August 18, 2004

West Texas Update #2

It's funny how the days run together when all you do is sleep and bum around a random house . . . I'm reading, but not as much as I had hoped. I'm watching movies, but not as many as I had planned. I'm visiting with people, but not as much as I had expected. I really couldn't tell you what I'm doing with my time. It's just kind of passing, and I'm not paying enough attention to see where's it going. I feel very weird.

I have acquired very cheap DVD copies of Chicago, The Last Emperor, and The Godfather. This pleases me immensely. I also scored a paperback copy of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and a pair of headphones with a cord of sufficient length. Sufficient length means that it's long enough to plug into my computer and still allow me to sit up straight in my chair (a must with all four of us having potentially noisy computers in the same room next semester).

I have absolutely no clue what I did all day on Monday. I find this very disturbing.

Wait, yes I do . . . That was the day of much Harry Potter arguing (after I got up at noon). Unfortunately I still have nothing conclusive to report, and the battle continues. Never fear, I shall continue to fight the good fight and all that rot. Wow. I can't believe I spent a whole day on that.

On Tuesday I dragged myself out of bed at about 11:30 because my parents were going to lunch with some random people that they know, and they wanted self and siblings along for . . . some reason. I was not particularly pleased with the prospect of making the random acquaintance of yet more random people that my parents have randomly met, but my mother insisted that I would enjoy myself because we would be eating at yet another Mexican restaurant, and these two personages were both female, and they were both close to my age, and had both recently spent time in Guatemala . . . Hey, what more do you need for a good time, huh? I could almost hear, "You'll have a basis . . ."

*sigh*

I was promised that, if I wished, I could escape to Hastings next door. And, Wilson, before you start screaming "Introvert!" at me, keep this in mind: It has long been my experience that the sort of people my parents tend to make friends with don't take very well to the sort of behavior that results when I do anything other than sit quietly, nod, and smile. So with this idea firmly fixed into place, we went to lunch, and let me just say this: Either one of these girls could have been LU Admissions Counselors. They were even wearing matching maroon shirts. And as for making conversation, had I been so inclined, it's an iffy proposition as to whether I'd have managed to slide a word in edgewise.

Micah and I went to Hastings.

Then, after supper, I took myself back down Farm-to-Market 400 to spend the night in Southland. I whiled away most of the excessively boring drive talking to Scholl. This conversation was largely punctuated with his breaking off to curse Scott's less-than-competent Alpha Centauri skills, but it was more interesting than simply staring at moonlit cotton fields.

The reason for my journey to Southland was this: My Grandma had to be in Lubbock this morning at 5:30 for a minor operation (which seems to have gone smoothly, by the way) and Ashley was taking the other car to work, leaving Audra with no way to get to her 10:30 CLEP test at Texas Tech. Without this CLEP test she faces an English Comp class with He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named (no, not Voldemort . . . that wouldn't be so bad). Enter Jared, that one guy with a car and nothing to do.

I broke in on the usual quiet evening at Grandma's . . . my Grandad was reading the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal while Grandma, Brendon, and Audra watched "The River Wild." Ashley was at a staff dinner at Mickey's Steak House. Then "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" came on, Grandma went to bed, I found the cookies and helped my Grandad with the crossword puzzle, and Ashley came home.

Then everyone else went to bed while I pulled out "Life With Jeeves" and Ashley pulled out "The Princess" by Lori Wick. I distracted her too much with my laughter so we got to talking about this and that until it was 2:00 in the morning. We have a bad habit of doing that . . .

I went to bed at about 2:45, which made getting up before 9:00 all that much more of a pain . . . but Ashley had it worse, she was on her way out the door as I crawled out of bed. Someday we'll learn. Maybe.

So, I shot off to Texas Tech with Audra, and my parents met me there once I'd made sure she was registered properly and so forth. We swapped out cars, my dad taking the pickup and I going with my mom to run errands in my grandparents' Oldsmobile (roomier, you see).

Audra was supposedly going to be done at noon, and then we were going to eat lunch and figure the rest out from there. Unfortunately, she didn't get done until 2:00, which is why I didn't get home until almost 5:00. However, she did pass the multiple-choice portion of the test, and I have every confidence in her success with the essay. (She informed me that she had had to write against her opinions. The essay topic was "The Wisdom of Being Impetuous." I thought that sounded like fun . . .)

And that is the latest in action-packed excitement from West Texas. Sorry.

Posted by Jared at August 18, 2004 06:05 PM | TrackBack