This trip was fun. I flew down to Las Vegas from Seattle. Leaving home, I was late to the airport because of weather; the plane was also late to the airport so it was all right. I would have missed my connection in Long Beach CA so JetBlue bought me a ticket on Alaska. Their systems aren't integrated, so JetBlue had to cut a paper check to Alaska. (Fun fact: This check ($130) was approximately equal to the total fare I paid ($140).)

When I arrived, I came in several hours earlier than planned, so I was able to meet John Covert at his gate, which was in the same gate complex as I landed in.

Here should be paragraphs and paragraphs about visiting Death Valley, the Las Vegas Strip, and Hoover Dam. If I'm perseverant enough, I'll write them tomorrow on the airplane. In the meantime I'm skipping forward to tonight.

Aw fuck, I'm lonely and screwed.

In which I bitch about not knowing how to do things, and not wanting to spend money.

This afternoon (Wednesday afternoon), after I arrived at the airport and John departed on his way home to Massachusetts, it started to snow. Watching with a mixture of amusement and fascination, I commented on it to my friends over the free intertubes provided by the airport. Of course, when the departure time of my flight rolled around, there was a line of twenty in front of the departure counter, because the flight was cancelled. Sucks.

This was my first time being screwed on my own, I ought to say. I don't really have developed coping strategies, and I've never really done things on my own. Like an adult who doesn't know how to read but copes by coming up with excuses to get others to read for him, I've been getting along by travelling with friends who are more experienced or just more confident than I am. I've got some measure of confidence in my abilities, but not really that much. I just don't like to do things that need to happen. I just have trouble with maintaining myself, such as making appointments with doctors and so forth. So, I don't know, I had trouble with getting a hotel room and finding transportation to same. John was wonderful and threewayed me with an agent who helped me take care of registering the room, but I had to find my own transport.

Vegas has nothing in the way of public transit, and I didn't know any of it anyway. Cabs are a new animal to me, so first I looked for the shuttle bus terminal. This wasn't at all forthcoming. I bit the bullet and took a cab to this place, called “Tuscany Suites & Casino”. Cabs are expensive, damnit. The room's less than $22 after taxes (which is amazing, btw), but they make up for it by charging out the ass for everything else. About the only thing that's not an extra charge is an electrical outlet, and the bed. Room service is a $10 minimum, and everything costs $9 (clever, yes?). Local and toll-free calls are a $1 per call charge, while toll is a whopping $7 connect fee, plus AT&T rates, plus a surcharge of unspecified size. Wow. It's as if phone calls cost money again.

I don't really want to get dinner (this city isn't walkable at all, and the hotel food is expensive), so I'm considering just eating the rest of the package of oreos I have sitting next to me. Not healthy, yeah, whatever. Don't know what I'll do about breakfast tomorrow, maybe I'll skip dinner today and have oreos then. Breakfast is $9 delivered.

I don't know what there is to listen to on the radio, but there doesn't seem to be any dance station; it's all Latino music and christmas carols. This city is so focused on extracting money from people, and it's impossible to navigate in a reasonable amount of time on foot or transit. I don't want to ever live here.

Edit before I got to post this: Andy said he'd pay the $13 for wifi so I wouldn't be so lonely. *hugs* Andy, you're amazing and I love you.

I got nothing done today. This is becoming a depressing pattern.

Well, not nothing. I went to class and paid a marginal amount of attention to the lectures. I went to work and did about two hours' worth. I had bubbletea with Kimberly. Then I dumped on her, sort of.

Came home and had some cookies, then went into my room as always. I've been online for 6 hours almost continuously now. Somewhere in the middle I pried all the keycaps off my keyboard and rearranged them.

What have I done? I've poked around on okcupid, talked on IRC, and checked mail too much. IRC is dead these days, but especially on Friday afternoons. Nobody was really on any IM much, either.

I'm just stuck in a rut.

Class ends in something like three weeks, and I'm not ready for it. I don't have a job, and apparently it's too late to find anything fulfilling.

I think the problem is that I'm letting the guilt from not actually doing schoolwork build up, which is uncharacteristic of me. The guilt, not the not doing schoolwork. I usually don't care.

I need hugs, damnit, not encouragement.

Mood: melancholy

Working in a gift shop at a major tourist attraction leads to some interesting thoughts. Never mind the people who can't speak English, the drooling toddlers, etc. I'm disgusted by the level of waste in our society. I'm selling things which are completely unnecessary. They're mostly cheap trinkets, useless toys, and so forth. Most of this merchandise is likely to break within a year, if it even makes it that far. It's more likely to end up thrown away. Very little of it is useful in the first place. (How many shot-glasses can you use? Do you need another refrigerator magnet? Is it even possible to put all twenty of those iron-on patches on your clothes without looking like a whore?)

And yet yesterday I sold a thousand dollars worth. On Wednesday. That's a slow day. At one of four registers.

And here's a completely unrelated fact, to round out your day! Every day, the city of Seattle sends a mile-long train full of trash to eastern Oregon.

Math final today! 1:30 in KNE 130, and I don't have my notes sheet. Or a calculator. I assume that my notes sheet from the midterm is wrapped around my sliderule, which I can't find. Augh! I'm going to SO fail this test. And it's all my fault ... if I don't pass Math126, though, I can't get into CE (or CS) without being totally awesome. And I don't think I'm awesome enough.

Plus my Qubic Project is due today at 11pm. I've done a lot of work on it (like, more than my share), but my fellow group members are the last-minute type. Come ON. My grade, it's being 'eld 'ostage! I can at least hope for an adjustment during the meeting with our TA. Especially if my (as yet nameless) group members decide to turn it in late. I'll have you know that they turned in the halfway checkpoint a whole ten seconds before the deadline. I had finished my part of the code two days earlier.

On the bright side, today is the end of my freshman year. I have a final on Thursday, but other than that it's over. Hooray!

• Universith of Washington: Accepted
• Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute: Accepted
• Caltech: Rejected
• M. I. T.: Rejected
• Carnegie-Mellon University: Rejected

So now you know.

I'll most likely be attending the UW. Strike that. Almost certainly.

I was going to say something but then I forgot. I hate it when that happens.

I am *this close* (like this --> || ). I'll tell you what it is when I get there.

I'm SOOO glad that I was introduced to LJ before the MySpace virus infected me.

I shall make a few new userpics for myself.

Last week I

um

she said, "No."

Damn.

The LJ thingy has basically changed totally. I bet that thousands of people are doing exactly this right now: "Aaack! They changed it!!!" Well, now it's my turn.

Aaack! They changed everything!!!

Post whatever you truly think about me, anonymously. Hopefully something interesting will come of this. I won't use IPs to figure out who posts what. Promise!