since a lot of other people I know have had much worse ones. However, when I said this to my friends Ero and Suzanne on Wednesday, Ero said he thought I had the right to complain anyway. So thanks to him, you guys get to hear all about it.

First off it was orientation week and it rained for four straight days. This, and the fact that the parking at SLC is completely screwed up, just raised everyone's stress level about three notches. Then my cell phone broke -- exactly one day after the manufacturer's one-year warranty expired. It took until today, when I spent about two hours on the phone with Cingular, to even get another phone ordered and sent to me. And because of some screwy things the people I bought the phone from did, I didn't get the benefit of the phone insurance I signed up for. (I also can't complain to them because when I tried to go back and get them to fix it, the store was gone.)

Now, my cell phone is my only phone, but normally I don't use it that much. Of course, this is the one week I really, really needed it. First, I am the senior fiction editor for Lumina, the SLC graduate writing journal, and I was supposed to be calling and interviewing the applicants for the associate editor positions. Luckily fiction didn't have more applicants than we had openings, so I could just approve everyone and move on.

But then, my friend Laura in NJ needed emergency kidney stone surgery, and Susan was trying to get ahold of me to ask if I could take Laura to the hospital. I finally thought to check my email at 1:00 AM on Thursday morning (the day of the surgery) and had to scramble around to get a working phone -- much thanks to my brother Dylan, who was on IM and loaned me the numbers on his calling card so I could use my landline, which has no long distance -- woke Susan up and told her I was coming, and then ran around for another hour pulling together clothes and stuff in case I didn't want to come back Thursday night. Since I had to be on the road pretty early to get there by the time Laura wanted to leave, I got about four hours of sleep. Maybe not even that much because I was worried and having that adrenaline rush you get when dealing with a crisis, so I tossed and turned a lot.

But wait, there's more! After getting out of bed and flying across the GW Bridge to get to Montclair in just over an hour, I arrived at Laura and Susan's to discover that Laura had passed the stone (I don't think she'll mind my sharing this as she had to call all the other people who were worried about her and tell them) and thus didn't need the surgery. I did run her buy the doctor's office to take the stone in for testing (gross), which was probably good because she hadn't eaten in about a day and was a little wobbly. And we got to have breakfast, but basically I drove two hours total and got very little sleep to have breakfast in Montclair.

Oh, and because I rearranged my work plans to do that and was mistakenly locked out of the office on Wednesday, I didn't make any money this week. And Shazia and Shasta are both getting worked up over Shasta's deposit, which through communication problems that were my fault, Shasta didn't find out about until this week. So I've been doing major damage control and trying to deal with one alternately weepy and combative roommate, and trying to avoid the other one in hopes that she'll forgot about the whole thing, as she is wont to do.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH!

OK, I feel better now. No, not really. I really want to scream in real life, but that would just make things worse. But, like I said, other people are having a lot more problems than me. For instance, Laura's grandmother died this week on top of her 36 hours of extreme kidney stone-induced pain. And one of my SLC mentees has already had to change her living arrangements twice because they have fallen through for various reasons. This really doesn't make me feel better though. It just makes everything seem more screwed up.