Staring Blankly Ahead

I'll be honest with you, I don't want to write tonight.  Mainly because of this: long distance is hard.  Really, really hard.

Friday afternoon, I left campus for the DC area where my boyfriend lives.  The drive took about three-and-a-half hours.  When I arrived, I left my things in the car and went straight to his door with a small box of chocolates and three pink carnations.  I knocked on the door and he answered.  I looked up at him (he's six feet, I'm five feet) and said in the cutest voice I could manage, "Will you be my valentine?"

Let me tell you, the smile I got for that was worth far more than the three-and-a-half hour drive I had just endured.

I had requested he get some vanilla ice cream to help my sore throat.  Instead, he had something better for me: two different kinds of mini-cheesecakes, one raspberry and one chocolate chip Kahlua.  Both were delicious.  We shared some of the cheesecake in bed, despite me having a cold, and then decided to go get "real food" for dinner.  We ended up going to a Chinese restaurant called XO Taste, where I got a corn porridge.  It was good, but I got full quickly.  Between porridge and Pho, I tend to get full rather quickly -- I expect it has to do with the amount of water.

Afterwards, we returned and finished off the raspberry cheesecake.  Because I was so congested, I took the recommended dose of Nyquil.  Um, never again.  I was drowsy pretty much the entirety of Saturday.  Saturday morning we had an appointment to get the oil in the car changed (along with a tire rotation and brake inspection) so we had a quick breakfast of oatmeal with bananas, walnuts, and raisins.  More deliciousness.  While we waited for the car to get serviced, we walked over to the nearby 7-11 so my boyfriend could get a coffee.  We returned and I read while he played Scramble.

A coworker of his told him about an Indian food restaurant relatively nearby so we went after the car was finished.  It was a buffet style and the decor was fun, although the Valentine's Day decorations were a little hokey.  I stuck mostly with stuff I knew I liked but tried a few new things and liked them as well.  The butter chicken was really good.  Both of us were really full after so we decided to try and walk around the strip malls but it was way too cold and the wind was blowing so we both chickened out pretty soon and returned to the car.

When we got back, I did homework and he hung out for a while.  For dinner, he had some more oatmeal and I was still full so I didn't have anything.  Later on we dug into the Kahlua cheesecake.  I took another dose of Nyquil, but this one was just half a dose, so I slept fairly well but wasn't overly groggy all day.

This morning we had planned to make waffles for breakfast but were too lazy so we waited until eleven to go get some pizza instead.  We got a Caesar salad with our pepperoni pizza.  Both were good.  I loved the thin crust on the pizza, even though the bottom was blackened.  The atmosphere of the place was really unique and they had set up wine so that a tube came up from the bottles and it was dispensed from a spout.  We couldn't decide if this was really cool or really tacky.  I decided it was tacky but would have been cool if the tubing was clear instead of white.

There was a Sweet Frog next door, so we got frozen yogurt after.  We ended up choosing (or, I ended up choosing) red velvet, caramel, cake batter, and original tart.  I filled it to 16.2 ounces and we (mostly I, again) ate the whole thing.  (My boyfriend just informed me via Skype that I have terrible taste in frozen yogurt.)

All day we had been simmering some chili in the slow cooker.  We had that for dinner and I worked on some more homework.

Most of the evening, leading up to my departure around 5:30 (which was originally scheduled for 6:00 but we were both so miserable at the thought of me leaving that we decided to prolong the suffering was useless), was spent crying.  He and I probably won't see each other for another three weeks.  We'll skype plenty, of course, but it's never good enough.

I drove home in a little over three-and-a-half hours, listening to an audio recording of The Red Queen, a book largely about evolution, which I plan on telling my psychology professor about because so much of what the book is about is stuff we just covered in class.  But the guy talked a lot, as audio recordings tend to do, and I listened because there was nothing else to do but sit there and be lonely.

Three weeks can't come soon enough.