Hello,

This blog is probably going to be dormant for the next several months as I embark on an adventure abroad. Primarily I will be staying in Roma, Italia, although I'm not there yet. To follow me on my journeys, check out my abroad blog at http://www.justabroadineurope.blogspot.com/. The abroad blog is much more candid and informal than this blog, but I might occasionally throw in the odd bit of prose. The photos are interesting, at the very least.

Thanks for reading!
<3Anni

The signs that read "NO PASSING ZONE" remind me of the small rubber hammers doctors use to check the reflexes in the knees of small children.

It happened in a moment.
Pain. Searing, biting, ripping pain. I've never before felt a pain so wrenching.
It sizzles through my body, coursing through my legs and arms, building up behind my eyes. My knees ache. My head throbs. My fingers tingle. It is so unexpected, so startling and unwelcome. My vision is blurred, my hearing is as though my ears are full of cotton, my mouth is dry.
My thoughts are fuzzy.
Ow ow ow ow ow ow ow.
Ironically, this vocalization is all I can think. My brain cannot even begin to process it into speech.


The next moment, the tears come. They are cartoonishly huge in size, rolling out of my eyes and coursing down my cheeks. I don't think to brush them away, because my body is already out of my control, every muscle in my chest, lungs, throat, and back seizing up and releasing in soul-shaking sobs. My mouth contorts as I cry, choking out sounds I haven't made since childhood, and my hands move automatically to cover it as my sobs turn into something more like the word "No." My nose streams. My legs snap together, my elbows tight against my chest, my fingers crush my glasses against the bridge of my nose, and my feet rise up to the edge of my chair, an attempt at an in-chair fetal position. A position that screams for protection. There's no one here to see.


So cutting, so exquisite, this pain. It consumes me, controls me, completely disables me for hours at a time.
It's something that's tragically common, something I never hoped to feel, the textbook definition of a broken heart.

Sometimes people watch so closely to try to make a right on red, they completely miss it when their light turns green.

I'm not really prone to doing unreasonable, regrettable things in fits of rage or sorrow. For this I am thankful. Please excuse my obscurity.

We have very regular class times every day -- 8 o'clock, 10 o'clock, noon, 2 o'clock, 4 o'clock, 6 -- when students stream from the residents halls on the East side of campus to their classes on the West. I love walking against the tide, West to East, letting my fellow students swirl around me, chattering about classes, girls, boys, parties, food, everything, bobbing their heads to the music that flows up from the mp3 players clipped to their backpack straps or hidden, snug, inside their pockets. The ratio at the school is so evident as I walk opposite the flow -- three girls for to every seven guys -- and everyone's eyes are roving. Sexuality is like a living thing within this crowd. I can almost see it snaking its way between the unwashed, reeking, geekoid engineering kids, the bubbling-with-energy greeks, labels bright on their chests, the colorful otaku with their multi-hued hair and baggy pants, and the vast majority of people who fall somewhere in between these all-too-evident, walking stereotypes. College students. We fall so easily into categories, even more so at this school. We are mostly young. We are mostly unburdened by spouses, children, mortgages, and jobs. We are mostly relying on our parents. We are mostly engineers-to-be. We are mostly all completely different from one another, even as we are similar. It's all too big to ponder, as it nears 2 o'clock and the crowd thins down to a few half-jogging stragglers, late for class, and I hope desperately to myself that there will be mail in my tiny rectangular prism of a mailbox as I shuffle up the steps to the mailroom door.