By rlubitz
I knew it was gonna happen but I just didn’t think it was going to happen to me. Because I am a stressmonster and have a habit of freaking out for hours at a time, I thought by now I’d be all set, just waiting for the plane to get here, just waiting for the time that I have to actually physically leave Washington, DC. Instead, it’s one day before I leave for London and I’m still configuring bags and giving clothes away and realizing that I’m definitely not going to be wearing three different black sweaterdresses while I’m there because I’m lazy and I never wear dresses.
In these hectic days, I’ve had to rely on humor to not shut my entire world down. For instance, I created a Saturday Night Live skit yesterday while I was lugging my bags across town and it’s called “Rachel Throws A Bag Bigger Than Herself Down Three Flights Of Stairs.” It’s hilarious.
But really I know everything will sort itself out and even though my arm might rip out of the socket while I’m dragging my bags across London, they do have cheap healthcare. I also found a pair of Steve Madden studded boots that are rocking my world right now. Is it smart to go shopping a day before you leave the country? No.
In addition to just being a failure at packing, I’m still fighting that fear that I’ll get to the desk to check my bag in and they’ll be like, “We don’t have you in our system.” And then my emotional Nagasaki will ensue. There’s also boring stuff like finding ATMs and such that I have freaked out and then figured out within the time it takes me to write these blog posts. Am I a mess? Yes.
Please Be Friends With Me
What I’ve been hurrying around doing now is gathering all my walking music for London. We’ve all got those songs in our iPods that when we listen to them, we remember where we were when we obsessed over them. When I listen to Cat Power’s Covers album, it takes me back to a roadtrip to Atlanta with my mother. When I listen to Nick Drake, it takes me back to Colorado when I was 13. I want to get a soundtrack for this trip. It’s going to be the new Cat Power album because I love crying, it’s going to be the Beatles because of every reason and it’s going to be whatever I find in the next 24 hours.
Us UCL students have to go to roughly a thousand orientations when we arrive and I intend on talking mostly about what to do later in the night and what bands they like and if they are touring THEN WE ARE GOING YES YES YES because I’m not about to waste one second of my time. Maybe we can bond over secretly loving Coldplay and crying all the time. Or maybe not. Maybe they’ll actually be normal.
No Regrets, Just Love *sung just like Katy Perry*
It may seem like I am so not thrilled on going abroad, that I am going to be too nervous about getting mugged every day to enjoy it but that is so, so wrong. It’s just that I have no idea what to expect. It’s going to be amazing and perhaps the best three or so months of my entire life. It’s going to change me and I hope it calms me down. I really hope that after I come back, and certainly after my Mariah Carey meltdown that will happen when I leave London for the US, I will have absolutely no regrets.
What I’m most scared of is time moving too fast. I’m afraid that I’ll be there for three weeks and I won’t see Paris. I’m afraid that on December 20th when I leave, I’m going to be thinking of a city I forgot to see. I don’t have the lifestyle to say that I can be back in the summer so for me on this trip it’s really do or die.
I wanna go to the British Museum, the Tate Modern, the Globe, Camden, Abbey Road, Covent Garden and all the roads that nursery rhymes made known. I wanna go and see art that I can’t comprehend creating, that is just so brilliant that for the rest of the day it stays with me. I wanna go see a play I know nothing about and have it take me out of my life for two hours. I wanna be sitting in a pub and realize that it’s older than the United States. I wanna walk around with music in my ears, look up and see Big Ben or the Tower of London and have it hit me in the face how lucky I really am.