pit of despair: the new jersey turnpike

Today I wished death upon a woman for not knowing which airline she was flying on. We boarded the rental car shuttle and the driver asked which airline and she said "i don't know, let me look it up" and i thought clearly in my mind, "i hope you ddiiiiiieeee, moron." and i resented her pastel native american fleece jacket. typically i am not a rageful person. but it was merely 10 am and already was like one of the uber shitty life days that needs a serious re-do. i woke up at 3am to drive from long island to philly to catch my 730 am flight. had been driving along smoothly until we got stopped for a really bad accident on the new jersey turnpike. while we were going 2 miles per hour i saw the man in front of me open his car door to puke. Then after leaving the area of the accident about a mile later the tire that had been low earlier in the week and which a very lovely housing authority inspector had patched up, blew out again. on the new jersey turnpike. i may keep repeating that. because only new jersey turnpike authorized repair people are allowed on the pike and therefore the roadside assistance could not come out and help me. the scary toothless long-haired man named rudy who finally showed up to fix the tire had bad eyesight and couldnt figure out the VW spare tire kit. which forced me to get the car towed. which forced me to miss my flight. not helpful: the man who finally fixed my tire kept pointing out how easy it was to figure out how to change the spare and loudly wondering why toothless rudy couldnt figure it out. *mental note...i know in my mind how to change a flat, but i'm just not confident on dark turnpikes. might need to practice late night in san diego. this is clearly a necessary life skill*

anyway, the whole experience was just a pathetic display of why optimism is so overrated. dancing along at 330 a.m. in my car i was imagining my status updates on various social networks as "drove from LI to PHL, flew to SD and took owen to legoland, all in a day's work." but instead all i am doing today is flying to san diego and being bitter about the new jersey turnpike. i can still take owen to legoland tomorrow. but all other activities that needed to get done this weekend are pretty much moot.

so my first blog in months is full of frustration. maybe it makes sense. i once read a quote from a poet (i think) who said no one would ever write when they were happy because they were too busy being happy. not that i've been super busy being happy and that's why i havent blogged. in fact, this last week i spent most of my days exhausted in my hotel room zoning out on televised sports, online scrabble, and eating various foods, many of which were dips and generally not made of natural ingredients. on two nights i actually swigged some buffalo sauce from the bottle. i looked atrocious nearly every day, had clear pillow streaks as i looked at myself in the hotel elevator mirror, and yet got hit on by two construction men who were part of a larger contingent of massachusetts construction workers stationed in brookhaven to build a budweiser plant. and it made me feel *worse*. at one point i was on an elevator with 6 men all of whom were toting budweiser 12 packs. and even though, due to their genetic east coastness, many of my participants rolled their eyes at other people's questions and were mildly hostile at various points, this was apparently a way of showing appreciation for my instruction and i got some of the best reviews i've had yet. hilarious. i actually had a lot of fun with them (east coasters (northern east coasters) are funnier than any other subset of people in the US). and i again posit that while people on the east coast are internally kind human beings, they just don't show it on the outside.

The night before i checked out i encountered a clearly russian woman who had also clearly learned all the english she knew from someone with a heavy new york accent and that linguistic baby is something i wish someone else had been around to digest aurally.

i hadn't blogged because every time i went to do it i was paralyzed by giving full life updates. but now it has been long enough that i don't think it is necessary. i may at some point get around to posting summaries of my india pics. but maybe not. anyway, time to figure out what to do with myself for 5 hours until my flight. the new jersey turnpike.