Apparently life hates me today. It’s being incredibly passive-aggressive, though. At first things went well: Peaches’ mother took us all out to breakfast at the wonderful Original Pancake House. She’s a very nice person, I’d like to get to know her better — plus she introduced me to wheat-germ pancakes, which were incredible. The only fault in the morning was that Peaches somehow managed to get seated as far away as possible, and I just felt too awkward to ask people to rearrange.

We took a cab back to school so that we would be in time for class. The driver somehow managed to hear “Lewis & Clark College” instead of “Reed College,” and proceeded to get himself quite lost. Fortunately, Peaches and I were only five minutes late to Greek, so I maintained my status among the ἀθάνατοι. But I remember wondering if the day was bound to continue with its streak of misfortune… No, I assured myself, such a negative outlook would only set myself up for a bad day.

Well, that positive outlook worked quite well until I got to the train station. It was early afternoon yet already a long day, and I was ready to head home; a nice long train ride in the rain would be perfect… Unless, of course, I’d managed to book the train for the wrong day — and the only train not yet booked left after 6:00 pm. The lady at the counter assured me that there was no possibility whatsoever of getting on the 2:30 train. I managed to make it several feet before bursting into tears.

I called my parents to let them know what had happened, and they decided to come pick me up. I walked to Powell’s to wait, feeling (once again) too awkward to return to Reed after having said goodbye to everyone. This wouldn’t have been much of a problem — only three hours to hang around town — except that traffic was horrible up north and I sat somewhere without cell coverage to learn this from my parents. By the time I found out that they were going to be later even than the train, my bus transfer had expired and I had no change — and by then they were only ninety minutes from Portland.

So I sat in the Powell’s cafe, ate a slice of banana nut bread for dinner, and (figuratively) hit myself over the head for being so stupid all day long.

At least Thanksgiving can only get better from here…