No, I'm still alive. Seriously. You checked 5 minutes ago.

My parents have IMed me on Skype pretty much every single day since I got here. They ask me how the weather is and what I'm having to eat today, just to make sure I answer. It got really old really fast. This week I didn't really answer them much, and they got agitated. I'm really confused for several reasons:

1) I'm 24. If I can't take care of myself by now, I pretty much deserve to get run over by a bus or die of gangrene caused by not doing my laundry or whatever else they think is going to happen to me.

2) I'm seeing them in a few days. This really should cause a relaxation of their apparent "Ask Antares what she's eating for dinner and confirm she's still alive" policy. They can come check for themselves.

3) I used to e-mail them every day when I was at school in California. They didn't like it much (that's what they said, anyway) so I stopped doing it when I came here, and now they freak out if they don't hear from me for two days. I guess they considered California to be relatively benign.

4) Are they doing this because England is a foreign country? Seriously? The only country I can think of that might be less scary for me to go to school in is Canada. Maybe. Really, people, England is civilized. You can drink the water over here and everything. Frankly, California was scarier by several orders of magnitude. There was a carjacking at a stoplight about 50 feet from my apartment, students used to get mugged every night, gunshots and screams from the alleys on my street were not an unusual occurrence. I did not share any of this with my parents at the time, of course, because I am not an idiot. Maybe I should have.

I really, really hope that they will come here, spend the week, realize that England is not crawling with land sharks and suicide bombers, and go away and Skype me once a week.

My favorite part of all this obnoxiousness is the fact that, if you ask them, they will proudly declare that they are not Helicopter Parents. No, indeed. Judging by this past semester, I think it's only because they can't afford to come visit David and me every week.