| (no subject) |
[Jun. 16th, 2007|05:48 pm] |
Finally! I get to the front of the line to check in for my appointment. I had all my documents and the photos ready to go, all organized in a folder. I produced them all when asked.
“I don’t think these photos will work…”
“OK, so can I just check in, go get new photos and come back at 10:30 for my appointment so I don’t have to wait in that line?”
“No, just go get the photos and come back here”
“…you’ve got to be kidding me”
“I’m afraid not sir”
SONOFABITCH!
So I had to leave the passport office, run to a photo place down the street; of course any place offering passport photos right next to a passport agency is going to cater solely to people in my predicament and is going to charge an arm and a leg. Sure enough, $48 for two pictures. I head back to the agency that now had a line snaking around the inside of the building. After waiting for what seemed like days in this hellhole I finally get to the front of the line. It’s now 11:30. I ‘check in’ for an appointment and am given a number just like every other poor sod in the joint. See it turns out an appointment in this office means exactly jack sh*t. I’ve been here for three hours and have nothing to show for my efforts but a couple of glossy 2x2 headshots.
Finally i get to the window, hand them all my documents and am told to return at 2:00pm to pick up my passport. I do touristy stuff for a couple hours and took some decent pics before returning to the office. I got there early (which really pissed them off, but i don't give a damn) and they were handing out a batch of passports. Approximately 1/5 passports that they hand out in this particular batch have some problem. Either a name is spelt wrong, it has the wrong addy etc. I was quite worried but when i finally picked mine up it was flawless. It was a big feeling of relief having that document in my hand. I flew home that night to spend less than 24 hours at home before leaving for rome. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jun. 6th, 2007|06:53 pm] |
This whole thing started early in the spring semester of ’07. My Italian professor, Angela Tumini, invited myself and a few others from her Italian classes to come to Italia over the summer and study at the Umbra Institute in Perugia, Umbria. Being an insane procrastinator, it took me forever to even decide to go, and once I had made that decision it took me even longer to get together the necessary paperwork and submit an application. It took me so long, in fact, that I submitted my application for the program on the very last day the study abroad office at ole miss was accepting them. Even then there were a few things I had not completed, but the remainder of the paperwork [course approval, passport…] was not due until the date of our orientation.
I was very fortunate that my professor invited me on this trip, as I was doing an amazing job of goofing off throughout the semester and ended up with what should have been far less than satisfactory marks in the course. However, in her infinite wisdom, Dr. Tumini thought the interests of everyone involved would be best served if she gave my grade a nudge in the northerly direction.
So the date of the orientation comes, and I still haven’t gotten the dean of the business school to sign off on this trip, nor have I spoken to a guidance counselor about where these courses would fit in the grand scheme of my college career. We sit down at a very nice conference table in the conference room on the third floor of the Martindale Student Services building and get through a rather plain orientation. I’m glad I went, mostly because it was mandatory, but also because I did get to know a few of the kids I’d be spending five weeks with in a foreign country. We’ll get to them later. I got a new copy of the dean’s office approval form (had to get a new one only partly because of my pension for procrastination, partly because my car turns into a black hole on the weekends. It’s the darnedest thing, it eats important pieces of paper, but leaves all the garbage) I signed on the “only sign here after you’ve spoken with an advisor” line, and dropped it off at the dean’s office.
The next day I stopped by the local pharmacy and had passport photos taken. I needed 12 photos; two for the actual passport application I had yet to file, and for some reason the Umbra Institute needed 10. Even at a fair $7.95 for a pair of photos, six pair was going to cost me some change. I got the two photos made and decided I’d use those for the actual passport application, and headed straight for the handy photo capable printer my parents bought me, whose photo printing capabilities had, up to this point, done me absolutely no good. After going through a few pages a photo paper I realized that this thing wasn’t going to get the job done. I needed something a bit more powerful. Three $2 sheets of 4x6 photo paper and 10 minutes at the Wal-Mart digital photo printer and I had my photos for the folks at Umbra.
After getting those pictures made I headed to campus. On my way to drop the photos off to Vanessa, the [person] in charge of the trip, I picked up the deans approval form and just like that I only had one thing left to complete: Obtain a passport.
Now this is where the fun really started, and is the reason I’m writing this at all. (Not to mention if my grandmother reads this she’s going to be insanely excited to know I kept a journal while traveling.) So, having already been over the fact that I’m a professional procrastinator, I don’t think I have to go into many details about how many times I was ‘going to’ drop off my passport application at the post office.
I never did get around to it. See, they have these passport offices in major cities that will issue you a passport the same day if you’re traveling within 14 days. I just though “why the hell not.” And waited to do it that way. So I waited, and waited until 14 days from the date of my departure, and called the automated appointment line to try and get an appointment set up to get this most valuable of documents. The first few times I called I waited what seemed like eternity as a recording of some stuffy nosed New Yorker explained, “we are experiencing an unprecedented demand…” I mean really, they could have just said we’re busy, call back later, but the damn thing went on for at least 5 minutes. (I learned quickly that using the touch-tones to navigate menus I’d later memorize would skip the monologue.) I didn’t get through that first day, and didn’t try the next. After all, I had 14 days to make this appointment. I finally got through when I called a few nights later at around 3:00am. I had a rather stark awakening when making this appointment; I was leaving the 24th, and the earliest available appointment was the 22nd at 10:30 am in the Washington DC passport agency. I hadn’t accepted an appointment so fast in my life. I was afraid if I’d waited another 30 seconds someone might take that appointment and I’d be up a stinky creek without an oar. So, I was headed to DC.
I should probably explain something before I go into the DC trip. The reason I was able to make this appointment and not have to worry about transportation from Jackson, MS to Washington DC is this: my mother is an above wing agent for Delta Airlines. Her flight benefits extend to me as I am a full time student, and still considered dependant upon my parents. Of course, the down side of traveling on those benefits is that it’s always travel on a standby basis. If there’s a seat open, hop on. If not, better luck next flight.
In making flight reservations for the 22nd, I found that nothing from Jackson would get me to DC in time to make a 10:30 appointment. With no chance of finding a later appointment on the same day I was forced to try and make it to DC, or at least Atlanta, the night before.
So I hop on a 5:15pm flight to Atlanta then take the 7:30pm to Reagan National where I would sleep in the terminal, and wake up with plenty of time to explore the city and make it to my appointment. Now, anyone that has done a large amount of travel through Reagan National is now laughing at me. There have been plenty of times where I had missed a connection and was forced to sleep in the terminal in Atlanta, or pull up a piece of carpet in the concourse at Dallas/Ft. Worth. I had never been to DC before, but assumed Reagan wouldn’t be too hard to find a place to pass out for a few hours. I was dead wrong. The airport is criminally small, and there was a bunch of construction going on in the concourse so I had to leave and head into the airport proper. All the benches there had armrests, and that made it impossible to find a comfortable way to sleep in them. I ended up crashing on the marble tile floor. I spent a mostly sleepless night in Reagan national airport before getting up at 5:00am to catch the first train out of the airport and into downtown DC. At the very least, my generous amount of free time in the airport allowed me to become familiar with the layout of the city’s metro rail system; This made it very easy to get where I needed to go. $7 on a metro ticket got me everywhere I needed to go that day.
I’d seen many pictures of our nation’s capitol and it’s various landmarks, but none of hat prepared me for the real thing. The city itself is a very busy commercial center. Government is nowhere near the only industry in the district. There are sky rises and office buildings everywhere. After wandering aimlessly through a maze of buildings, I stopped at a star bucks and grabbed a cup of coffee and a street map. I decided it might be a good idea to locate the passport office so I would not have any trouble finding it when it got around the time of my appointment. It wasn’t a far walk from a metro station on the northwest side of town (Farragut west for anyone familiar with DC), so I grabbed my coffee and headed that way. It was about 6:00am when I got to the passport office. There were two people sitting outside waiting, and the posted hours on the office door were 8:00am – 3:00pm. Two hours before this office even opened up and there was already a line forming. I thought about staying, but I figured since I had an appointment it wouldn’t matter, and went and did some more exploring.
I walked down to Pennsylvania ave, and made my way to the 1600 block. The Whitehouse itself wasn’t very impressive from the outside. The lawn, however, is immaculate. It looks like the fairways at Annandale the day before the first round of The Masters. It was a very well manicured lawn. They were setting up a press junket in the south lawn, and I got some interesting looks from the police stationed on Penn ave when I poked my camera over the fence to snap a few shots. I went through the ellipse and took a few pictures of the statues there, and poked around the treasury building. The statues around the ellipse were impressively large, and the treasury building had it’s own strange allure I still can’t explain. It’s a beautiful building.
I wasn’t very far from the passport office, so I went to check on that line. By now it was about 7:15 am, still 45 minutes before the joint was supposed to open, and there were already 17 people in line. So I decided for the better interests of everyone involved, appointment or not I should probably stand in this line. I’m very very glad I did. The DC passport office is like the federal version of a DMV. No matter when you get there you’re going to wait in a line, appointments don’t matter, and there’s always a baby crying in the background. They opened the office 30 minutes early, so at 7:30 the cadre of people gathered was led into the building by a way-to-friendly to be a security guard security guard. He was the kind of nice that makes you want to hit something; I don’t know how he got a gig as a security guard. I waited in that first line (yes, Indeed I had to wait more than once, in fact three times) for at least an hour and a half before I got to the window to ‘check in’ for my appointment. I had all my documents and my photos ready to go….but this place is closing up, so I’ll continue the story in the next entry. |
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| in italia |
[May. 29th, 2007|12:55 pm] |
So i'm in italy for the next 5 weeks doind an intensive italian language program. It's a full immersion course in Perugia, away from all the tourist centers where it's still rare to find an italian that speaks any english.
I'm rooming with a kid named Jay from Georgetown, and two ragazze italiane. Siete studentesse all'Universita di Perugia. It's really a good time. The two italians don't speak any english, so it forces me to use my italian all day every day for the simplest tasks. The way the course has gone so far i'm confident i'm going to come away from this trip with a decent command of the language, and be able to function day to day without any english. There is also a complete lack of any grocery store chain. Shopping is almost an all day experience as you have to go to two or three different markets to do all your shopping. It's definitely loads cheaper than eating out every night. The food at the restaurants is amazing, and comparatively cheap, but the italian economy took a hit when they went to the Euro from the Lira.
I've been here since the 23rd, and have journaled all my travels. When i get a chance i'll put them up here, but for now i have to go to class.
Ciao! |
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| Inspired |
[Apr. 8th, 2007|10:37 am] |
Finally got around to getting out. I went and saw 300 last night. It kind of had the same effect on me as 'The Passion' had on a lot of christians; they all knew the story, had grown up with it, but once it was put on film and they actually saw it, they had a newfound respect for exactly what the messiah went through. Coming from a greek family, the story of Thermopylae is something i've heard since i was little, it's just a part of my history. While not entirely historically accurate, as the movie was based on a comic, it's not incredibly far off. I've always been proud of my heritage, but it's nice that others got to see how badass my ancestors were.
mo'lon la've
PS: michelle, send me a text or leave me your number. Old phone broke, need them digits again. |
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| One of Those |
[Dec. 8th, 2006|04:15 am] |
Busy much? Or is it just me? The last time i posted anything was way back in october. Finals week is drawing to a close. OI have my last two finals tomorrow. Took a break from the grind that is finals week to do a small survey; just to get my mind off of schoolwork for a while.
(Sorry for the lack of links to accompany the books. Just Google 'em if nothing else.)
One book that changed your life.
I really don't know that any one book has made a huge impact in my life. "Who moved my cheese" is a damn good motivational book to read. I definitely recommend it. It's short and sweet.
One book that you’ve read more than once.
I'll steer away from anything obvious with this answer. Chop Shop by Tim Downs was just as good the 2nd time around.
One book you’d want on a desert island.
Survive on a Desert Island by Claire Llewellyn
One book that made you laugh.
George Singleton's The Half-Mammals of Dixie. I dare you to read "Richard Petty Accepts National Book Award" during a church service.
One book that made you cry.
I can't recall a book ever making me cry.
One book that you wish had been written.
Expanding your Empire, a complete guide by Augustus Caesar
One book that you wish had never been written.
Anything authored by anyone that deems themself a rap/hip-hop artist.
One book you’re currently reading.
The Mysterious Secret of The Valuable Treasure by Jack Pendarvis. How's that for redundancy? It's a collection of short stories. Very Funny.
One book you’ve been meaning to read.
The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century. It's about globalisation. The lowering of trade and political barriers and the technical advances that have made it possible to do business, or almost anything else, instantaneously with billions of other people across the planet. |
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| (no subject) |
[Oct. 16th, 2006|01:07 am] |
So, it's been a long time since i've actually posted anything really worth reading, and quite a few things have happened.
First, the photo above. If you didn't know already, i transferred up to the University of Mississippi at the start of the fall semester. I'm studying business and am contemplating going to law school once i finish my BA. The doors law school would open for me are many, and are very large, and some are platinum. Assload of school though, and a larger, oprah sized assload of debt.
I live with a good friend of mine, Joel, that i worked with at The Buckle a few years ago. We've got a really nice Apt in a complex called The Links. Got our own 9 hole golf course. I love golf. Especially free golf. Not only do i live here, i also work here. That's how i play free golf, instead of the $3.something golf the rest of the residents play. Drawing from the construction background i picked up in Jackson, I work maintenance on the golf course and around the complex. It's really a unique blend of riding around on glorified lawn mowers, maintenance on the apartments, and riding the clock. It's easy work, the pay isn't great, but i spend no money on gas commuting to work, they knock 20% off of my rent, and cable is $17. Can't really beat it.
I'm taking a SCUBA class this semester. I actually just took the "final" (it was a joke, free A anyone?) last week. There's a trip to some place in Alabama scheduled for everyone in the class to do their first open water dive and actually get certified. Attendance for the rest of the semester is pretty much optional, since all there is to do is strap on the gear and go f*k off in the pool for a while. It's been a really kickass class, and i enjoy diving a lot more than i thought i would.S
Sateesh would be proud, i'm in a computer science class. I'm actually learning to program with formal training, instead of teaching myself enough code to get by. We're learning Java. It's actually rather straightforward. Nifty language, and probably the only one i'll bother to learn since i don't have any more core computer requirements to fill. I wasn't meant to be a code monkey.
Business Calculus sucks. nothing else to say really.
I'm in a 201 level Physics class, so it's not quantum, or nuclear science by any means. It's all common sense stuff. And yet, it shocks me that some of the people in this class made it this far in life, much less school. If you just stop and think logically, this class is a breeze. It's probably the easiest class on my schedule (besides SCUBA, of course).
Liberal Arts: Contemporary Short Story Authors. I took this class so I wouldn't have to take comp II. The professor is an author that lives here in Oxford: Tom Franklin. Not a bad writer, not a bad teacher either. This is probably the most fun class on my schedule (besides SCUBA, of course). I even have the professor's cell phone number. Tom (the professor asks us to call him by his first name) called me the other day when i was on the golf course to tell me i had a verb tense shift in the paper i submitted two days prior.
Italian. I took this class for three reasons: 1) I set a goal to learn a second language by age 25. 2) It fulfills my last core requirement. 3) Spanish was full. Surprisingly enough i'm actually learning the language. Once the professor teaches you a phrase, some vocab, whatever, she will not say it in english again for the rest of the term. It's been an effective teaching strategy. Though i'm struggling a bit, i may go on to take a second semester. This is probably the hardest class on my schedule.
6 courses - 17 credit hours. And i work 5 days a week. I stay pretty busy these days.
In my spare time, i've managed to get addicted to a new MMO. EVE Online. Amazing, amazing, amazing. Alas, it's 2:00am. I'm off to bed. More about EVE later. |
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