My Freshman year in college, and my first holiday away from home. My boyfriend at the time invited me to spend Thanksgiving with his family. His parents picked us up for the long drive from campus to their house. I wasn’t feeling very well, and visited a clinic the day after we arrived. It was there I found out that I had an STD. I told my boyfriend about it, and he said he’d stand by me and blah blah blah. We went to a party at his friend’s house, where he spoke privately and individually to everyone there, never telling me what he was up to and leaving me to socialize with a bunch of people I’d never met before, including his saccharine-sweet ex-girlfriend.
The next day was Thanksgiving proper, which in his family meant that everyone loaded up their plates and then camped in front of the TV, not speaking to one another (totally different than my family). I was painfully homesick and his parents were clearly not cool with the idea of me placing a long-distance call to my family, so I didn’t. My boyfriend talked to me less and less over the next two interminable days, until finally his parents took us back to campus on Sunday.
As soon as we were there, boyfriend disappeared into his room and wouldn’t talk to me at all. Wouldn’t answer phone or emails. Out of naive desperation I camped outside of his dorm room until he talked to me, which was of course to break up with me. Over the STD. Which I had gotten from him.
That turned out to be his first and only year in college; he was an alcoholic (I didn’t know that at the time) and flunked out. Spared me having to see his sorry self every day on a small campus, thank goodness.
[hijack]It always bugs me that one of the least oppressive and primitive forms of church architecture is called Gothic. I know why it’s called that – some Renaissance dweebs thought it primitive --, but everywhere else you see the word “Gothic” outside its Germanic context it refers to something foreboding and primitive. Romanesque churches seem far more lower-g gothic to me than Gothic churches!
That said, I prefer Romanesque, since the primitivism reinforces the non-materialism of Christian doctrine. Whereas, in one thing they got right, Gothic churches are more appropriate to evil cults and other nasty organizations due to their looking all indulgent-and-such.
I have been camping I guess, of sorts. Back in the 70s my girl scout troop went to Alcatraz Island. We had a bonfire and ate smores all night. We were sleeping in the old guard barracks, which now that I think about it, looked kind of like a mobile home. The bathroom had stalls, I want to say 8-10 along one wall, with a huge mirror opposite. The mirror was crowned with a row of naked light bulbs. Of course, being a bunch of little girls far from home (okay, so it was one quick boat trip across), the lights were left on for our nighttime protection.
Did ya know snakes like the heat naked light bulbs give off? Looking back, I think the caretaker of the property aged 15yrs that night. 25 screaming girls have a way of doing that. (yeah yeah we even screamed hours after the real snakes were removed)
Heh, the first time I came to Australia, to meet my net crush (now my husband), oh dear god.
My luggage was half lost
I broke a bone in my foot stepping off a curb (yeah, I know) the first day
My now-husband, having arranged to take time off, had to work
Because I broke my foot, I was stuck sitting on his bed or hobbling to the computer room all day (And this is my first time ever out of the US, and my first time in Sydney!) so I couldn’t even take myself sightseeing.
On the last day, I decided hell with it, we’re going sightseeing, so off to the CBD we go
Because I spent the day limping and hobbling, by the time we got to the lovely Spanish restaurant we were going to, I quite literally could not stand - one foot was broken, the other one sore!
There was an enourmous bush fire, and I couldn’t breathe properly
I got, the very first night (I counted) 54 mosquito bites! Husband to be got…2. Bah.
In fact, I didn’t see much of Sydney at all until I moved here. Must have done something right though, cause I was back to stay three month’s later.
Ehrm, in Spain Gothic (gótico) doesn’t have any connotations of primitive. Maybe it had it in whichever language came up with the term, but if so it definitely lost it. Having had Visigoth kings, we get Visigoth art (visigodo). I don’t know what Gothic churches have you been in, but a lot of them are pretty bare, actually. Yes, I know a lot of art books make it sound as if Lyon and León were the only Gothic churches out there but I promise they’re not. Oh, and in a lot of them the sculptures are Baroque, at least in Spain (gothic retablos usually consist of a single sculpture and the rest of the figures are painted, baroque ones are all sculpted).
