Alternate title: How I bought myself four extra days to study for my midterm, for the low low price of three hours of my time, a bucket of sweat, six years off the end of my life, and a multitude of tears that somehow would not come.

So, where shall I begin to describe my day? Should I begin with eight o�clock this morning when we discovered that the Prince�s personal account was, once again, overdrawn by $40? No, let�s not start there... after that comes a tedious but otherwise uneventful four hours of studying for my Paper midterm this afternoon.

Let�s start at 1:40 in the afternoon, in the sweltering heat at the bus stop by the side of a busy road somewhere in Chicagoland. Note the time... 1:40. Because the bus is due there at 1:48, and I recently learned that the bus that runs at this particular time of day will always be on time (as opposed to 20 minutes or so late Every Fricking Day like the 5:00 bus.) So lately I�ve been busting my butt-cheeks to make certain I�m there at least 5 minutes early for the 1:48.

So I waited, squinching myself into the tiny patch of shade provided by some trees overhanging the sidewalk, sweltering in the 86-degree heat. Waiting, waiting, waiting. 2:00 came and went, I got bored, went to put on a little makeup, and promptly dropped my makeup sponge on the bird-shit encrusted sidewalk. Shit. Wait some more... then a bird decides to take a crap right on my hand. Shit! To protect myself from more poop-bombs, I moved out of the overgrown shady area and wait in the full sun, all the better to feel the crows� feet and carcinomas popping out all over my 38-year-old face. At 2:10 I was nearly mowed down by a idiot bicyclist who came flying out of the overgrowth on the sidewalk, startling the shit out of me and missing plowing into me by mere inches... but still no bus. Just as I pulled out my cell phone and finished angrily punching in the number for riders� services to find out what the hell happened to my ride (only to be put on hold,) my bus came flying around the corner and for the third time this week, drove straight past me. I shouted and waved my arm frantically and he finally stopped up the road a ways, forcing me to run to catch up. By then it was 2:15... my class was supposed to start at 2:30 and even if we made the best time possible, the best I could hope for at that point was to be less than 10 minutes late.

The bus drove about a mile up the road, made a turn or two and stopped at its usual stop near a shopping center. The driver then turned off the motor and in broken English, I heard him telling a guy sitting near the front that �the next bus will be here at 2:43.� What!? I couldn�t understand him well enough to ascertain whether our bus was broken down or what, but it was clear that he wasn�t going anywhere. So I called my instructor at school and explained the situation, that I was stuck on a broken-down bus and I�d probably be an hour late but I should be there to take the test by 3:30. �Oh, that�s a problem,� he said. �I�m starting the midterm at 3 and I have to be out of here by 4 for an appointment.�

Now, I�m a fast test-taker but in talking to him we decided it would be best not to try to rush it. Meanwhile, he�s running alternate times past me and none of them are working for me...ridiculous times, like, �How about 7:00 tomorrow morning?� Dude, I�ve got no car available and the buses don�t run that early! By this time I was getting all loud and starting to talk really fast and furious like I do when I�m upset, and he�s telling me, �Hey, hey, relax, we�ll figure something out� (which people are always doing when I get wound up, which annoys me because it makes me feel like some kind of a psycho whack-job overemotional idiot freak--but what the hell, they usually DO figure something out for me so I guess I shouldn�t knock it.) Finally he offered to let me take the test at 9:30 on Monday morning and I gratefully accepted. So then there was no point in even going to class today, so I grabbed my shit and stormed off the bus, still upset and frustrated and hot and tired, to walk the mile and a half back home. I didn�t even pack my bag back up properly from where I had rooted through to dig out my phone and phone numbers and stuff... I just snatched everything up, and with papers and my hat and my phone clutched in my hand and my backpack bag flapping open, I marched down the road in a huff, around the corner and down that road a ways before I calmed down and decided I better put my stuff away.

My hat, my papers go in the bag... my cell phone... hey, where the hell IS my cell phone? I thought I had it in my hand when I got off the bus, but now I�m thinking maybe I left it on the seat of the bus. So I run back towards the bus, around the corner and from there I can see that the bus is GONE. Did they come tow it, did he resume the route, did he limp it back to the bus garage? I do not know, but all I know at this point is my cell phone is ON THAT BUS! What to do, what to do? The first thing that pops into my head is that there is another bus due in about 10 minutes... I�ll have that driver radio the other driver and have him find my phone and keep it for me. Miraculously the other bus was on time, so I decided to go ahead and try to make my class after all. I was pretty sure he�d have me there by about 3:15, and I�ve never spent more than 45 minutes on any test since my GED when I was 18 so that should be plenty of time for the midterm.

The bus driver radioed the other driver, who apparently had tried to go on with the route and then broke down again at some other point along the way. He looked but didn�t find my phone... the bus driver even dialed my number to see if he could hear it on the bus but no dice.

Fuck...fuckety fuck fuck FUCK. I realized that I must have dropped my phone while walking... why, oh WHY did I not retrace my steps all the way back to where I got off the bus??? Because I�m impulsive and stupid, that�s why... two traits that are not improved by the addition of heat, tiredness, anger and frustration. At that point I just wanted to cry. Wanted to blubber like a fool, with great fat tears dripping down my face and off my chin into my cleavage... wanted to sob great heaving sobs of anger and frustration... but oddly, tears would not come. For the remainder of the bus ride I just sat there feeling in my stomach a knot of the deepest despair, for I am a drama queen at heart, tears or no.

So again I fretted... what to do, what to do? Well, there was no way to get back to where I likely had dropped the phone any time soon. My first thought was to go on to school and take the test, and then on the bus ride home, get off at the shopping center and retrace my steps. Or if I had half an ounce of brains (and I�m gratified to realize that I apparently do) I could go ahead and take advantage of the fact that my teacher does not EXPECT me to take the test today. Duh!

So I simply stayed on the bus... the hot, hot, un-airconditioned bus... for the remainder of the route and then back to my stop�over an hour and twenty minutes MORE of sweltering and worrying about that stupid phone. What happens when you lose a cell phone, anyway? I wondered. I think ours are leased from Cingular or something like that... I knew I�d have to call and get the service shut off right away so I wouldn�t wind up having some idiot calling China on my dime, but what about the phone itself? I�ll probably have to pay for it... I wonder how much they charge for that little piece of shit, anyway? A hundred bucks? Two hundred? Great... just what I fucking need when I�ve got tuition coming up on the 10th and our trip to St. Louis in two weeks, and we�re so broke right now that being $40 overdrawn causes a panic. And how do I go about replacing it... will there be another charge for a new phone? I can�t afford that... and I really kind of NEED my cell phone these days considering the remarkable degree of unreliability of both the suburban public transportation system and any coin-operated device in the vicinity of my school campus. Shit, shit, shit.

Finally, we arrived back at the shopping center and I got off the bus. It had by this time been three hours since I left my house this afternoon and all I�d accomplished is a sweaty, anxious 2-hour round-trip bus ride, and the loss of who knows how many hundreds of dollars worth of a crap-ass electronic device. And paid three dollars in bus fare for the privilege.

After I got off the bus I walked slowly along the same stretch of road I�d stomped along before, carefully sweeping my eyes along the ground for the cell phone I knew was not going to be there. It�s not a stretch of road that is well-traveled by pedestrians, as it goes towards the back of the shopping center rather than the front, but it�s far from desolate. Surely SOMEONE had happened by in the past couple of hours. I was grumbling to myself as I walked along, berating myself for my own dumbth�what kind of an idiot wouldn�t have retraced her steps in the first fucking place? Hopefulness faded quickly as I realized I was running out of road. I was almost to the corner that I had run to earlier, only to discover that the bus had already left... when I�ll be damned if I didn�t see my fucking phone lying there in the grass, happily soaking up the warm rays of the sun like it didn�t have a care in the world, its little digital face still registering the missed call from the bus driver! It was a joyous reunion... I picked it up tenderly, lovingly caressed its smooth, dark plastic body, still warm from the sun, and carefully slipped it into my breast pocket�the left one, right over my heart�before walking the mile and a half back to my home, with little to show for my afternoon except a new appreciation for my phone, much gratitude for my good fortune in being reunited with it once again, and a bonus four days of extra study time.

And thus endeth So-Charming�s Big Sweaty Adventure. Is there a moral? Yes�Don�t Be Such A Dumbass. It�s a good one, don�t you think?

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Crappy job crap, weird neighbor, and someone whose baby I apparently want to have - 2006-05-08
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