Oh. My. God. You will never believe what happened to me.

See, I was going Christmas shopping and I got this gift for my grandmother and this car -- mall security believe it or not -- came tearing around the corner and slammed into me. So, that's it. I'm dead. Mowed down by mall security!

No, I'm kidding. I thought Sue would appreciate it though. :-P

Anyways, to start off with my life since Thanksgiving.....
I got back and immediately started hardcore prepping for tech week for my short play that I was directing. Tech week came and went and my show was good, if I do say so myself. It hit a few bumps in the road on the way there, but it was good.

One of those bumps in the road, however, was a bump in the road for all areas of my life.
You see, it snowed and iced in the middle of tech week. And driving home from school, I slid off the road and into a speed limit sign. Ironically enough, I wasn't going as fast as the sign said.

The car won't even begun being worked on until January. As you can imagine this has caused several headaches. How was I gonna get home for Christmas and New Year's??? We worked it out though! I have this rental (we have rental on our insurance!), and I am taking that home to Rhode Island!!!! I'm going home!!!!
Tomorrow, actually.

Anyways, it's been a nightmare trying to get this sorted out. But all's well that ends well, right? Right!

"I don't usually have to wait for nobody"

The past two days have been a continuation of me getting effed over by....well, life.

Ignoring the drama that continued and escalated from this weekend, which mainly was unimportant to how shitty these two days were except for that my friends are more nocturnal than I am so I am very sleep deprived...

...or I would be except that I slept through my only class today. Yeah, whoops. You know it's a bad semester when, three weeks in, you're already doing poorly academically.

To make matters worse, the guy who was driving the van I hit is absolutely not cooperating with my insurance company. I don't know if he simply has no redeeming social skills at all, or if he's playing some kind of a game and trying to get something. For the sake of my faith in humanity, I'm hoping it's the second. I'd rather think everyone has some degree of social skills and that people are manipulative and greedy than that someone can exist who is an utter failure at being nice to people ever.

On top of that, I utterly failed to get my car evaluated yesterday so I had to send my dear dear dear friend Katie to do it this morning. She stills owes me a massive favor as it is, from that time when she woke me up at 7 am. Apparently she had an entertaining conversation...
"So this guy must be your husband?"
"No!"
"Oh, your fiancee!"
"I am *not* engaged!"
"Why are you wearing that ring?"
"Uh, I like jewelry..."
"Well, he must give good head."
(At this point she paused to try to figure out why my abilities at giving head would influence her to do anything for me...)
"Well, he has to be good at something because it sure ain't driving."
(We're still trying to figure out what my blowjob skills have to do with Katie.)

Anyways, he evaluated $2,400 to fix the damages on my car caused by the accident. Lord knows what the insurance company is going to pay the other guy.
I'm making a concerted effort to think the best of this poor old guy, I mean after all I was the one who hit him. It's not really my fault that he makes it so difficult to find any good qualities in his personality, is it?

So I pretty much called mom and gave her two days worth of freaking out and was all like "I can't do college! I need to drop out!" You know, saying those things all college students believe when they are stressed. And I'm still holding by all of those things -- I'm beginning to think college is not for me.

Moving on to the next event, I went and got HIV tested today. Now, I was 99.9% sure I was clean, but I was mainly going to give Carl moral support. His first test. (Our little boi is growing up so fast!) Anyways, both of us are clean so that was a good thing!
Yay for good things!

Oh, another good thing? A friend of mine has my future husband Jim Verraros' phone number (well, business card)...and I recently (five minutes ago) discovered that he's single now. Oooh.
Hold on, Jim, I'm on my way to Hollywood! :-P

Yeah, I think I'm gonna stop there and just end on a good note. Ya'll don't need to know the rest of my day. :-P

"He made my heart stop palpitatin' every time he came hear"

I have had a hell of a month this week.
Really just the past few days.

You see, Wednesday night I went out for dinner. "I'm going to dinner, I'll be back soon!" I cheerfully announced.
Then I got lost on the way to Friendly's, where I was meeting Don and Bob. Not just once, oh no, I got lost three times.
When I finally found my way, for real, it was dark and it was snowing. I was distracted. So when the light with the sign next to it that says "Left turn yield on green" turned green, I hit the accelerator...

...and then I hit the van.
I'm fine. The people in the van are fine. The guy driving the van was a dickhead, but I think he was like that before the accident.
I got out to see if he and all his passengers were okay. They were. He got out to insinuate that I had intentionally slammed my car into him (at 3 mph...) . Then he asked if I was on drugs. How you leap to that without asking if the person has been drinking first is beyond me, but that's not the point. I gave him a "Are you shitting me?" look and said no and he told me I was going to be tested anyways. Then he asked if I had a camera on me, and I told him no. He didn't either.

So he called the police, and I, in tears, called Don and Bob. I was only a block away from them so I figured they could help me. I had realized that I could not deal with this man -- the true definition of "crotchety old pain in the ass" -- on my own. Honestly, I don't think there is a better candidate for drug testing...skip the rats, just try everything on him. He could at least maybe help out mankind that way, cause I'm sure he hasn't done anything beneficial to the planet in decades.
Seriously, he was acting like the accident looked like the picture there, instead of a minor dent in his van's side door and a smashed headlight (and corner) on my car. It was all very, very minor, not at all the fifty car pile-up he thought it was.

Anyways, it probably didn't help his attitude that after he opened his mouth the first time all of the witnesses who had stopped immediately flocked over to my car to make sure I was okay, and to assure me that it was just a car and everything would be okay. You know, those things the witnesses always say because they're feeling awkward enough without somebody bursting into tears in front of them? Yeap.

Anyways, the cop also got sick of the old fogey, and was really nice to me.
Unfortunately, after Don and Bob took me to dinner...they no longer had time to take me back to school and I couldn't drive in the snow and the dark without my headlight. So we went to Don's apartment and picked up some art supplies he needed and then made the trek to Bob's house. I spent the night there.
The next day (after I e-mailed my professor and told him I wouldn't be in class) we all went off to Philly so Don could meet his client. Then we headed back to Bob's house. The plan was to get me to my car that night, but we were running late and it got dark and snowed, again.
Except this time the roads froze. We holed up in Bob's house for the night.

Don said the sweetest thing to Bob on the way to Philly, and I want to share it with all of you: "I can't imagine why I wasn't writing your name on my notebooks with hearts in middle school."
Say it with me now: Awwww!

This morning we got my car, I drove back to campus, and made it to my anthropology class for the first time all semester. I forgot to get a syllabus but oh well. In fact, I went to all my classes, called the insurance company, and did a whole bunch of stuff.
And then I got to my room, thought for a second, and realized I am absolutely shit-faced, can't-stand-up-straight exhausted. So I didn't go to work tonight. Which is bad because I'm taking tomorrow off too.

Unfortunately, I msised the Pretty Person of the Week, my audition that I'd decided to go to (thanks to Sue's advice!), and two meetings I had on Thursday. It was all taken care of so it was fine, but it was a little disappointing.

Meanwhile, I was reminded of this thing that I'd done before by Pete Ross...so I did it again.


Cilian Murphy? Nick Lachey? Yeah I'm okay with this. Really okay.

Year in Review 2006 Part Duex

-As the school year came to a close, I put together the menu for the theater club's end-of-the-year banquet. Not only was the menu great, everything about the banquet was spectacular. As we looked back on the year as a group, I realized how much I personal had changed over the year...which of course, would be outlined better if you'd watched from the beginning. I also realized how much I was going to continue changing....

-I came home from school for the summer and had a pretty uneventful, kinda blah 19th birthday. It marked a second year of being fairly disappointed in my birthday, so I decided that to make up for two years of shizz birthdays I was going to make certain that my 20th birthday was going to be the best one I would ever have. We'll see.
(That's a picture from my 16th birthday.)

-The brakes failed on my piece of shit car. (Actually that was before my birthday but whatever. :-P) I ended up slamming into another car, and totalling the crappy thing. It was '95 (I think?) Toyota Carolla. Too old for the insurance company to care, the DMV didn't investigate my car at all and decided the brakes worked fine. (They got in it, didn't turn it on, pushed the brake peddle, and that was it, according to the guy who's lot had my car.)

-I jumped at the opportunity to be an extra in the movie Normal Adolescent Behavior (which should be coming out soon). I also met Emerson doing this, and we would spend most of the rest of the summer attached at the hips.

-My church had a Vacation Bible School, and my family hosted some of the counsellors who came in from Camp Calumet. I helped out at the camp, and became super popular with a bunch of those kids. The counsellors were amazing, but I haven't seen them since that week.

-Emerson and I started going to the clubs in Providence, where we made tons of awesome friends. It wasn't long before we were both dancing at a club with a bunch of the people we were hanging out with.

-The return to school was bittersweet, only because it seemed like I had just made all of these friends. Shortly after my return to school though, things began falling apart for all of them. I, on the other hand, had a brilliant beginning of the semester. I reunited with my friends, though it wasn't quite the same (for one, the Quad had all but disintegrated) and made plenty of new ones. I fell in love (not the romantic kind) with most of the guys living on my floor, most of whom I didn't really know (or know at all) beforehand.

-Almost immediately, there was some classic gay drama going on over the Mr. Shimmer 2006 pageant, and it looked like I was going to get the title after all. Right when I didn't want.

-I started a blog on this crazy website called Blogger or something. :-P

-Oh yeah, I dated this guy for about two weeks. That makes three boyfriends for those of you keeping track at home. Three ex-boyfriends too. *shrugs* Can you tell I wasn't particularly invested in this one?

-The theater department also changed with the introduction of a new tech professor. The students united in the hatred of him. But somehow, despite the tension and stress there, Arcadia went off perfectly.
(Picture of me as Jellaby from Arcadia.)

-I began directing a one act play for the Fall 2006 One Act Festival. It was dark, not funny like most of them, but people loved it. Which, pretty much, I owe to my actors and my stage manager. :-P

-I began working at Abercrombie and began go-go dancing again at about the same time. The two jobs took over the free time I had allowed myself during the day and on weekend nights. I shifted my partying to the occasional weeknights. As stressed as I became, I was really really happy with having an income.

-Mostly due to my new jobs, I have made tons of friends in the last few months of the year. :)

(Can you tell I'm tired, from that half-assed end of the entry? :-P)

"If you need to crash, then crash and burn, you're not alone"

This weekend, I died.

Or I thought I did.
It ended up not being quite the life-changing experience one might think, but only, I think, because I didn't actually come anywhere near to death.

Let me set the scene...I'm driving, after a day of mild boy drama, to go pick up my friend Colin. We planned to go see The Prestige, but I was running late so it was going to end up being The Departed. I was on this creepy stretch of road, being tailgated. Two ambulances, both (I assume) carrying injured people, are coming down the road towards myself and the car behind me. I slow down and start pulling to the side...

One ambulance goes by....then the other...then there's a screech of tires and loud bang of metal. The kind that comes from big crashes, hard crashes. The kind people die in.

I thought the car behind me had hit me. My car was still moving forward. With the siren lights flashing, and the extreme dark from the stretch of road, and my utter shock over I didn't know what had been hit if it wasn't me...somehow, in my mind, I leapt to the strange conclusion: I had just been killed in a car accident.

I thought about all the things I still wanted to do, the things other people still wanted me to do. I thought about Craig, and how neither of us would ever see if this whatever was going to amount to anything -- that was probably the most sorrowful thing I thought. I thought about Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. I thought about how Colin was never going to get to see a movie tonight.
All of these thoughts lasted probably a nanosecond, all coinciding in my mind. And then I glanced at the rearview mirror. I don't know where the car that had been behind me was. All I could see was the pickup truck.

All I can figure is the second ambulance somehow must have hit it. The thing went flying across the lane I was in -- I do mean fly, I don't think the tires were touching the road at all -- and into the woods.

And, God forgive me, I slammed on my accelerator and got the hell out of there.