In the next scene -- act two -- my car dies. It won't even cough at me as I turn the key. About an hour later help arrives in the form of a beat-up, rusted Chevy Cavalier and two guys with dreadlocks, gold chains, and pants slung oh too low. Progressive Auto's answer to jump-starting me, which is done in an efficient and grunt-aided manner. Fast forward a couple of hours and my car is being fitted with a new battery in a Sears auto center. Me? I'm back in the mall with an empty stomach... again. And all I want, all I can think about in this bemused and lonely state, is potato. I need potato. Potato and butter and cracked black pepper.

Ten minutes later I am sheepishly requesting a lone baked potato in Ruby Tuesdays...

I may have found a home. We shall see. Next step will be a bed and a couch. But for now it's back to the hotel room and its orange polka-dotted couch and red zig-zigged desk chair.

I ate dinner alone tonight and watched a date gone horribly wrong. He had flat blond hair and a thick, thick neck. He wore a Copenhagen Hard Rock Cafe shirt and attempted to list all the cities that produce their own Hard Rock Cafe apparel. Her straight ginger hair was pulled back in a purple barrette and her bare shoulders were speckled pink. She had her back to me. He turned the subject to grades -- they were both undergrads, probably from different colleges. "And what's wierd is, is there are, like, three failing grades. What's that all about?" The speckled shoulders shrugged.

I barely made a dent in my plate of pasta. My throat refused to swallow, as it had earlier after just a few bites of the much-anticipated potato. But here I sit on my bed at 12:30 a.m. winding green forkfulls out of a black plastic container. The microwave is downstairs in the lobby, but on my way down I ran into a security guy who guestured me into the staff lounge. "You don't want to walk all that way, I know it," he said. No, of course, those fifteen long paces would have just done me in. So I stood beside a poster that said "90% of guests don't complain, they just don't come back" and waited for the ding.