Back at it again...
It's been a while, I noticed. I tried finding another vehicle, a.k.a. blogging website, for my "travel writings" as my friends call them, but they were too complicated, flashy, whatnot. I just want to write, it makes this much more concrete, real, effective, I suppose. One person even said I should write an autobiography. Yes, Derek, it's flattering but it's not happening until I'm too senile to have the normal amount of constraint to write one.
I'm back because I realized I'm coming to an end, at least for a little bit. I'm not foreshadowing my death, my cease of existence, rather the cease of existence of this lucky life I've lived the past x amount of years, where I bounced from vacation to study abroad to international opportunities and so on and so forth.
I graduated from college. Big news. Bachelor's in Hispanic Studies. I got the official document in August, just a few weeks before I returned home from working in Bemidji, Minnesota at a language immersion summer camp. What I should have felt was fulfillment, completion, a settling of fluttering term papers and semester-long work in my belly. But it seemed dampened by the fact that it was over. College was over.
And it wasn't even about no more 2am hot dogs on Dauphin Street, or free trolley rides, or hookah and family game nights at my apartment, or even the over-crowded and far too structurally unsound living quarters of most of Spring Hill's senior class, where you'd leave with a Picasso of bottom-shelf liquors on your shirt and pants and bar tar on your shoes. It was the fact that now, after 22 years of a structured lifestyle of school, work, play, fall break, winter break, spring break, summer break, weekends, weekdays, school functions and road trips, I no longer had structure. The only things providing me structure would be the jobs I was to get, and boy, that's a trip.
Providing support and dedication to the workforce is important, I agree. What naively smacked me in the head like Wile E Coyote's anvil was that I wouldn't be able to freely travel like before, where I could pick up and go for a summer, a few months, a week. To put it shortly, I panicked.
It wasn't a midlife crisis (I'm only 23), and it wasn't a panic attack, what it was was unfiltered reality coming in hot. I'm thankful it did, though, that it came in blazing and quick and immediate as I held my diploma, almost illegible script and crest and all. I imagine that if it came in slow, I'd be living quite aloofly, wouldn't I? Day dreaming and subconsciously fighting against the post-grad world as it yelled at me, "Get a job!" I'd have been living in denial, and that seems incredibly unhealthy.
Let us flash forward, to tonight, December 10, 2017. I'm sitting in a frumpy outfit, my beloved Land of Lincoln sweatshirt from my 7th grade field trip to Springfield, Illinois matching my grey socks and pants. I've started eating this lovely saffron cheesecake from a little patisserie in Adliya, Bahrain, a district near where I've been living for the past 2 months working on a military base in their childcare center. We live in the hotel on base, and housekeeping gave me an extra box of tissues because I told them I was sick and needed new sheets. It's an average work night for me, as the weekends here are on Friday and Saturday, respectful of the Islamic holy day. I'm finally posting after an entire year of silence on my blog, the one I actually like, and mentally planning my next few posts to come. Maybe do some food focused ones, anecdotes, just some photos. I'm content, minus the scratchy, dry throat and the occasional annoying sniffle. And I finally feel that settled sentiment that was buried beneath the anxiety of my reception of my diploma.
I suppose writing does that for me, it's therapeutic. While I'm off in January to join the States' recent grads in our pursuit of purpose, I'll continue to write here, to share what I have with whomever is willing to read it. Hopefully you enjoy a nice coffee or tea while you read, as that is what I would wish to do if I were to read an other's blog, to enjoy the simplicity and pure intentions of their works. This blog will be me, as I was while I traveled and as I will be as I grow into the adult I was chiseled to be by my own doings and those of nature and academia, my attempt of an oeuvre.
Not that I know much about anything, but I think I'll do alright.
I'm back because I realized I'm coming to an end, at least for a little bit. I'm not foreshadowing my death, my cease of existence, rather the cease of existence of this lucky life I've lived the past x amount of years, where I bounced from vacation to study abroad to international opportunities and so on and so forth.
I graduated from college. Big news. Bachelor's in Hispanic Studies. I got the official document in August, just a few weeks before I returned home from working in Bemidji, Minnesota at a language immersion summer camp. What I should have felt was fulfillment, completion, a settling of fluttering term papers and semester-long work in my belly. But it seemed dampened by the fact that it was over. College was over.
And it wasn't even about no more 2am hot dogs on Dauphin Street, or free trolley rides, or hookah and family game nights at my apartment, or even the over-crowded and far too structurally unsound living quarters of most of Spring Hill's senior class, where you'd leave with a Picasso of bottom-shelf liquors on your shirt and pants and bar tar on your shoes. It was the fact that now, after 22 years of a structured lifestyle of school, work, play, fall break, winter break, spring break, summer break, weekends, weekdays, school functions and road trips, I no longer had structure. The only things providing me structure would be the jobs I was to get, and boy, that's a trip.
Providing support and dedication to the workforce is important, I agree. What naively smacked me in the head like Wile E Coyote's anvil was that I wouldn't be able to freely travel like before, where I could pick up and go for a summer, a few months, a week. To put it shortly, I panicked.
It wasn't a midlife crisis (I'm only 23), and it wasn't a panic attack, what it was was unfiltered reality coming in hot. I'm thankful it did, though, that it came in blazing and quick and immediate as I held my diploma, almost illegible script and crest and all. I imagine that if it came in slow, I'd be living quite aloofly, wouldn't I? Day dreaming and subconsciously fighting against the post-grad world as it yelled at me, "Get a job!" I'd have been living in denial, and that seems incredibly unhealthy.
Let us flash forward, to tonight, December 10, 2017. I'm sitting in a frumpy outfit, my beloved Land of Lincoln sweatshirt from my 7th grade field trip to Springfield, Illinois matching my grey socks and pants. I've started eating this lovely saffron cheesecake from a little patisserie in Adliya, Bahrain, a district near where I've been living for the past 2 months working on a military base in their childcare center. We live in the hotel on base, and housekeeping gave me an extra box of tissues because I told them I was sick and needed new sheets. It's an average work night for me, as the weekends here are on Friday and Saturday, respectful of the Islamic holy day. I'm finally posting after an entire year of silence on my blog, the one I actually like, and mentally planning my next few posts to come. Maybe do some food focused ones, anecdotes, just some photos. I'm content, minus the scratchy, dry throat and the occasional annoying sniffle. And I finally feel that settled sentiment that was buried beneath the anxiety of my reception of my diploma.
I suppose writing does that for me, it's therapeutic. While I'm off in January to join the States' recent grads in our pursuit of purpose, I'll continue to write here, to share what I have with whomever is willing to read it. Hopefully you enjoy a nice coffee or tea while you read, as that is what I would wish to do if I were to read an other's blog, to enjoy the simplicity and pure intentions of their works. This blog will be me, as I was while I traveled and as I will be as I grow into the adult I was chiseled to be by my own doings and those of nature and academia, my attempt of an oeuvre.
Not that I know much about anything, but I think I'll do alright.
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