italia

April 22, 7:40 p.m./ April 23, 1:40 a.m.

Here I am, a few hours into our DC-Milan Alitalia flight, coming down after a minibottle of terrible red wine and a disastrous loss to Brian in a heated card game of War. Ah, the Italian life. Shitty wine and card games. Tommy is listening to his ipod with his eyes closed - he’s somewhat irate because apparently gameboys are not allowed on Alitalia flights. Neither are dvd players, or CD players, but ipods are cool. The logic behind that eludes me, but whatever. I am happy watching an old episode of Friends, and Spanglish is coming up - yippee! I didn’t think it could get much better after the dinner of mystery meat - one stewardess hesitantly told Brian it was chicken, another told Julie, “Ehhh...I theenk turkee.”

Anyway, I have been so retardedly anal about every single aspect of this trip - sent out something like 417 emails about procedures, what to bring, special tips, what not to forget, etc. FOUR HUNDRED AND SEVENTEEN EMAILS. AND I FORGOT FOUR HUNDRED AND SEVENTEEN THINGS.

Well, two, to be more exact. Thursday night I came home from work and started packing. The procedure went something like this: la la la packing is fun, la la la, let’s bring five pairs of shoes (literally - my pumas, a pair of flip flops, two pairs of flats, and my strappy cork wedge platforms - the pairs of shoes were not among the number of forgotten things) - la la la packing OH FUCK WHERE TH E FUCKING HELL IS MY PASSPORT LA FUCK LA LA.

For about ten solid minutes I tore my bedroom apart, mostly freaking out about the fact that my friends were going to make so much fun of me because that very day I had sent out an email strongly reminding everybody that they better check they had their passports or else maybe, just maybe, they would go to hell.

Fortunately I remembered soon enough that I had left it at work, in my scanner. Yes, in the scanner. Why doth I scan the passport? So that in case I lose it in a foreign country, I have a copy uploaded to my email and can charm the foreign officials with a smile and a .jpeg file. Yeah. Didn’t figure I’d have to worry about losing it in America first.

Secondly, and much worse - I’m pretty sure that left back in the apartment, plugged into an unsuspecting wall, is the charger and battery for my camera. (Note - on the very last night of the trip, I found the charger and battery for my camera deep within the bowels of my suitcase. Am massive idiot.) I am SO UTTERLY DEVASTATED about this. I go to italy 75% to be able to take pictures and post them on my blog. So, crap. At this point I’m not sure I’ll be able to take any lovely photos of flowers, or duomos, or me doing sommersaults after drinking a bottle of chianti. The disappointment, I feel it too. Tommy has promised to scour shops with me to try to find a replacement batter, but I’m not holding out hope.

Anyway, I had best stop writing because I just belched out an entry so boring that I want to smother myself with an Alitalia pillow. And oh yeah - one of the male flight attendants, we have decided, looks like a pirate. Or at least a Uva Cavalier mascot. I will hopefully have stories-a-plenty for my next post. (I just said post. I am writing with a pen and paper and I am delusional and think I’m blogging. Where’s the publish button?)

UPDATE: if you thought perhaps i was tipsy while writing this, you were right. one or two bottles of tiny airplane wine, at extremely high altitudes, can do evil things. you should have seen me on a flight with my friend claire from milan to DC - we had one tiny bottle of white wine, a video of justin timberlake's "rock your body" came on tv, and hilarity (and shameful public dancing-in-our-seats) ensued.