Cursed City

• It all started... As I was leaving for the airport, there was the contact lens incident. I'm convinced now that it was the Fates trying to intervene.
• Just call me Short Straw. My four housemates and I drew lots (very ancient Greece, wouldn't you agree?) to decide who would share a room. I knew the result before we even began. And so I share the hottest, brightest room with K. who now sleeps, as she likes to say, "Six inches from Stephanie's face."
• Kick her when she's down. I was trying to minimize future debt (too late) by consolidating my loans, when I discovered that my financial aid was totally screwed up. Two weeks, fifty phone calls and innumerable hours listening to muzak later, I was able to consolidate with ten hours to spare. Fingers crossed.
• Really? Never going to the doctor again. The bill for my annual exam: $500 I don't have.
• "I think it's just poor craftsmanship." This is the barbed insult I flung at the Apple Genius who told me it would cost $70 to fix Rococo, my less-than-one-year-old iPod Mini. My little pink friend, who had accompanied me everywhere in Chi, finally and unceremoniously died in this city where talk is cheap and yet nobody shuts up.
• If I were a bettin' woman... Whilst excitedly updating aforementioned iPod, my computer's hard drive crashed. 50/50 chance I'll be able to retrieve all my documents, photos and music. Guess where my money is?
• "World's Greatest Sunglasses." Mere hours after deciding on this epithet, which I frankly ranked right up there with "wine-dark sea" and "rosy-fingered dawn," the glasses, of course, broke. That's hubris for you.

Other highlights of our time here include: K. being escorted home by cop who said, "It's not safe to run here at night;" two housemates contracting pink eye; K.'s computer screen breaking (which led to a conversation with Dell tech support rep. Von Harper, who told her to "get a torch," to which she responded, "like a blowtorch?"); basement-dwelling dogs that howl in the wee hours and engender fantasies of double canine homicide (think I could stage a murder- suicide?); crazy landlady; no video stores; no laundromats; no nothing that would make this a convenient place to live.

I'm not even surprised anymore. It's this horrible, awful, horrendous dump-of-a-place, otherwise known as our nation's capital. It's only been six weeks, and I'm holding my breath for the next four.

Consider yourself warned.