1. Give yourself ten days of living with your mom in your hometown, expecting that you’ll spend them watching TV and leisurely packing to move four states away.

2. Forget that over the course of the last two years you have actually made a lot of really excellent friends, all of whom will want to see you for various meals and parties and gatherings, thus ensuring that you will be

3. Driving/Metroing all over the metropolitan area to fulfill various social engagements, while still leaving to time to

4. Take a five-hour road trip in a normal-sized car with three other adults, plus a baby in a car seat, to see your cousin graduate from college. This will entail

5. Spending a night and a day in southern Virginia, sleeping at a place called “The Budget Inn” which resembles another well-known motel called “The Bates Motel.” Take a lukewarm shower and shiver under your threadbare cover next to a nightstand with NO CLOCK RADIO.

(Also, the car ride gives you enough time to memorize every single Wiggles song, ever. “Fruit salad! Yummy yummy!” will be stuck in your head until the day you die.)

(Furthermore, you forget, for the 9,678th time, that you are Irish, and basically have the melanin of Powder. You neglect to put sunblock on your bare forearms and get a frigging SUNBURN, in 75-degree weather, on the three inches of skin exposed beneath your cardigan sleeves. Feel pathetic and extremely Caucasian. Say to your boyfriend, “Look at what a honky white cracker you’re dating,” as you point to your flaming red wrist, and laugh when he calls you his little gringa.

6. Spend one day hiking and picnicking with your new sort-of boyfriend at a nearby mountain, after getting the two of you incredibly lost on the drive there, because you have sworn that you knew the way but you are actually AN IDIOT, although he is incredibly nice about the whole thing and does not get mad but instead says, “Of course I don’t mind - it’s fun hanging out with you, even if it’s just driving aimlessly all over the county.”

(At this point you have still not packed, even though you are supposedly leaving the state in five days.)

7. Spend Sunday looking at houses with the sort-of boyfriend and his realtor and his uncle, feeling very weird and pretend-grown-uppy, because the last time you looked for a place to live for yourself, your main priorities were 1–Does the neighborhood have a lot of gunfire, and 2–Is there room in this apartment to fit both a bed AND A SOFA, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD.

(You are not moving in with said boy; you are only tagging along in the house-hunt. Do not be frightened, Internet peoples! I have not become fully domesticated yet!)

8. Get peer-pressured into testing your crappy high school Spanish out on the boy’s Spanish-speaking-only uncle. Say to him, “Qual es tu color favorito?” ("What is your favorite color?") while the boy and the realtor struggle not to laugh outright. Blush like a tomato.

(The uncle is a good sport. You now know that his favorite color is blue (azul). Yours, you tell him, is green (verde).)

(Curse you, public school education! Why am I such a language numbskull?)

9. Vow to start studying Spanish in your free time.

10. Spend a blissful night at the Motel 6 IN YOUR TOWN (if that is not seedy, I don’t know what is) with the boy, because he too is living with his mom while he looks at houses to buy and you need privacy for those long discussusions about Cartesian geometry and earth science, and by that of course I mean premarital relations.

11. Wake up feling dirty, but in a good way.

12. Meet your dad and stepmom for lunch downtown. Your cell phone rings four times in one hour, which is more calls than you usually get in a month, so you feel special and beloved. However this means more running around and social engagements and one-last-times with various disparate friends.

Boo hoo…NOT. I know. Everyone should have such problems.

(However, as of now it is Monday night, and I leave Wednesday morning, and I have not packed one damn thing.)

What this boils down to

You guys, back when I was employed (two weeks ago), I spent all day, every day, on a computer. Some part of that time would be spent checking my email and looking at and commenting on you guys’s blogs. But in the past nine days, I have not been on a computer for more than about an hour, total.

It is a completely weird feeling. My email is all crazy backed up and I have not been going to see any of your sites or doing any posting, at all. I am really sorry if I haven’t written people back like I said I would! Please don’t get mad! I’ll be back soon.

I am actually getting really sad/scared about moving now. I mean, all this time I thought I hated DC and that I’d be just thrilled to go, but now that it is down to the last days here, I’m getting really morose and emotional. I have no clue why I ever imagined it would be easy to leave all my friends. I am even going to be sad about leaving my mom, and she is mad as a hatter. For real.

Plus I really like John. I really really really like him. Things just keep getting better and better with him, and even though it is sort of crazy that we’ve only known each other for three weeks now, we are going to try and do the long-distance thing. Apparently flights between DC and Savannah are like $150, so hopefully this is a relationship that can be maintained.

I want it to work so badly. I just feel so good when I’m around him. I really like myself when I’m around him. He makes me feel beautiful and funny and smart and kind, and a girl can get used to that, you know?

I am trying to remember, way way back a year and a half ago when I applied for this program, what it was that I was intending to do with it, so that I can focus on that and remember what I’m making this huge change for. I’ve sort of lost sight of that goal in the midst of all these details of moving and saying goodbyes and wrapping things up, and I need to focus on that again. I need to trust whatever it was in me that orginally set this whole adventure into motion so that I don’t stay bogged down in all the things that are ending now. I don’t know. It’s all just making me very pensive.

So, that’s what is going on in my head lately. Once I get to my dad’s house in Georgia, where I’ll be for a couple of weeks at least, I’ll have a lot of spare time to get back into reading everyone’s sites again. I hope you guys are doing well.