miscellany

I was supposed to look at this apartment later this afternoon that looked really promising... and then the landlady just called me and said she showed it to a girl this morning who decided to take it on the spot. Cazzo. I am so exhausted from this apartment hunting thing. I need it to be over, now. Anyway, enough of that whining. Some random things:

1. So I went on this apartment-listing website and in order to respond to other people's announcements, you need to make one of your own. So in my little blurb I wrote something like, "I'm interested in getting to know ragazzi in Palermo!" Ragazzi means either boys or young people in general (you know how romance languages work... males + females --> you use the masculine plural). But apparently in this particular context of apartment listings, people are careful to specify (e.g. "Room available for female students" or "4 young men looking for 5th roommate"). So basically my announcement said I'm interested in meeting men in Palermo. When my friend saw it he laughed and explained it to me. But that explains why I was getting so many bizarre-o responses from people like "35 year-old man looking for female roommate." Then there was "56 year-old man looking for female student roommate." Uh yeah, good luck to that guy.

This is a quintessential example of how living abroad is inevitably full of awkward times. Eventually you have to decide either to embrace the awkwardness or to never leave your room.

2. I just learned an incredibly weird Italy factoid from my friend. So, like in the U.S., you have to be 16 to get a driver's license in Italy. In California at least, you can get a permit at age 14 and 10 months that allows you to drive with a licensed adult. In Italy, or maybe this is just in Sicily because I've never heard it before, you can get a permit at age 14 to drive around in a mini-car. It basically looks like a giant toy car. Usually I take in the craziness of Italy without blinking an eye; I'm used to it by now. But this makes absolutely no sense to me. It's like, "So you're too young to have a driver's license, but what we'll do is put you in a really little car, so that way if you get into an accident your car will surely be crushed and you will die."

I mean really, wtf? I need to have someone from the Italian version of the DMV explain the logic of this rule to me.

3. I brought with me the same Italian phone that I'd bought in Bologna when I studied abroad, but I had to buy a new SIM card for it and get a new phone number. But it turned out that it still saved all of my former phone numbers and the text messages I'd sent and received. Then of course, it instantly said that my text-messaging inbox was full, so I had to go through and delete 9 months' worth of texts. 9 action-packed, transformative months. It was such a bizarre feeling, like I was deleting 9 months of my life, faithfully documented by that little pink phone. Nine months of courtships, abbreviated attempts at courtship, flirtations, random stalker messages... . A lot of it I'd forgotten about until I saw those messages again. Weird. Pretty, pretty, pretty weird.