This is called 'Second Week Slump' becuase I was a little blah during my second week and it shows. The rest of my diary is more upbeat, so you can just read that if you prefer!

Storia – 25/09/08

Three months til Christmas!

My God, these days I have so many mood swings. Eg, I woke up feeling like shit. Then I caught the bus and felt better – I haven’t been on time for the bus once so far, and the bus driver probably knows me as the girl who always runs. For some reason, that thought amused me and cheered me up somewhat. I walked to school with Sara and the class communist, and told them about the 81 tour (they asked about my badge). Fabio, the com, was more impressed with Dad sticking it to the man rather than the reason for the protest, but hey. He’s incredibly dedicated to his cause, and he’s always drawing the sickle and star everywhere and giving out copies of some commie newspaper, “Liberazione”. He even gave like a ten minute speech on Marx yesterday for no obvious reason. LOL is all I can say. Anyway, then I got to school and meh, had gym and felt better, was pissed off with the world for ignoring me at interval, and now am just really, really bored. Every day I’m seesawing all the time; it’s exhausting. And from what I’ve heard from the other AFSers, they’re facing it too. Just part and parcel of the experience, I guess.

Pizza for lunch today. Next week I’m going to start making my lunch on Tuesdays and Thursdays, because I don’t have time to go home to eat and buying it is getting expensive. Francesca offered to make me lunch today and I was like no! It’s good! She does so much for me already, I’m starting to feel a little smothered. I’m really glad Cate showed me how to bike to school yesterday. Starting tomorrow, I’ll be biking instead of bussing or getting picked up. It means I won’t have to worry about missing the bus or catching the wrong one, and in the unlikely event that I ever get a social life, it means I won’t have to make extra arrangements about getting home and inconveniencing other people.

This next paragraph was written but is being skipped on the basis that it’s just needless bitching. So, CENSORED.


Psicologia – 27/09/08

No notes. I can’t be bothered taking any. The problem with improving at Italian is that I can understand more and more of the lessons, and therefore am actually required to do some work now and then. Like, we had a psych test yesty that I didn’t know about. If that had been all, I wouldn’t have felt bad about bombing, but the teacher made me a special easy short-answer test instead of the hard one. And of course I knew nothing, so I failed pretty hard, which is slightly embarrassing. I suspect most people think I’m a bit think, but c’est la vie. Maybe I am; who knows?

I had a bummer of a dream this morning, and woke up crying, which is something I thought only happened in stories. I dreamed I was home, and Dad got pissed off cos I was spending so much time on the comp, even when I explained, “But Mum and Dad want to know what’s happening! It’s how we keep in touch!” Duh, great logic, much. And then I snivelled throughout the entire dream and woke up still crying. I just don’t think it’s fair. I mean, who attacks a sleeping opponent? And I know I would never work myself up like that awake, but asleep I don’t really have a lot of choice. Bloody dreams.

Today’s been pretty good other than that, though. We had double English first, and I did some translating to and from Italian. It was on different tenses in English, and what amused me is that I got them wrong about half the time – the English, not the Italian. Apparently I was supposed to be saying “I’ve gone” instead of “I went”, and occasionally I came up with a third possibility entirely, which confused the teacher no end. I actually think I was right most of the time, but I didn’t make a fuss about it because that would just be confusing. But let’s face it, who says, “How slow you are!” instead of “You’re so slow!” these days anyway?

Today I was supposed to be going to check out Venice with Lauren and some of her classmates, but she’s basically got the parents from hell and she’s grounded for reasons that aren’t entirely clear. Therefore, Venice will have to wait for next Saturday instead. I’m going to phone Lauren this afternoon, try and see what she did to get grounded. I’m wondering if it’s got anything to do with her friend Dario, who seems camper than a whole CAMPGROUND of pink tents and then some, but apparently tried to get into her the other day when he was drunk. So maybe not that camp after all. It’s a mystery.

And you know what else I’m going to do this afternoon? I’m going to cut my nails! I finally managed to buy a pair of nail clippers – it’s taken me like four days to track some down – and I’ll be able to put them to joyful use. I haven’t cut my nails since NZ and they’re so gross right now. Yay nail clippers!

And I might try and download some more books onto the comp this arvo. I finished my last (The Amber Spyglass) last night – well, not really, but The Godfather’s really boring – so I need to get some more. There’s a wireless point at my school in Venice as well, and I might go early one day and make use of the free internet. Upload some photos onto the net, download some music, that sort of thing. I really want to listen to “Sweet Home Alabama” because there’s some stupid rip-off by Kid Rock playing EVERYWHERE at the moment. I’d quite like it but for the chorus, which is so badly written it makes me want to hit things. “I was trying different things/ we were smoking funny things/” – is that seriously the best rhyme the songwriter could come up with? EVERYTHING rhymes with –ing. Even everything. Eg, “We were trying different things/ blowing smoke in funny rings/”. That was just off the top of my head and yet I a) managed to keep the gist of the line the same and b) found something that actually RHYMES. Not Tennyson, perhaps, but I’m doing a lot better than the dumbarse who wrote that song.

Sorry, that got way off topic. But if I do get to this net point, you’ll get pictures of: Treviso, Rome, the scary old lady I drew in class the other day, and my potplant dying of a mystery illness. By the way, if anyone has any tips on how to keep potplants alive, I’d love to hear them. It would be sad for it to die before it was even named.

I bought myself some chocolate yesterday, good chocolate. The chocolate here is shite, and two separate supermarkets I visited only had crap Kinder and Milka, both of which are gross. In the end, I found some good stuff at the massive supermarket we went to buy my school books. It’s called Nero (black) which has got to be a good sign, and is 70% with cocoa nibs to crunch on, yum. They also had 99%, and next time I think I’m gunna get that.