I am fucking EXHAUSTED. Man, I wish I could tell you about my weekend, but I don't want to get all live-journally on you. Instead, I will tell you that my 3-hour drive to Brooklyn yesterday afternoon turned into a 6-hour drive. Actually, calling it a "drive" is misleading, because for a good half-hour I was parked on the BQE.

You see, sometimes in the summer, when cold air and warm air love each other very much, they get together and make a thunderstorm. This can bring a lot of rain in a very short period of time. Apparently, it has never rained ever in NYC, because the main highways flooded as though sewer grates hadn't yet been invented. My drive was already very trafficky and slow when I hit the Triboro bridge, but that's where it actually became stop and go - the kind of stop and go where you stop for a full minute and then go forward two or three feet. Normally, since I am now in the iPod era, this wouldn't be a problem. But I was tired and hungry, and my bag of peanut m&ms was almost empty, and I had just an inch of water left in my plastic bottle. I did have a small bag of heart-shaped sweet-tarts that I had gotten on the street as part of a promo for a reality show called "Hooking Up," but that can hardly be considered food. Anyway, I had only eaten some french toast and the aforementioned m&ms all day, had gotten not enough sleep, and was now sitting in a car in the pouring rain, in traffic that was essentially stopped.

Finally, finally, I inched forward into Queens and the BQE, but once I managed to reach an extended underpass - more of a tunnel, almost - the "stop" part of "stop and go" won the battle against "go." As the minutes stretched on with no movement whatsoever, people started leaving their cars - the universal sign of "the laws of traffic have been overthrown by forces we do not understand. Anarchy reigns!" A guy in an Audi to my right got out of the driver's seat and changed his toddler daughter's diaper in the back seat. The Honda to my left had a cute white dog inside, so the teens in the car took it out for a walk, to try to get it to pee. I think the dog had a hard time deciding if we were outside at all, since we were essentially in a huge asphalt and concrete room with two big doors. Essentially. I put my car in park and got out and met the dog, who licked my face, and talked to some other people, who said they thought the road was closed because of flooding. My away team, reachable via cell phone, confirmed that for me. There was a bus behind me, and several people got off with their bags and started trekking forward. Godspeed, you fearless adventurers.

Eventually I saw, off in the distance, the glowing red taillights that meant that people were restarting their cars. Hooray! I hopped in and slowly rolled forward, leaving the protective underpass and hitting the heavy rain again, and slowly slowly merging and passing through the single lane that had been cleared as a two-lane lake was getting pumped away by a road crew. Then I was in the clear! for about ten seconds, and then the traffic stopped again. This time, however, I was close enough to an exit to take it, and I made it off the BQE and got back on just after the flooded section.

So I got to my sister's by 9:30 or so, and they were all "hey, welcome, we got stuff to make mojitos! Whee!" and even though I was half-dead from lack of nourishment I cannot resist a refreshing mojito, and my bro-in-law had made guacamole, and we ordered thai food, and by the time I should really have left to go to my apartment in Manhattan it was raining. I gave in to what the universe was telling me and I splurged on a $19 car service.

And last night my cat kept waking me up. This is why I am so tired today. So be nice to me, please.