Plenty more running around with mom. Today we went to the Marie Selby Botanical Gardens, which had, among other things, a giant butterfly garden swarming with butterflies, a huge display of rare orchids-- and tiny lizards! Plenty of them; I spotted 37 in the Gardens before we left. Also before we left, I overheard a call in the welcome center. There was a small Buddha statue on the floor in the orchid building and a Catholic woman called to report that she was greatly offended by it. We can't have those rice-eating heretics running around trying to convert our children, you know. I would have laughed, except the woman who took the call said she privately agreed with her.

Getting up bright and early tomorrow to drive up for more visiting for two days, so it's bedtime for me.

At the moment I am five different shades of tan, I have a bellyful of ice cream and sugar-white sand under my toenails. I'm friends with my mom again and I got to watch the sun set over Siesta Key Beach in a slew of colors I didn't even know existed. I am also wonderfully exhausted and content with the knowledge that I am going to fall asleep smiling.

Alive and well in Sarasota. It only took eight and a half hours to get here (as opposed to the two estimates of 8 3/4 and 9 1/2 hours I read). Time for dinner!

Welll, my original plan to leave at 1am fell through, so now I'm about to head out at 7. 570 miles, baby. Sarasota or bust! (Hopefully not the bust.)

My Intro to Creative Writing class is over as of yesterday, and we're all very sad about it. That was the best experience of my entire college life so far, but at least I'll walk away with a bunch of new friends, a body of writing I'm proud of and three credit hours. Also, I want to make our teacher Mary Hood my grandmother and live in her house and follow her around every day for the rest of my life. In these past two weeks she's inspired me more than I ever imagined possible.

I am now getting ready for my trek down to Florida; took my car into the shop at 7 this morning for a new seperntine belt, a tire rotation and fluid check ($85). I plan to spend today seeing Matt, packing and cleaning my room, before taking a nap in the evening and heading out tonight/tomorrow at 1am. I should get into Sarasota late Sunday morning. The trip is around nine hours, three times longer than any solo trip I've done before, so I have that excited/nervous feeling that makes my stomach churn. Or maybe that's just hunger. Hmm, time for breakfast.

Here's a comic for all the fans of Toad from the first X-Men movie. I know I can't be the only one.

Matt and I went for a three-mile hike in the Botanical Gardens and Matt spotted a little brown frog the size of my thumbnail, which I managed to catch for a minute. Makes me want to hike more.

I got completely trashed last night but I still remember everything. It was my friend Lisa's graduation party, so I went to her place and we both did five shots of vodka before we even went downtown to a bar called Molly O'Shea's at 11 with her roommates. Lisa and I got a Blue Motherfucker, drank half of it before realizing it wasn't fruity enough, and took it back to get a new one which we finished. Shortly after that I went from amusingly drunk to frighteningly, dizzily drunk. I hurled in the bathroom, got a ride home by one of our mutual friends around 1:30, hurled again and passed out. I woke up at six to hurl a third time and managed to pass out again till ten. Since then I've been drinking water and eating some pasta, which I hope will finally settle my stomach, but I'm still a little woozy. I remember how embarassing it was to be barely able to walk and how I repeatedly told her roommates that I admired them for not drinking. The new fun of drinking has officially worn off.

Allow me to sum up Matrix Reloaded in nine words: boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring.

I can't believe that after today my creative writing class will already be half over. After two days we had already gotten to know each other (there's only 16 of us), and by now it's more like a summer camp for college credit. I've never had this much fun in college.

sum picz 4 u b4 i go 2 calss:
Matt and I, taken when Dad visited
Monica and I doin our thang and showin that blang.

Well, you can generally tell how busy my life is by the infrequency of my updates. For about a week starting on the first of May, I spent hours and hours each day in the library working on a 12-page research paper for my Lit class. I owe Devan and Charlie a lot for giving me so much feedback; it saved me from losing my mind. (I found out yesterday that earned A's both on the paper and for the class itself.) On the 7th I turned in the finished paper and immediately drove back to Asheville for a few days to have my periodic CT scan/blood work done. The doctors are now relatively confident that the node in my lung is simply scar tissue, which is excellent news. I spent the rest of my time there hanging out with my Dad or running around with Bec and Monica and their (very cool) friends having masochistic DDR marathons. Yesterday I started my Intro to Creative Writing Maymester class, which meets for three hours each day in addition to an hour-long lecture. I'm already having a blast and it's only day two. I'm still a little nervous about crashing and burning since I have very little short story writing experience, but not nearly as much as I was before yesterday. It has the kind of atmosphere I've been dreaming about for as long as I can remember.

There you have it! A week in a paragraph. Now I have to get out of this lab and hop back upstairs for today's lecture.

Aaaaand now we're getting tornado warnings.

And for a nice one-two punch, FedEx just called and offered me two positions-- both of which I had to turn down because of Maymester.

Didn't get the campus job.

X-Men 2... Wow.

The interview went really well! There are fifteen to twenty other people vying for the position, though, so I'm trying not to get my hopes up. I should find out early next week whether or not I got it.

I got home just a few minutes ago and there was a pickup truck parked in the lot with its lights on. Since I would want someone to do the same for me, I went around knocking on the doors of apartments that still had lights on in the windows to try to find the owner. I understand that it's late at night and I'm bald (oooh! skinhead! ooooooh!), but nobody even opened their doors to talk to me; I had to shout through them like some kind of hoodlum. Luckily I found the owner on my third try. But I'm still irked by how the big 40-year-old hicks who live around me are too suspicious to open their doors at night for Shrimpy McCancerpants. Maybe I'm just too naive.

These days I'm trying to avoid making "today I did this and this and this" posts but today was actually pretty unique. Since I need a second job over the summer, this morning I applied for a package handling position at the FedEx delivery center nearby. It would be completely thankless, it's all manual labor and my shift would be from 2:30 to 7:30 in the morning. And all of this makes me want the job desperately. My life has gotten so comfortable these days that I really want and need something like this to come along and stomp me into the ground. Tomorrow I'm also applying for a simple clerical job on campus, so keep your fingers and toes crossed for me.

At work this afternoon we met our quota in a long-running project and got to leave three hours early with pay, so I chilled with Jon for a while before Matt and I went to a reading tonight by three local poets. I'm generally not a big poetry fan, simply because no matter how hard I try I always get distracted or drift off into my own thoughts during a poem. Tonight, however, I managed to pay (almost) complete attention and the poets were all very engaging. I haven't written poetry since my angsty high school years but it almost makes me want to give it another shot. It's not like I have anything to lose-- either I'll produce some good work or I'll have something to make me laugh in a few years, like my high school poems do for me now.

Time to print out my resume and get some sleep. If I don't post tomorrow, an earthquake musta got me.