Matilda

I'm. SO. HAPPY.

But I'll wait until later to tell ya why.

I woke up at 10 a.m. this morning. Mmmm...now that's what I call sleeping in. Actually, I think I'm the only one who calls sleeping-until-10 a.m. "sleeping in." All of my friends sleep until past noon on the weekends. Anyway, I got up and left for Greenville.

I was worried about driving because of all the rain, but it wasn't so bad. Definitely wasn't as bad as the time I drove through downtown Greenville in torrential rainfall.

After church, my friend Jenny wanted to hang out, but my father wouldn't let her come over to our house so I had to leave her at church. My brother called me while I was filling up on gasoline and apologized for my father's behavior.

"It's just because he doesn't get to spend a lot of time with you and having someone there...gets in the way of that."

Yeah. Like I would want to hang out with my father anyway. I can tell I have no more affectionate feelings for him considering that I call him "my father" instead of "Dad."

"No, I understand," I told him. "He's sick and stressed out and he doesn't want to deal with this." By this, I mean Jenny coming over.

Anyway, I ate lunch with the family and then scrounged around the storage shed for "supplies."

Jenny and I did get to hang out later on. We met up at the mall and hit up all the preppy stores so she could find what she called a "plain shirt." I also dragged her into any store that had a sale but, of course, being the cheapskate I am, I didn't buy anything. I did finally purchase something at the movie/CD entertainment store, but it's...um...things I can't mention here.

I was surprised because Jenny and I were discussing music in the entertainment store and we share several commonalities in our music taste. I have always thought that her music taste was identical to my brother's, but she likes a lot of the same boy bands I do. Huh, you learn something new every day.

Anyway, it was raining by the time Jenny's father picked her up and she asked him to give me a ride to my car. She freaked out when she realized how far away I had parked and the fact that I walked there from the rain. HONESTLY, it wasn't THAT far away. I parked at the next store over. I think Jenny is just so used to being driven everywhere so she thinks ten yards is far away.

"When you walk half an hour to school every day, now THAT'S far away," I told her. Of course, she would never walk that far to school.

Finally, I came back to Clemson and immediately set to cooking dinner. It took an hour, but was well worth it. I also cooked enough so that now I won't have to cook for the next three days or so.

After homework, I finally got around to reading my friends' blog posts. Ben, the modern gentleman, wrote about his gaming escapades. I liked how he used words like "ballin" and "own my face." Very characteristic of him. Melissa's blog posts about today made me yearn for long, rainy beginning-of-autumn days spent with friends around campus. At least I got to hang out with Jenny since I won't see her again for the next six weeks.

Craig's post was full of whatever "blarg" is. He wrote about how none of his friends writes ten paragraphs (single-spaced, left flush) about how awesome he is. Well, I'll show him.

Lastly, the blogs make me wish I had friends like that to spend time with and share adventures. I feel like Matilda Wormwood sitting in her room reading about heroes and knights and princesses and dragons. How she longed for a friend like those she read about in her books! The only way she could escape her family life was to immerse herself into books, stories that writers have sent out into the world...like ships onto the sea.