the long, long summer
Well, I've now been home for a little over twenty-four hours and I figured that I should start using my livejournal in the way it was intended to be used. I've abused it in the past, but I'm making a resolution not to do that anymore. It must be awfully annoying. So, here is my first normal lj entry ever. The trip back home from Swarthmore was fairly uneventful. We stopped in Maryland a few days to visit my cousin and her newborn son. I got to hold him for about ten minutes, but it wasn't a profound experience like I was expecting it to be. I just found it kind of strange to be holding a person that small (I think he's like seven and a half pounds or something like that). After that we began our roadtrip home. Yes, four people, in a car meant to hold only four people, for over a thousand miles. It could have been much worse were it not for the portable dvd system my mom got to occupy my little brother. He is the most spoiled person on earth, well maybe not, but it is pretty upsetting. I mean, he structures his life around going to best buy. About the dvd thingy, I was talking to my mother about what she was going to get with her fair share of some economic windfall that's coming our way, and she said "oh, it's already spent, I used it on that dvd thing," which I found incredibly upsetting. My brother is the most spoiled person on earth. So we visited an outlet mall in Pigeon Forge, TN, near Dollywood for you country music theme park fans out there (actually I think that Dolly Parton is really cool and I wish that we had gone there instead of going to that stupid outlet mall. I find outlet malls really upsetting; they don't work like they should. An outlet mall should be full of really nice clothing that normal people are too dumb to wear, but instead there are just special stores for outlet malls like "Banana Republic: Outlet" etc., which have less exciting versions of clothing that they sell in their normal retail stores. Why do people go to these places if all they have there are really cheap, boring looking things?) and then we went on to Centerville and spent the night there. At this point I was suffering a near breakdown because I was completely ready to be home and was angered by our stopping for the night slightly before seven, and because I had to share a room with my brother and I was certain that I would be kept up all night by his gamecube (honestly, that's just excessive, one should never need to bring a full-sized game console on a roadtrip). Fortunately it turned out to be alright because he used his headphones, so I was able to get some sleep. I'm still not sleeping very well, as a carryover from the end of the semester. Does this happen to anyone else? For some reason I can't just pass out for a really, really long time after I get home, and I end up only being able to sleep for a maximum of six hours at a time. The next day we got home a little after four, and I found my room full of crap and later discovered that there were also many, many insects in it. At first I thought that they were fleas (apparently one of my dogs spent a couple of nights there in my absence), but more recently I've come to the conclusion that they are termites. I'm not sure why they are there, but I want them to go away. So I stayed home today and did very little (beyond cleaning the kitchen), which I intended to anyway, but was necessitated by my parents' not renewing my car insurance. So, I am under virtual home arrest until further notice.
I pulled out my violin today and practiced for the first time in about a year. I really miss it sometimes, and I actually avoid orchestra concerts now because they make me sad and reminiscent. However I've been asked to play a wedding this summer (which I used to do quite often while I was in high school) and I'm looking forward to that. I find my current estrangement from music really strange; I used to spend at least a couple of hours a day doing something music related and now I rarely even listen to music. I've only bought one cd in the past year and that was largely because I thought it was ridiculous for me not to have bought any new music in the span of a year. This needs to change.
I've sort of attempted to begin looking for jobs here, but I can't seriously do that until I have a car (argh) and until Sunday when the great big classified section comes out. My dad got me an application for Starbucks, which could definitely be worse. I really wish that something would just land in my lap, but this never seems to happen. If only I were Adam, but oh well...
This entry seems incredibly long and uninteresting, so I will stop it now and leave other random tidbits for later entries.