I had big plans for when I got to Italy.
This is what I thought my life would be like when I got here
1. Do all homework all the time
2. Appreciate art all the time, every day by doing sophisticated things like going to museums
3. Travel EVERYWHERE
4. Cook fancy Italian food
5. Be fluent in Italian
6. Legal drinking age= party every night!
But hey I’m a reasonable person. Pretty soon I realized that this wasn’t a really realistic life goal so I went back to the drawing board
New more realistic life:
1. Do homework all the time always. In fact do homework early. Do homework before its even assigned
2. GO TO MORE ART MUSEUMS
3. Catch 20 planes a week
4. Make eggs for dinner every night
5. ITALIAN BECOMES PERFECT. I will even know idioms and make jokes. I’ll be like a real Italian. I will memorize the bus schedule so when people ask me when the next bus comes I will KNOW. They will never suspect I’m an American.
6. PARTY ALL THE TIME ALWAYS. SO MANY BARZ! SO MANY CITIES.
This was going pretty well for me. I did get a little sick of eggs. So when disaster struck, I figured it was just that eating eggs for at least two meals a day and making the third one a chocolate bar was probably giving me scurvy or something. So I ate an orange. (vitamin c fixes everything, right? But that didn’t help. I was sick.
From bed I momentarily tried to revise a new more realistic life. It looked like this
1. Stay in bed
2. Watch tv
3. When starving, make eggs. But put vegetables in them or something
But I couldn’t stick to it. I started freaking out. I’m only in Italy for three months. I want to do EVERYTHING. I must see every work of art since ancient Rome. I have to learn Italian! No one ever learned Italian from bed!! I HAVE TO SEE THE WORLD AND THERE ARE SO MANY BARS I HAVENT BEEN TO YET.
I marched myself to the pharmacy. I demanded Sudafed. They don’t have Sudafed in Italy. I demanded medicine. They don’t really have that either. Standing in a pharmacy in the middle of Florence in my pajamas without I begged the pharmacist for something, anything that would get my life plan back on track.
And that’s when she gave it to me. A little tube. Since I was so behind on my BIG PLAN to become fluent in Italian I didn’t understand what it was. But in my mind the tube was going to be magic. It was probably some sort health tonic/ Italian fluency tablet all in one.
I went home and dropped the tablet into a glass of water, drank it and waited for the miracles. I refused to go back to bed. I made eggs. I felt exactly the same but my brain didn’t want to hear that. Through sheer willpower and belief in weird Italian magic, I was cured.
Since then I’ve taking those little tablets every day. I even keep them in my backpack for emergencies when I’m super tired in class.
I finally got around to looking up what’s in them. It’s a multivitamin. With extra vitamin C and a little bit of caffeine. But in my heart, I know its magic.
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