Whew!

Today I had to redo my oral presentation. Yesterday I tried to do it in front of the other girls in my class, locked up in brain dead post-"two days of no sleep" mode, and stammered my way through a sweaty retarded string of broken sentences and incorrectly conjugated words.

I still feel like shit today, a not-so-subtle nudge from the universe that I'm actually starting to age, but my teacher let me do it over with just her in the room. I rewrote the whole thing yesterday and made it simpler, then recited it over and over again last night until I couldn't stand anymore. Literally. I forced myself not to nap yesterday, because napping has done nothing good for me at all here. Just makes me tired when I wake up, then not able to sleep when I want to go to bed. Last night I was stumbling around the apartment with a sheet of chicken scratched sentences in my hand, mumbling them over and over. Sometimes my eyes would cross involuntarily, or the floaters from when I had my nose broken would become apparent. I felt like a malfunctioning robot, like Johnny five in the second movie after he got his ass kicked by the bank robbers. Crazy, pissed off, committed, and falling apart.

Eventually I fell onto the bed with the paper in my hand, and I woke up like that this morning. Apparently I tried to set my alarm when sleep was covering me with its leaden blanket, but I didn't set the switch all the way back to the "on" position. I slept in two hours, but since I've been making myself get up at 6 every morning, it wasn't a big deal.

Tomorrow is the review for my final, and then Thursday is our last day. I've started pitching to everyone that we go to one of the mega-clubs in Ostia, just so we can say we did a beach club in Italy. Plus, I want to get completely shitty and discard every bit of Italian language I've absorbed in the past five weeks.

Friday I'm doing the Vatican in a very special way. I'm going with my uncle S. to check out the many artifacts in the museums, etc, and staying up all night in Roma afterwards. Have to pack everything first, and figure out what the fuck to do with the bottle of wine I bought. Shipping is expensive, but I know it won't survive being checked in my bag. I considered hollowing out the memory foam travel pillow my mom gave me for the trip, but it's not long enough to ensconce the neck of the bottle.

This way, though, I get to have one more madcap adventure in the city, rife with history, culture, and Hunter S. Thompson's preferred method of experiential interpretation. Then I can load my shit into a cab, get on a plane, and turn my brain off with sedatives for 9 hours. When I get to Newark airport it will be 11 AM the same day I left, and I can have breakfast in some shitty airport restaurant and pretend I don't have jetlag. It will probably still hit me, but at least I'll have started my circadian rhythm on the proper morning hour.

"Proper." American. Cheeseburgers. Football. MTV. Constantly going. Work. Bush. Texans.

Fuck. I don't want to go home. Just ship me BBQ, texmex, and my cats. You can all come visit me. I don't need the rest of the shit that comes with America. Maybe burning culture, but I can just as easily find that or create it here.

-Sean