Dear Diary,

I’m feeling kind of crappy now. Not the sick crappy—I got over my sickness a couple of days ago and now only have stuffy-nose occasionally—but the angry, depressed crappy. Part of it was caused, I’m sure, by the overpriced swill I had for dinner here in Rome. I had previously said I wouldn’t eat in a restaurant that had a tourist menu, let alone eat off that menu. I guess I had a case of temporary amnesia because I did both. I also ordered a glass of house red, which turned out to be worse than swill, perhaps pig goop? (It tasted like watered down grape juice with a shampoo after taste.) Excuse me a second, Rosie and I are trying to plan our trip to Greece. (She just went over to check with Greg—it seems hard for her to make decisions without his say so now-a-days.)

Oh, she’s left. I didn’t have any evil thoughts about her while she was here—that’s not completely true. Back to my musings.

I was seriously considering cutting this trip short and flying home soon. My main argument for this is why spend money when you’re not having a good time. I’m not saying I’m having an awful time, just read the previous pages for countless refutes of that, it’s just getting worse as I get more tired of the traveling and bored with the same sites, different places. I spoke to Steven today—Moms is going to be thrilled with the phone card bill, I’ve been racking up the minutes…err…hours lately—about his trip, which was also 7 weeks. He mentioned that he was getting tired in the middle and Greece really relaxed him so he could muster up enough energy to finish the trip. He also very much agreed with the relaxed wandering approach to touring that I enjoy—not that I needed his approval, just as a showing that different people travel different ways.

Seeing as we’re leaving Gregory tomorrow, I’m hoping his ill-effect on me will leave as well. I truly regret the day I mentioned to him that we should meet up in Europe. This past week has been nothing more than a they-verse-me adventure. I guess I’m just a horrible person and Gregory is always right—or something silly like that.

Once again I’ve slipped into a discussion of my ex-friend. I was thinking today, something I’ve had a lot of time to do lately now that I’m on my own, about my other arguments with my friends: more specifically my “breaking-up” with Romy and the gang and Steven. I looked for some common themes and I came up with the realization that I must be a pain-in-the-ass to be around, probably something to do with my moodiness. After a little more thought, however, I realized that this was not entirely true, no matter how easy it sounds. Besides my hobbies and things my friends and I have in common, I’m not much of a talker. I don’t mind going an entire trip staring out the windows in silence. Will mentioned that I’m very abrupt on the phone. And in a way I am if I have nothing to say or nothing that I need to know. I’m not sure how this relates to what I was talking about, but Gregory and Rosie’s main complaint seemed to be that I didn’t talk much in the morning and I was grumpy. Albeit, I’m not a morning person, although I’m not sure how this has anything to do with the price of corn in Kansas.

Looking back on my friendship with Gregory, it seems all we ever talked about was basketball and school. Little wonder it wasn’t meant to last. Even so, it saddens me that it had to end like this. I have little doubt that the ending was caused by his stubbornness and desire to make everything a win-lose, blame contest. While I enjoy competition, and have been to say, “did you win?” when talking about a life activity, competition is not the end-all, be-all for me as it is for Gregory. I think the thing that truly pain me is that I haven’t and won’t get a chance to say this to his face. He is too much of a coward to talk to me and I’m too civilized to talk bad of him.

Enough bitching—someone reading this would think I was in a relationship with Gregory.

I did get to explore some of Rome today, although I mostly walked a lot and didn’t get any where of note. We leave for Greece tomorrow, and we’ll se how that goes in the AG era. But have no ear, we’ll return to Rome after Greece so we can meet up with Rosie’s friend. It seems an awfully long way to meet someone, but so be it.