I Need Another Vacation

I'm heading back to Chicago on Sunday for classes that start Monday (a day on which the forecast high is 16 degrees), and after some reflection, I've come to the conclusion that I don't wanna. Aside from the fact that it's cold as a monkey's butt (monkeys' butts are apparently pretty f*cking cold), I feel I haven't had nearly enough time here (at my parents' house in Los Angeles) to appreciate home-cooked meals, non-coin-operated washing machines, and a varied landscape (seriously, hills are a lot cooler than I ever thought--it sucks not to have any in a land where it snows!). It also kind of sucks to know that I won't be back here for at least six months- at spring break, I plan to go on a class trip to Tokyo and Shanghai (so, obviously, if anyone was ever deserving of pity, it's me), and I may not even get here till the end of August, after my residency is over. It's weird to go from relationships with friends where you see them every weekend to talking to them mostly on IM and only seeing each other twice a year. But that being said, thank God for IM.

Anyway, I plan to spend my last 36 hours here enjoying LA stuff- In N Out (the best burgers in the world), a pizookie from BJ's, shopping at Glendale Galleria, buying cheap wine at the San Antonio Winery in downtown, and dropping by the USC bookstore to buy any Rose Bowl stuff they may have left. And tonight I can rip all my old cd's to my new iPod, because, joy of joys, there's nothing else I should be doing instead. Well, watching OSU cream K State in the Fiesta Bowl (I'm kind of disappointed that the game thus far appears to be a carbon copy of the one I watched yesterday), but the point is that the spectre of class readings has not yet descended upon me, and I want to enjoy that to the fullest.