Poop". I was inspired to start a new campaign. T-shirts, bumper stickers- it could be beautiful, if only I wasn't so damn lazy. So I leave it up to you. Take this sentiment, this motto, this mantra. Know it. Love it. Share it with the world:

Girls don't poop. They shit.

We finally went to bed around one, as I had to wake up six hours later.


Saturday
I ended up waking two hours later, to the worst noise I have ever heard. It was three am, and my first thought was that the boy's roomate had an awful alarm. My second thought was that fire drills didn't apply to me because I didn't go to school here. My third thought was "Fuck, we're on the tenth floor." My fourth and final thought before my brain sat this one out was "Fuck, I'm wearing shorts, in February, in upstate New York."
A while later, we went back to sleep, hoping that something was actually on fire and our lives had been saved. Reality: a drunk kid threw a beer can at one of those ceiling sprinklers. I don't know how the mechanics of that works, but that kid needs to be spanked, or something. There were at least two girls outside with wet hair and bathrobes.
Around eight that morning I went to the waiting area for the theater department interviews and auditions. The boy's friend and future roomate hung out with me, as he was hoping to transfer into Drama, the major I was applying for. Drama seems to me the place for humble (self-deprecating even?) theater kids who are just happy to be around a stage- sure, we might act, but we're more often doing all the shit the actors consider themselves too important to do. The boy's friend and future roomate told me a story about a show in which he was part of the lighting crew, as was an Acting major. She allegedly stood up and demanded someone explain to her what a wrench was, as she was an actor and didn't usually have to deal with this sort of thing. Struck me as the sort of person who spoke in italics. I'm sure you know that type.
Anyway, the interview went well. We went to a museum for the purposes of one of the boy's friends getting information for an assignment. I realized I needed to take more pictures, so I snapped this gem:

Though, I think it would be just as humorous if all I had got was this shot:

In fact, I'm pretty sure that sign renders the rest of this entry worthless. You'd probably be much more amused if I had simply posted that one picture instead having to read all of that boring trip recap to get to it.
The rest of the day is kind of blurry, I'm pretty sure we got back and had a big sleep party. I do recall watching a movie that evening, ordering pizza, and, oh yeah, this piece of glory:

That, my dears, is a sixteen inch cookie. That is larger than the large pizzas made at my place of work. You can see Skittles, Reese's Crumbles, caramel chips and snow caps. I didn't get a shot of the brick-sized brownie with M&Ms and dark chocolate baked to the inside. We ordered that around midnight. Yes- in Ithaca, there is a bakery specializing in giant cookies and brownies paired with any candy you could imagine, that delivers until four(4) AM. I'm really not sure why this isn't established in every college town. By law.

Sunday
Mostly, this day sucked. I won't even talk about it. Scroll up and look at that huge cookie some more. That was such a better time than the three hour delays and ten degree weather that Sunday entailed.
Call me sentimental, but the best part of the whole day was this:

A little boy headed to the snack car asked me to take care of his puppy while he was gone. The puppy was appropriately, if slightly predictabley, named Puppy.
No mustaches or stinky cheese on the little boy's puppy either, please.


Project Runway commentary tomorrow (Friday). I promise.