20040916

sketching's all fun and games until...

sketching's all fun and games until the sky gods decide to hate you and, as they did on tuesday, pelt you with rain drops the size of over-filled water balloons again. all that aside, i spent about 3.5 hours having a blast sketching in the forum this afternoon. it was frustrating but lovely; frustrating because i can no longer sketch like i used to, but lovely because the forum is lovely and i think that i'm getting a little better at the old sketching routine... i just love the fact that i get to do this for a class... it's an assignment that we have to complete by sketching... i love this! if i was back in the studio in the states [sorry to all of you who are in your own little private studio-hell right now], i would be pulling my hair out right about now over some rediculously complicated and [unoptimistically] impossible problem... i love rome... i love it here, i love it here, i love it here!!!

oh - i owe you lovely people a story about my visit to the rome police station yesterday! so... david, brad and i get up at the ass crack of dawn and haul ourselves over to the putrid little police station in piazza del collegio romano [i guess that you can probably tell by now that all did not go well yesterday...]. so the three of us wait in line for 2 hours outside the police station to finally be let in to go wait for another hour upstairs in a stuffy, cramped little hallway. and, halleluyah!! my number finally gets called and i'm really excited because it looks like things are finally starting to look up...

i get into the office [ufficio stranieri] and sit down in front of an incredibly unpleasant woman who immediately starts to argue with me in italian... all i have to say is thank god that i can speak some italian and understand more, otherwise, i think my head would have exploded all over this woman's desk and my trip to italy would have been utterly wasted over a terrible exploding head incident... anyway - she starts in and tells me that some of my paperwork was only valid for two [2] days... now, i want to make something clear here: it had been almost a week since i had received the paperwork she was referring to [the cessione di fabbricato... which, by the way does NOT expire in two days...] and anyway, it was the people from HER office that told me wait to come in yesterday when i would have gladly done it last friday... anyway, i finagle [i have absolutely NO idea how to spell finagle, but you get my drift, so i guess we'll all just have to get over it...] my way out of that and just as i think all is well, she starts fuming about how i'm missing one [count it: one [1]] photocopy out of about 15 [that's right, 15] that i'm supposed to have... so, she throws her little temper tantrem and then she storms out of the room to make the copy. after she returned she finally accepted my paperwork and i was shooed from the room to go wait back in the aforementioned stuffy hallway with the other 40 people there waiting for their permiso [the thing that i went to the police station to get].

i think that just to spite me and my roommates, the office decides that they will no longer wait on anyone OVER an hour BEFORE THEY WERE SUPPOSED TO CLOSE... so brad and david get to go back at 7:30 on a saturday morning instead of getting to go to the beach. anyway, after about an hour, i get called back into the tiny little office filled with the stank of laziness and snobiness to get both of my hands dipped in ink and then pressed onto different sheets of paper in a random fashion for another 15 minutes by some guy who at first seems fairly nice buy then begins to exude a kind of rancid 'holier than thou' aura, if you will... [i truly think that he probably developed that after starting to work in that office, because he seemed like he could have once been a fairly normally nice person...]...

so after about four and a half hours of waiting on my feet, i finally get my permiso. and the worst thing about the whole day is that poor david and brad have to go back to that hellhole on saturday... i feel guilty... like i should go wait with them because it's not right that i have my permiso and they don't...

anyway, i'm off to go try to find an umbrella... as i have been thoroughly soaked twice already today, and i'd like to avoid the third time...

cause some trouble kiddies. ciao!

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