Tuesday, May 27

I couldn't sleep last night because of thoughts running through my head and snores running like a lawn mower long overdue for retirement. That said, it surprised me that I woke up as early as 8:30 this morning. It probably had something to do with the large amount of activity progressing around my bed. I don't usually sleep well with activity around me.

Breakfast was, I dare say, on par with if not worse than the insanity that was Sodexho. My dad liked it, nobody else did. In the meantime, we drove down to the boardwalk and made attempts at getting tans. We all failed. Then, our attention was brought to the shops on the street next to the boardwalk. I knew after roughly the second shop that all of them were going to have mostly identical products, ranging from crap you put on a shelf/desk and then forget about for the rest of your life except when you dust to crass shirts with such clever phrases as "I'M SHY ...but I have a huge dick," and/or pictures of women in some wilderness spot, with some kind of high-power firearm, wearing nothing but some kind of underwear. This reaffirmed my strong, red-blooded Christian belief that unless you like booze, bullets and boobs, you're not a real man.

It might have been the amount of fluid I'd consumed during the day combined with the insane heat of the car when we got back in, or possibly it was just my state of heart, but I felt incredibly nauseous for at least half of the drive back to the hotel. That feeling came again after a short while, when I ate some pizza from the poolside cabana and then tried to tan some more on the beach (still failure). It lasted until about the time I got back to the room, and shortly after my dad walked in, I had to use the bathroom. It was diarrhea, which is my body's way of telling me that not even it believes I'm enjoying myself. My stomach churned for a time afterward, but I ignored it until we went to the nearby lighthouse. Walking up all of those steps didn't seem to have that much of an impact on my legs while we were at the top, but on the way down my thighs felt incredibly awkward, and when I took the first stair outside of the lighthouse my legs felt suddenly like completely giving out. I made sure to hold onto the handrail on the way back to the car, as I was the last one in line and I didn't think anybody would have noticed me falling to the ground behind them all.

We went to a predominantly seafood-oriented restaurant for dinner. On the way there I made attempts to find routers I could link to, and felt an incredible rush of excitement when, for two seconds, I was logged on to Facebook. If I had the opportunity to get a real message out to a friend as opposed to the 140-letter tweets I'm currently able to send, I would have been much more excited. I couldn't, and I had a chicken quesadilla for dinner.