reverse culture shock is strange and makes me feel queasy. no sir i don't like it. just last week i sat on shimmering cobblestones, sipped espresso, and people watched beside a historic church of hand-painted tiles. now i am in hell. hell, contrary to popular belief, is so very cold. it is also filled with void satiating materialistic crap, not to mention an excess of townies. these where am i? how the hell did i get here? moments reached their pinnacle and hit me like a brick to the head early this morning.

having developed permanent jet-lag, i now groggily rise from slumber at approximately 6am. this not only means i consume about three breakfasts, but also that i view a totally unacceptable amount of morning television (which might i add is god awful and chock full of infomercials). this morning my mother requested that i flip the channel from good morning america over to what she referred to as the religious channel. this is fundamentally wrong on a variety of levels, and i sighed in disappointment that this, of all her four hundred channels to choose from, was the newest addition to the only two networks she actually watches: lifetime & hallmark. both of these, in the opinion of anyone with a smidgen of taste, are gut-wrenchingly nauseating. and i regret to admit that the holidays are the worst time of year for these channels to exist, as on a daily basis they air what my mother refers to as cute christmas stories, her face warming at the mere mention of them. essentially, they serve solely as a home for the multitude of D list celebrities who fell from grace, or those whom have climbed the actoral ladder from soap operas, to produce a wealth of unremarkably painful made-for-tv movies. good for them.

the religious channel consisted of walks through jerusalem and a montage of jesus in various art forms, set to a monotone group chanting of the rosary. hail mary full of grace hail mary full of grace, on and on and on. having contracted the flu (perhaps swine?) i lay there and felt as though i were being exorcised, intermittently heaving and hacking up delivish phlegm, linda blair style. my mother may as well have been hanging over me, splashing holy water upon my overtaken body. and so...i am home, home bitter home.