so yesterday jeanna and i woke up at 4 am. it was a saturday morning. saturday mornings are for sleeping in, not for waking up TWO HOURS before the freaking sun rises. but we did it. our mission? to drive downtown and be among the first in line for the mtv real world/road rules audition. so i wake up at 4 with three hours of sleep under my belt and start trying to make myself look like the rock star that i am while jeanna was taking a shower. we left the apartment shortly after 5 am, intending to stop by starbucks to grab coffee and breakfast. suck. i forgot on weekends they don't open until 6. so we go fill my car up with gas. suck. i just remembered that i left the photo of myself that i was supposed to bring to the audition at home. so we drive back to my place, grab the photo, jeanna brushes her teeth because she forgot her toothbrush and bought one at the gas station, and then we drive back to starbucks because by this time the store is open. yay. so we start on our journey to the city. i'll have you know that until this day i had never actually driven in downtown chicago. i always make helen do it, because she's an aggressive driver. as in the case with pizza, there is also chicago-style driving, which requires the driver to be an ass behind the wheel. i'm getting better at it; i honk at people when they drive stupidly, i butt my way into turn lanes-- driving in chicago is really a survival of the fittest. if you don't take a stand behind the wheel you will either get in an accident, get hundreds of other angry chicago drivers ticked at you, or stay in the same spot for so long that someone will tow your car. so it's my first drive into the city, and i'm a little nervous about how i'm going to fare, since i'm used to driving highways and suburbs all the time. but i do it and it goes fine because it's 6:00 am on a saturday morning and most people aren't so concerned about getting to work. we get downtown, find the place where the auditions are being held, and then i park. *snap! crack! pop!* that's the sound of a glass bottle crunching under my front passenger's side tire at a parking meter. suck. i hope it didn't puncture my brand new tire. jeanna gets out and has me reverse a little bit and says she thinks we're okay. then she says, "i think there are parking spots that are closer to where we want to be." okay. so i repark on a different street. *snap! crack! pop!* that's the sound of MULTIPLE glass beer bottles crunching under my passenger's side tire at ANOTHER parking meter. suck. i hope it didn't puncture my brand new tire. jeanna gets out and has me reverse a little bit and gets a pained look on her face. i ask if my tire sounds like it is hissing. she says no. so i just park and pray that i don't have to change a tire in the middle of downtown chicago.

we get in line at around 7 am. auditions start at 10. there are roughly 100 people in line before us. not bad at all. we fill out an application. we sit and make small talk with some cute boys from indiana and play cards with them. finally they start the interview process and it takes about an hour before we get inside. they took us in groups of 12. we sat in a big circle in a little room. one of the casting directors came in, asked us three questions, and had us go around the circle and answer.

1) what is the biggest misconception people have about you?
2) if your life is taped 24 hrs/day, what would you be most concerned about your family finding out about you?
3) in one word, how would the audience label you?

i didn't really like these questions, because i don't really have interesting honest answers for any of them. biggest misconception? i don't really know. i said a lot of people assume (i guess by the way i dress) that i'm a "hippie" and that i participate in the behaviors associated with such a person. lots of pot, free love, save the animals and the earth. but i'm not about any of those things. for the second question, i was going to say that i was concerned about my parents finding out how infrequently i shower, but really i think they know. 2-3 times a week. there's not really much i can think of that i do that i would be nervous about them finding out. so i said that some people i'm close to might be surprised to hear me occasionally cuss, which would probably happen were i to live with 6 other people who were constantly doing it. not so much as an issue of conformity, but just because it wouldn't offend them. for the last question i said "mediator." i guess i tend to play that role fairly often.

so what was weird about the interview was that there was this other girl in our group named stephanie. i think she was my age, from detroit, and we were like THE SAME PERSON. i'm not kidding you. we kind of looked alike; both long streaked curly hair, dressed sort of the same way. only she was cuter than i am. in the interview process she always answered questions before me, and i would always have to change my answers because they were going to be exactly what she said. i'm not making this up. like for the second question, she said that the only thing she was worried about was her family seeing her personal hygeine habits; that she didn't shower every day, etc. and she was kind of joking, just like i would have been had i gotten the chance to say it. jeanna turned to me and said, "she IS you!" really loud in front of everyone. jeanna later said that the only difference between me and the other stephanie was that she came off as being more of the bubbly perky type and i came across as more of the reserved intellectual. it was funny. but weird. afterwards i said "it was nice meeting you...errr... me." i mean really. what the freak. same name. same style. same life. same interview. WEIRD.

so after the interview i felt kind of sick. not like physically sick, but i guess i just initially thought that hey, maybe i'm kind of different and that maybe i have a unique outlook on life and for that reason i might have a shot at getting a spot on one of these shows. but when i was waiting in line yesterday, i realized that absolutely everyone there is thinking the same thing. and realizing that for some reason made me very nervous going into the interview. i wasn't myself; i felt like i was trying to impress someone, and THAT made me sick. i felt like such a conformist. *sigh* needless to say, i doubt i'll be making callbacks, unless mtv is thoroughly impressed by the comment i made on the application about my unusual tendency to stab myself in the hand with starbucks' milk thermometers.