Feeling: tired. happy. tired.
Listening to: my voice. singing some wordless melody
Reading/Watching: "Teach Yourself Judaism" - Theology textbook. end of play, time for work.

I feel almost guilty for saying, this had to be the best vacation I have ever had. Most everyone else had a crappy week, and me? Chicago. Horse buggy rides, fancy restaurants, improv theater, museums, and room service. It's like being Marie Antoinette in Versailles while Paris starves.

There is something very surreal about being on vacation when a war begins.

On the one hand, it reaches everyone everywhere. The newspapers all have it on the front page, no matter where you are. The only difference is the name of the paper. San Antonio Express News, Chicago Tribune, Arkansas Gazette.

The weird part is how nothing else is normal. My family, my friends. They were all off living their usual lives while I hung in limbo, connected back to real life only by the thread of those newspaper headlines. The rest of my little sphere of existence was filled with museums, dinners out, always having change for taxis, and room service. Among all that, to be reading about troops, Scud missiles, surprise dawn attacks and protesters in the streets� it�s just plain odd. Reading about troops being called to arms, wondering if that includes the Air Force Boys. Reading about protesters brought down by police, wondering if that included Panda or the activists I knew from the school paper.

I feel very guilty about how easy it was to get lost in museums, how eagerly I absorbed myself in the Post-Impressionists and ignored the voice in the back of my head that counted down the hours.

I hate it. I hate all of it. There is no right answer here, no matter how much people will argue, because although it�s not an issue that can stand to be ignored any longer, I don�t want it to be acknowledged this way.

And since I don�t want to be completely depressing on a day when most everyone is being depressing...

The best part about the 30-hour train ride back was holing up in a booth in the lounge, surrounded by the front pages, eating pretzels and catching up with a world that kept spinning under my feet, whether I was fully grounded or floating in vacation dream-land.

The worst part was when a mid-thirties guy from Longview (home of the Texas Cheerleader Mom) decided to sit down next to me, on pretext of sharing the paper. Instead he spent an hour hitting on me, smiling with half his teeth missing. (To be fair, I�d estimate it was from a fistfight, not old age, which is even more *utterly desirable* (sarcasm).) And it gets even worse: Briana had to point out that he'd been hitting on me. I hadn't even realized it on my own, I'd just thought he was being really annoying while I was trying to read my paper.

Which makes me wonder, what kind of person flirts on a train? You are obviously both traveling, so you will probably never see this person again. It is utterly pointless. And don't you dare start about the fun of harmless flirting, because it's just retarded. Flirting is embarrassing and it's hard work and it's a delicate science I have NOT mastered and I'm not going to waste my time on some person who exists in my personal orbit for fifteen whole seconds.

Side note: Do I have �desperate� stamped on my head? Why is it always the toothless ones that decide to visit the purdy redheaded gal with the birthin� hips reading quietly in a corner?

Bri says I wasted a perfectly good chance to make up an identity and lie my pants off, pretending to be Jessie-Belle Johnson from Edna, Texas: milkmaid, farmer�s daughter, and homicidal nymphomaniac with six dead bodies in her checked baggage. In hindsight, she�s right.

We spent half the train ride doing homework, and the other half coloring with pencils and crayons, silly though it sounds. We found a bunch of flower-fairy coloring books in the gift shop of one of the museums, and at first considered getting some for the girls at church. Instead we got two for ourselves. The girls are getting stickers.

And I�ve souvenirs for everyone, so show the love, people!

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