Sunday, November 18

I Hate Airports

Spur of the moment, I decide I am going back to France, and, what do you know, my sister happens to have two tickets. There is no time to pack, we just leave.
I have no recollection of being on the first flight, but all of a sudden we are in an unknown airport where we must catch out second flight. I think it must be Dubai. There are no signs, only clocks, which tell me that it is 9:30 PM. I know we must be on the connecting flight my 9:40, but I do not know the number or airline because Laura has the tickets. She pulls them out and determines that the connecting flight is controlled by British Airways... but when we look at a list of airlines, British Airways does not operate out of this airport. Laura pulls me over to a phone booth and rifles through a packet of papers she finds there. It is some sort of airline code book, and she finally tells me that the Airline we are looking for is the national airline of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The packet also tells her that there is a fee of 250,000 Rand (South African currency) for the non-corresponding airlines, which I equate in my head to $4,000.
An Indian woman passing by overhears us and tells us that we've got it all wrong. She shows me a map of the airport, and shows me which desk I should go to to get my own map of the airport, which in turn will direct me to information. I'm pretty sure we missed our flight.

Friday, November 9

Dork Dance and (Not My) Wedding Anxiety

I am on vacation with my family, and my parents have decided that it would be beneficial to our cultural knowledge to visit a theme park. The theme park is located on a rocky cliff, and the manager directs our car into the cave so we can begin the ride. The whole thing is really sketchy and makes me really uncomfortable, like the bad circus, and I keep telling my mom that we should quit, "before it's too late." The path we drive down is very narrow, crumbling at the edges, where it drops down about five feet to moats of lava on either side. We proceed at a crawling pace in the Mini Cooper so as to avoid the campus squirrels and cardboard vampires that keep popping up. Finally my mom gets tired of waiting for the exciting part, so we reverse out of the cave, which is only about twenty feet long.

I return to my hotel room to make a flower arrangement, only to find the math team staying there. I happen to know one of the guys from somewhere random, so I decide I should chat with him so I don't appear unfriendly. While we are chatting awkwardly some music starts playing on the stereo, and I get really excited, thinking everyone is about to start dancing, and things will loosen up a bit. I exclaim, "Come on, we should dance!" and start grooving.
The guy just stares at me and goes, "Uhhh..."
"Come on, this is a great song!" He just looks around at his teammates, and I look at them too and see them all standing motionless, slouching and staring at me. I should have realized that of course the math team would never know how to dance, but I am the huge dork in this situation.

Later someone else has Garett's (my sister's fiance's) green bike, and they want to ride somewhere with me. In the gift shop of Fontainebleau I realize I'm supposed to be in love with this person. I decide I will act like I am for a while, because it must be part of the plan where we pretend like we're in love for a while. Then I realize I actually am in love with the person, and they are in love with me, but I feel terrible because I've only just now realized I really love them, so I must have been lying to them for a long time out of convenience. I want to tell them the truth, that I finally love them and only now found out, am too scared to say anything because they will probably hate me for lying for so long.