Unbelievable

I chose this, I know.

But sometimes I feel like I don't know what happened, and someone else was making all the decisions the day that I became an adult. One day, I was a normal person, the next I was agreeing to move in with a family (mom and 12-year-old son) that I didn't know. Suddenly, yet before I moved in (after I'd agreed) they lived in a different house and the entire situation changed, only I lacked the mental capacity to process what was happening because I was uber-stressed by school. Then it was sharing a bathroom with a boy from Saudi Arabia. Then came puddles of water on the bathroom floor and head hairs all over the sink and floor every day. (Not to be stereotypical, but I'm not sure he's showered since I moved in a week ago--it's the mysterious smell emenating from his room, which is about 2 feet from my door.)

Then, today came.

A Japanese foreign-exchange student is taking J's room for a month, sometime between Aug and Sept.

It was that smile (Elaine, you know the one) - the plastic, oh-my-gosh-did-you-just-say-that tilt of the corners of my mouth. Noncommittal, yet plastered to my face. "Wow." was all I could muster. Not an excited exclamation, either. She heard the tone. She saw my eyes--steel, maybe.

As if my insensitive, formerly conservative-Christian now religiously-confused, wanna-be-my-best-friend, absolutely grating instructor wasn't overwhelming my ultra-thin nerves enough. As if being in school for a full calendar year won't make a person insane and unstable on its own. As if wanting to live alone, yet never quite getting it to work out won't drive a person mad in 25 minutes of sharing living quarters with a 12-year-old, no matter how nice, sweet, or cool he is.

Someday, I will look back on this patchwork family and say, That was such a fun way to live, such a random and interesting story to share. Right now, I'm pissed.

Should I not have been asked if it was okay to bump up the house load by one more person? Do I live here, too?

Last night I heard this when the TV came blaring on outside my room, "J, turn that down. Lana's studying. Other people live here, too, you know." And then, they all continued to talk loudly in that same area for the next hour.

I'm venting, it's true. My nerves are shot. I finished my final project of the year and now have a 2 week break, that will start tomorrow night after a pointless and aggravating class that the instructor refused to cancel, even though no other class on campus (except for Bird's Lithuanian) is still meeting. That's because all classes have reached the maximum hours required/allowed for a single course. And the instructors understand that people are losing their minds and getting a little vicious.

Everyone except my lovely instructor. Everyone on campus, except for him.