December 13, 2003
The Epic Journey
Well, I'm here, safe and sound and so tired I can't string two coherent thoughts together, sitting here watching the new scenes of The Two Towers with my brothers. As we all know, there's only one thing to do when one can't communicate coherently: Whip up a blogpost. Traveling and stuff sucked, big time, so that wasn't cool. It's been a long day, but there have been a few bright spots.
Waking up at 6:30 this morning was not one of those bright spots. I mean, how could it be? The sun wasn't even up yet. However, I managed to snag an Egg McMuffin and fill up on gas and get out of Longview by 7:20. I was making crazy good time on the way to Dallas, but I seriously started falling asleep at the wheel. So I pulled over at a rest stop, took a 10-minute nap, and bought a source of caffeine. After that I was okay.
Once in Dallas, I drove straight to the office where Mr. White (my history teacher from high school, for those of you who don't know) now works. I got there at 10:00, right on schedule. It was great to see him again, since I haven't for about a year and a half, and we had plenty of time to visit before he dropped me off at the airport. We stopped at Denny's for brunch along the way. He'll be taking care of my pickup for me while I'm here in Guatemala.
So, he dropped me off at the terminal, and I went in and . . . Bah, I don't want to write all this down. To make a long story short, I wound up standing in the wrong line for 20 minutes, then I had to drag myself and my freaking 140 pounds of luggage over to Terminal E (from Terminal A). It really sucked. However, I finally made it to the gate a few minutes before they started boarding. I was asleep before we even took off and I didn't wake up until we landed in Atlanta. At this point I was suddenly starving (like, the kind of hungry where you're fighting collapse). And I had to get all the way to Terminal E from Terminal A, again. But we're still making a long story short. I grabbed something at Burger King, and made it onto my Guatemala plane.
There was a movie, and it was a movie I hadn't seen before: Matchstick Men. It looked decent, so I watched it. I hated it. I mean, I really hated it. And I'm having a hard time understanding why. I generally dislike "feel good" movies, and I love surprise endings. But I was actually enjoying where this movie was going, and the twist hit me like a punch in the stomach. It was one of the nastiest things I've ever seen done to a main character, and I didn't like that at all. And then they had the gall to try and "fix" it in the last fifteen minutes so you didn't totally feel like crap after the movie was over, and that failed miserably. Maybe I was just mad because the movie got me to care a bit, I dunno.
You know, along those same lines (somehow . . . don't ask me to explain the connections), I was thinking after the movie was over: I kind of have a love/hate relationship with, like, everything. Does that make me a schizo, or just subject to wild mood swings? The whole thing kind of dovetails with my earlier posts on sentimentalism vs. cynicism. But whatever. I was going to go into it further, but I'm tired. I'm going to sleep. Maybe more later. G'night.