cockroaches and toilets

two things that arn's so pleasant. yet i must get used to them. i must get used to these new ways of life. Soon they will become ordinary and routine. Walking 4 extreamly long corridors in the middle of the night to use the bathroom and opening the door only to find cockroaches scambling from the light. big cockroaches. fat, black ones. i was told, upon arrival, that that would be the case. You don't believe it till you see it though. I let out an "OH my GOSH." while screaching and jumping up on the ledge to get out of their way. We have to step on them too so they die. That's what they tell us and so we must comply.

Here, i've learned to get use to not being able to go to the bathroom any time i'd like. For some reason, this plesant ship seems to only have about 3 or 4 bathrooms...although i know it has more, the place is huge and if your on A deck you're not going to walk the 25 minutes to C deck, just for the bathroom. You're going to wait. For 30 mintues, for an hour, for two or three. You're going to have to wait. And so you do. I'm getting used to not getting what i want, when i want it. I'm getting used to waiting for others. I'm getting use to going to my bed room around 11 but having to turn around and leave because boys and girls are watching a movie on a laptop two feet from my bed, i'm getting use to not being able to grab a cookie whenever i well please or having breakfast at whatever hour i prefer, i'm getting use to waking up at 6 or 5 or whatever hour i can in order to get my 2-minute shower time, i'm getting use to painfully slow computers and waiting 10 minutes for the next screen to come up, i'm getting use to going back to get my facewash that i accidentally left in the bathroom and it's not there or going to sign up for laundry and having to wait 3 hours to get my turn. i'm getting use to no privacy. I'm getting use to this thing we call, community living. It's fun at first, slightly burdensome now, and i'm sure only tends to get more annoying down the road. Really, i have no real problems now. It's just funny and interesting at the same time to think about what i'll have to get used to over the next year. These small things that i took for granted at home, like not having to crunch the cockroaches on the bathroom floor, i no longer have the priveldge to refrain from.

And yet it's exciting to be given new tasks and new ways of life to adapt to. I look forward to being a real life survivor.

I always think of what I pinned on my bulliton board. I found it, the other day, on a page in my notebook, that linnea had written for me to one day find.

"whatever my lot, thou has taught me to say, it is well, it is well with my soul. (belt it out like micheal w, girl!)"