2002-06-13-1:55 p.m.
I'm in San Antonio! We got here around 7:30 last night. I had almost--almost--forgotten how beautiful this place is. The campus is right next to a major highway (I could walk out the driveway, cross a street, and be on the on-ramp), but you'd never know, it's so quiet here.

I was reading in Eleanor's diary about her own road trip, and about her feelings of how the road trip trope (har) is such a privilege for some while being a necessity for others and a dream for others still. And it made me think about an essay I wrote for my nonfiction class earlier this year, about how troubling it is for me to be have friends who have travelled everywhere and are so casual about it, never realizing how this nonchalance can be really hurtful to those of us who haven't traveled so much. But it's hard for me to express exactly how I feel about that, since I myself have done a fair amount of traveling. Sure, my mom is getting reimbursed for the money we spent driving down here, and she's only coming here for work, but it's still a vacation for me. I'm a stowaway. But if my mom didn't have the job she does, I couldn't be a stowaway. So you see, it is hard for me to criticize my friends who sometimes act like it's no big deal that they've backpacked across Europe for three months. Because I'm not exactly underprivileged myself.

This afternoon I'll be scoping out the amazing flora and fauna on this campus. Did you know mockingbirds can imitate just about anything, even the sounds of machinery? Though I don't know why they want to do that. Maybe to be incognito? Tomorrow I plan to go to a park near here and stalk Muscovies and check out the huge turtles that swim in the creek. And I can wait to eat some corn fritters from Church's Chicken.

over n out

p

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