Sunday of March 6, 2011 (Anticipation Day)

My heart is running a marathon. The noise of a spectator can be heard, reading off the names of the lucky finishers. I could see my self crossing that line that separated long hours of studying, and the best five days of my life. Everything about this trip made my mind blow up. The fact that I was going to fly in an airplane put me in shock. The good kind of shock, like when the people on game shows find out that they won something. I think this was what alienated me from the rest of my class. I hadn't been on an airplane in so long, flying was much more meaningful. A lot of my classmates have been on a plane, or even to California in the past year. I was not thinking about any of these things. The only thoughts that were banging my head was leaving Austin, Texas and fitting all of this junk in my backpack.

I was going to be gone for five days. This would be the longest trip away from home (I think) ever. This would also be the hardest packing assignment that I would have to accomplish. Our first two flights would be with Continental, which doesn't take your bags for free. So my smallest bag, my backpack, would somehow need to carry about a weeks worth of clothes. I doubted that my backpack could manage, but that's what I thought when I saw fifteen clowns hop in a small car.

WARNING: The following paragraph is the most useless piece of literature ever written. Feel free to skip!

These are the things that I needed to pack:

• Five days worth of clothes
• Two jackets ("The coldest winter I ever spent was the summer in San Fransisco" -Mark Twain)
• Bathroom essentials (toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant, you get the point)
• My camera, and its power cord
• A plastic bag for my dirty clothes
• My belt
• Two books: "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" by Robert Stevenson and "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe

After I was done packing I decided to watch an Adam Sandler movie (Anger Management). I don't really know if the movie was actually that good, since I was mainly picturing myself in a world of freedom and AWESOMENESS!! When that was over, the worst part of the waiting process approached... sleep. Nine hours of tossing and turning and wishing that it was time to get up. And then when it was time to wake up, I didn't want to.