The Steffiverse

We saw Jessica Alba at the LA airport while we were checking in. She's small in person. Like 5'4, and more slimly built than she looks in the movies. She was in baggy pants, skate shoes, a tight-fitting top and one of those pseudo-military forage caps that are all the rage these days. A dancer's lithe, ahtletic body. She looked HOT.

Thanks to jet-lag, I'm up before the sun for the second day in a row. Today's 6 a.m. is definitely a vast improvement over yesterday's 5 a.m. though.

At 5 a.m. yesterday morning, I lay wide-awake in bed, tired and wanting to go back to sleep, but with my body absolutely refusing to obey. Instead, my mind went into overdrive mode and starting thinking. And that's when I realized that oops, shit, I still do miss Shadra.

Which sounds pathetic. Because we've been OVER forever now, and I'm sure as hell positive she doesn't miss me anymore. But she was what she was to me, and that emotional attachment on my behalf is still there. I thought I was over her. Especially during the month back in SG because there was so much else to think about, and other people who helped me take my mind off her.

But it's a lot easier to be "over" someone when you're half a world away from the person. And here, back in familiar surroundings where the ghost of our 'thing' still lingers, I slipped right back into just missing her.

So it wasn't easy taking my sister and mother on a tour of campus while still in that funk. We'd pass the EMU and I'd look up at the Emerald and remember the couple of nights we hung out on the balcony together when I brought her coffee when she was working late.

I'd look at the Johnson Hall parking lot, and all I could see in my mind's eye was her car. We walked past Rennies and the memories of our good times there together would just come flooding back.

But the almost choking bittersweet feeling of nostalgia gets worse whenever I'm in bed or walking anywhere near my old place. Because ultimately, my room is where we spent most of our time together. And I don't know if it makes it better or worse that physically, my room is now longer in the same location — because we moved, but that somehow, because I arranged my furniture in pretty much the same configuration, and the furniture is still the old familiar furniture, I step into my room and the feeling of loss instantly intensifies.

I miss her. And I miss all the time we had in my room in my old apartment. I also miss my old apartment. And every glance at my new room is almost painful because of the realization that she's not here anymore, just like my old apartment is no longer mine.

And that's a big part of the residual resentment that's all bottled in me. Even though my room is exactly the same size as my old one, everytime I look around my new place, small, cramped, and farther away from campus than my old place, I resent having had to move. Get mad at my roommate all over again because if it hadn't been for her, we wouldn't have had to move.

The old apartment was so much closer to classes.
The old apartment was so much more spacious.
The old apartment had TWO fucking bathrooms.
The old apartment allowed me to step onto the street and be faced with a host of different dining options.

The new apartment is fucking tiny.
The new apartment has a bathroom and a half.
The new apartment is six tennis courts and two turf fields away from civilization as I know it.
The new apartment is no longer a block from the library.

Sounds stupid, but in certain ways I hate change and moving. And missing my old place almost makes me want to cry sometimes. Because that was HOME. Warm, fuzzy, comforting, and the center of two years worth of cherished memories — six months of which evolved around Shadra.

So I miss home in that sense, and by missing home I miss her.

And to add insult to injury, my fucking car won't start. Well it wouldn't start until the tow-truck guy arrived. (I was gonna have to tow it to the mechanic's.) But it struggled to life when he got here. Which meant that I had to pay him 40 bucks even though he didn't do shit. And he recommended that I take the car to the mechanic's anyway because he said the battery could conk out again at any time.

So that's where my car is right now. At the shop. Ugh.

And I've just realized that it seems as if most of the people I spent most of last year with, such as Angie, are either graduated, gone, or on an exchange program somewhere.

Plus tickets to the big football game against Oklahoma this Saturday are all COMEPLETELY sold out.

So I'm stuck in a rut and sulking. Not how I normally am, but I think I'm entitled a day or two to feel pathetic and loserish before I convince myself to shake out of it and have a fun senior year.

Welcome back indeed. Fuck.