My Journal

Well. here i am, on the road. My cute little laptop has a plug-in for the cigarette lighter so i've created all of this en route. i've made a rough intro page, begun the links page, and am now doing my daily journal work. it's 8:24 right now, eastern standard time; the moon is full, my father is driving; and my mother and i have been playing word games. First we played Alphabet 90s rock musicians, then Alphabet things we see, and ended up with Alphabet things to call truck drivers (yellow-bellied ugly zebra-heads ... aren't we vicious?) We left arkansas this morning around .... 7 or so; ate breakfast (omelet biscuit from hardees) in the car; at lunch at the Cotton Patch diner in Nowhere, TN (they tried to pass hot sauce off for bbq sauce but we caught on to their cheap trick); then i drove for about three hours before mom got too tense and my leg started aching. So here we are.... traveling down highway 81, as we have been for the past three or four hours. Tonight i think we'll be staying near Roanoke, VA -- another 100 miles. Ick.

Mom keeps talking about how exciting this is ... i'm excited, i guess, but being in a car all day just sucks the life out of me. i read the Phantom Tollbooth, which is a lovely book that i recommend to everyone reading this. we've listened to a ton of CD's -- Ani Difranco, self-titled; Pearl Jam, ten; Radiohead, ok computer; madonna, i'm breathless; marvin gate, what's going on; r.e.m., document no. 5 and automatic for the people; u2, achtung baby, etc etc etc. it's been .... long. i've set up quite a little home in the back seat here ... my CDs, my drink, my backpack, my pillows, the computer .... its like in the shawshank redemption (yes i am comparing the backseat of my car to a maximum security prison) when you get "institutionalized" and even though you hate it, you don't want to do anything else. my brain has become permanently fuzzy.

i have lots of homework to do for school (i'm going to be missing five days of class) none of which i even looked at today. i'm also taking a college class (writing) and i have to read four papers and write a 500 word essay. and i'm a semifinalist in this competition so i have to write an essay for them too and give them a list of all the stuff i've ever done in my entire life. well it feels like it at least.

tomorrow we'll drive all day.... monday i have an interview at swarthmore college in philadelphia at 10:30. i'm kinda looking forward to it -- interviews are my cup of tea. none of the other colleges i wrote to said interviews were necessary/possible. i hope i don't find out later that i should have pressed harder for interviews everywhere.

anyway -- i'm going to go work on the college links page and then play minesweep for a while until this headache i'm getting becomes unbearable. talk to you later.

well .... it's 12:06. We ended up spending the night in Roanoke, Virginia -- a lot farther than we had intended to drive, but the town we had planned on staying in (Wytheville, VA) was having some little flea market festival so all the hotels were either full or had increased rates so we kept going until 11:30. The room was nice; nothing special -- except the shower was more of a mist-bath, rather than the typical spray. it was kind of soothing, but didn't feel like it was really doing much good. i scrubbed extra hard to make up for it.

so ... we ate some bagels and doughnuts for a little breakfast snack and hit the road. Our real breakfast was in Marshall, VA, at the Old Salem Restaurant. I highly recommend it -- i had the western omelet (without ham), homefries, and toast, with orange juice and water. It was sooo good. the three of us ate for under $20, and we were all stuffed, so it was nice.

an now... here we are, driving along, on our way to Washington, DC, and then Philly. I was just listening to casey casem's top twenty and he was talking about that guy that bought Max Yasgur's farm to make it into a sort of amusement park for yuppies. it's so sickening. this guy didn't even go to woodstock, and told his daughter not to go to the one in '94, and here he is buying the place and making it into this clean-cut, polished playground for the rich and spoiled. it's everything the original woodstock was against. I think i may start a campaign to put this dickhead out of business. If you have any suggestions or encouragement, email me at aalpm@mvtel.net . Maybe if i get enough support we can ruin this guy's venture. hey, if he has the right to be a capitalist pig, i have the right to be a butcher.

September 6 -- 10:21 pm

sigh. welcome to the world of college, alison.

we arrived in philadelphia at 3 in the afternoon (which is damn good time -- 500 miles in 7 hours) and went straight to swarthmore. it's such a weird sensation -- i know i should be focusing and getting a sense of the campus but i just am not really registering what's going on. swarthmore was a lovely place -- it's an arboretum, so all the walkways are lined with small gardens, the buildings are surrounded by bushes and vines, all with little cards identifying the plants. it's beautiful, yes; but i feel like i'm just a tourist in a botanical garden. i couldn't get the "you're at college" vibe that i'm looking for. my dad loved it -- he thinks the campus is lovely, the buildings are old and full of character -- and my mom agreed. but I prefer Haverford, which is where we visited after dinner.

dinner was at Paolini's (or something...) a nice little Italian joint between swarth and haverford. i had tortellini alfredo -- with (gasp) veal tortellini mixed in with the cheese. i had asked to only have white (cheese) tortellinis. and that's what i got -- white tortellini with veal inside. blah. so i ate half of my meal (gave mom the other half) and had a bowl of soup (excellent vegetable soup -- excellent.)

so anyway, after dinner we went to Haverford. as soon as we got there, i felt more comfortable and "you're at college." it's not as beautiful as swarthmore, but i find that better. swarth was almost intimidating in its glory -- haverford feels more accessible. we went to the admissions office and talked to a few students (i had been feeling too shy to just walk up to someone at swarth and begin talking to him, even though there were plenty of friendly looking students.) there was one guy there who works in the admission office so he chatted with us for a while about various aspects of student life at haverford. he was a really nice guy -- if you want to know anything about haverford, or just talk to a self-described "sunshine-y" guy, email him at cdorfman@haverford.edu . So, anway... to find out what we talked about, go to the College Reviews page.

Then we walked around the campus for probably half an hour or so, just kind of checking out the buildings and campus. I really liked it -- the buildings were all fairly close together, giving a specific sense of campus, and they were all attractive and of a similar design, which also added to the feeling of union throughout the campus. They weren't nearly as interesting as those at swarth, but like i said, i found them more inviting and less ... stuffy, i guess. i feel like places with a distinctive sense of self impose that sense on you, rather than let you bring your own character into it. since i'm planning on truly becoming myself while at college, i don't think i could withstand the overpowering influence of buildings bursting with character and self-righteousness.

then again, i may be reading a little too much into this.

alas -- it's late and i'm tired so i believe i'll retire to sleep. or at least television. either way my brain won't have to function.

Well. This has been a successful and enjoyable day. I wish i would have written about it earlier when it was fresh. As it is, it's about 10 pm and i'm tired but determined to document the highlights of today.

We started from our crusty little hotel this morning around nine in our rental car (our regular car has an iffy transmission that we didn't think could handle the stop and go traffic of New York City.) Breakfast was at a nice little diner: Mom had a feta and spinach omelet, i had cheese blintzes with apple topping, and doug had french toast and scrambled eggs. Then we went to Swarthmore for my interview at 10:30 which i was starting to not really want to do because i had originally planned it just as a rehearsal for the "real" interviews i wanted to do at the colleges i really wanted to attend. But as it turned out, none of the other colleges made appointments for interviews. so i was like, why am i wasting my time with this?? BUT, as it turned out, i had a fabulous interview with a really great guy who, though he may not have persuaded me to make swarthmore my first choice, definitely moved the college up on the rankings. the interview, which usually only takes 30 minutes, lasted an hour, not including the time Imli spent talking with my parents. basically, if all the students at swarth were as a) interesting b) friendly c) intelligent and d) attractive as Imli, i'd be the first in line to apply.

so after the interview, we headed to connecticut. i slept a lot, until we hit this huge storm -- i could hear the wind making the car creak -- very scary. (later we saw a news weather report that said there had been a tornado in that same area...) so we drove through a lot of rain and wind and lightning.

finally we arrived in new york, after crossing the george washington bridge. we ate lunch on the coast at the Waterfront Diner. I had a wonderful cup of clam chowder and a bowl of caesar salad. it was perfect.

then we drove to connecticut and ended up here, just outside of new london.

and i'm dead tired so i'll end here. see you tomorrow.

well yesterday's entry was very unsatisfying because i was so tired when i wrote it. so during this entry, i'll try to refer back to some of the highlights of yesterday to sort of round it out, give it a little more life, because it definitely had some, and it's unfair to not acknowledge that in my journal.

but first -- today.

well in a minute -- i'm watching Tootsie on TNT and it's just such a fabulous movie i'm really distracted.

okay -- i'll write during the commercials. SO... today we left the hotel around nine and went into New London, which is just a wonderful little town. It's really the stereotypical New England city, with old buildings and piers and all sorts of lovely things. And i was really in love. it's such a weird thing to walk up and down a street and think, "This could be my street. I could be living in this town. This could be my town someday." It's such a new thing to me. so anyway, the town was great; we ate breakfast at a great little diner (i wish i remembered the name of it so i could recommend it.) it was friendly, cheap, and really really tasty -- what else could you want?

oh -- the movie is back. just a sec....

okay. commercial. So... after breakfast, we went to connecticut college, which i was sure would be absolutely fabulous. and i was damn disappointed. at first. the campus consisted of very monotonous gray cut-stone buildings surrounding a huge playing field. which instantly gave me the impression that the school was boring and sport oriented.

"I was a better man when i was a woman with you than i've ever been as a man with a woman." -- more or less the wonderful line from Tootsie.

So anyway, i was feeling really icky about the whole thing. at one point, i just said, "listen, i hate this school, these students aren't at all what i'm looking for, and i really, really want to leave." but my parents insisted that we walk around some more and talk to some people. Also, we had stopped by the admissions office as soon as we'd gotten on the campus and set up an interview so i felt trapped into that committment. we walked around a little more; sure, i was being obnoxious and shitty about the whole thing, but i really felt that all our time spent there was a waste. i had expected so much from this college that it was a really big let down for it not to be exactly what i was hoping for. not that i know exactly what that is, but i'm assuming i'll feel it when i'm in it. so we wandered some more, and gradually my black mood faded, though never entirely. finally, after stopping at a few buildings that we thought may pertain to me (the humanities building, the outdoor auditorium -- where, by the way, we saw a red fox...) we headed to the 1:30 group information session before my interview at 2:30. The information session was really ... informative. (stater-of-the-obvious, andrea? moi??) the admissions guy running it, Steven Danadma or something, told us about some really interesting programs Conn. has, like CISLA, an overseas internship during the summer before the student's senior year. Also, Conn. has established a community center in downtown New London for the students to become more involved in the community and the community to become more involved in the college. plus the usual study abroad stuff, so those were all added bonuses.

after the info session, my family and i waited in the little clean-cut lobby until 2:29. "At 2:31 i'm walking out the door." At 2:34 an attractive (i have the world's best luck, i swear) guy in his late 20s walked into the room and asked for me. So we shook hands and introduced ourselves, and he told my parents we'd be about 30 minutes. (As was the case at Swarthmore, the interview lasted almost an hour.)

So we went up to his little office and chatted for a while about all sorts of things -- it was really a lovely conversation, though it stayed focused on the college more than swarthmore did. At swarthmore, Ilmi and i talked more about my interests and opinions on various things (he asked where i had acquired an interest in primatology and what authors i enjoy.) Still, i felt that Daniel (Daniel Parish at dbpar@conncoll.edu ) and I had a very nice time talking, both as a counselor and prospective student, and as two humans beings. I'd love to become good friends with all the people i've met on this trip, really. I told Daniel about my interest in adapting The Phantom Tollbooth into a play, which i really would like to do -- it seems like such an interesting challenge, and i already have so many ideas. of course, they're all probably entirely illogical and impossible, but making them work is part of the fun, if you ask me.

so... well jesus. The Goodbye Girl is on TV and i'm distracted again. so ... i guess i'll try to finish this tomorrow. or something. i'm tired.

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