World's Worst Traveler

As is currently my top priority, I have kept myself occupied lately primarily with stress, mostly from over-thinking many things, under-thinking a few very important things, and planting strawberries.

I had started thinking about when I would be coming home more or less right after my ordeal with the carnival. I knew I would need to be around at least awhile longer to see some stuff and make a little money, but felt I needed to look into tickets well ahead of time to not have to pay $13,785 (plus extra for baggage) to get across the Pacific. I held off looking seriously until a few days into planting, and wound up buying one from Brisbane to San Francisco with Air New Zealand, with whom I had found a seemingly reasonable fare. Departure was for June 1st because I would like to attend Lauren Vogl and Eugene Burke's wedding on the 10th. About two days later, in the height of the day's back pain in the strawberry fields, I realized that maybe having to find yet another job, with no guarantee that it'd be any better than planting or carnying, wasn't exactly what I wanted. Maybe it wasn't worth it to wait around until June, and I should just finish up on the Sunny Coast, see whatever I could for a few weeks, then leave in early May.

I looked into changing or canceling the ticket however, and found this to not really be an option because of a steep cancellation surcharge and the very expected automated telephone maze that Air New Zealand makes customers go through if they haven't upgraded to their Super Flexi Gold First-Class Maxi Favorite-Customer-Ever status, which I had not, cause I'm 23 and a homeless bum. Several other discoveries made the ticket purchase into more and more of a mistake: I found a fare to Phoenix in early May for the same price as the one I had already bought, and then received an email from Qantas about even cheaper tickets. The very bitter cherry on top came when I looked at my itinerary and realized I had unwittingly bought a ticket with yet another long layover in Auckland, this time overnight. I don't really have words for how astonishingly, frighteningly angry I am with my travel agent. And somebody says I'm smart enough to be a mechanical engineer?

My only explanation for these shenanigans is that at some point in the past I had found a cheap ticket for some destination, waited on it, and missed out. Since then, I have apparently become the world's most compulsive airline customer, barely bothering to think through the situation lest I miss out on something or have to pay $45 extra to not sleep in an airport lobby. The last couple months are seeming to be defined more by my blunders than anything else.