A disaster.
Yesterday I actually awoke early for once, as Jim wanted me to start working on his website. After a long discussion about what it should be like, I started on it with Jaco watching.
Jaco is the son of Robin, Jim’s friend and colleague. When I first came over to the States, Jim kept talking about Jaco and how we’d get along and how Jaco could even come on the rest of my trip around the country with me. I met Jaco and found out that he is fourteen years old, but doesn’t seem like it at all(apart from occasional moments of understandable immaturity).
So I’m working on the website, and Jaco is absolutely bored. He has the day off of school and his Mom sent him over because she has two younger kids to take care of, so Jaco has to stay at the house. His options for what to do are 1)Watch Jim work, 2)Watch Kyle work, 3)Do some work of his own. Jaco decided on 4)While Kyle is out of the room, go to his iTunes and start playing some stand-up albums.
I wasn’t really averse to this, because I wasn’t getting any work done with Jaco looking over my shoulder and being bored out of his skull. We started talking about going to see a movie, and settled on Aqua Teen Hunger Force(although we really wanted to see Grind House, but Jaco’s Mom wouldn’t let him.)
Before the movie, Jaco had a Doctor’s appointment that I had to wait outside for, and then Brenda, one of his Mom’s friends, was to drive us to the cinema. She ran out of gas, her card wouldn’t work at the petrol station, her husband had to drive us there through traffic that was almost at a stand-still and in the end we turned up ten minutes late and at the wrong cinema for the movie.
Oops.
We wandered round the mall for a while, and I had three hot dogs and bought some stuff from the Hot Topic store(which is awesome) and decided to run across traffic and jump over walls to get to the real movie theater. Where ATHF still wasn’t playing.
We had to see something, or else it would be a wasted trip, so I chose In the Land of Women, the new Adam Brody film. Because it has Adam Brody in, okay? It was a great film, and Jaco and I both enjoyed it(and the cinema seats over here are amazing).
When it was over, though, the problems began. My cell phone battery was low, and our attempts to call someone to pick us up were proving futile . Neither Jim, nor Robin, nor Sofia or anyone Jaco thought to call was answering. Eventually we got Jim, who had just returned home after waiting around for us to call him on his cell. Y’know, the cellphone number I had asked for but Jaco had said he knew. When he didn’t.
While talking to Jim about where we were, my phone died. We had to hope that he would look up where the Regal Express cinema(on Cerillos Rd) was and come pick us up. We waited. For an hour.
We called Jim again, with the very last of my phone’s battery, and he hadn’t left because he didn’t know where we were and we’d hung up on him. It was now 11pm in downtown Santa Fe, which is not somewhere safe to be. Still, we needed to get to somewhere that Jim would know if we told him, so walked across a couple of main roads to get to an Albertsons supermarket. My phone was out of juice, so we had to use all my quarters, and even ask for some from strangers, to call Jim again.
He was angry, but he was coming to pick us up. We waited another half an hour, with it getting colder every passing minute(desert, people). Jaco was mad and blaming everything, and I was scared and trying to remain calm. Jim arrived, we were fine.
The car ride home was silent, aside from a heavy-handed and ill-thought-out attempt by Jaco to blame Jim’s cell phone for the communication issues. Truth be told - it was mostly my fault that things went wrong yesterday, because I should’ve remembered Jaco’s age and taken charge a little more, and been more responsible.
We just hashed everything out, and everyone’s happy and everything has been resolved. This, like most other things that have happened to me here, has been a learning experience, and it’s a good thing that it happened.