November

Every few weeks I think about writing a post about how strange it is to find myself living here every day. When I first came, I thought a lot about how it was “only 10 months,” as though it was something I needed to suffer through, counting down the days to the ending. Sometimes I still feel like this. The semester is coming to a close and there is a sense of relief in that; it is half over. I admit that some things about it are hard. But mostly I just feel weird that I am living each day, still my whole and complicated self, eight thousand miles away from “home.”

I have felt this way before, showing up in another country and looking at the sky and just marveling at the fact that I made it to a far away place, where things are happening just the way they are in the US or anywhere else in the world. It is the surprising feeling when you realize just how many people live in the world, are living at the same time as you. This feeling is greatly enhanced now that I am properly living in another country. I buy groceries here; I go to work here. I go out with my friends and I watch Hulu on the couch on Saturdays. Yet I am also incomplete in certain ways. “It’s really not my home,” think to myself (a la Joni Mitchell) every few days. And who do I talk to about it? Almost no one. One of the strange aspects of this fellowship is how little all the fellows talk to each other about how bizarre it all feels. We mainly talk about the GPS course the first years take, or what restaurant we want to go to, or what graduate schools we want to apply to. I think on some level we are trying to maintain an image of intrepid world travelers. Which we are, of course. I wouldn’t take that identity away from any of my colleagues. I still think we all have done something sort of strange and wonderful and something most people would not do.

I remain proud of myself for coming here, even though I am “so far” out of college. It all happened so quickly and part of me is still living in June, waiting for it all to commence. I am very glad not to be living then, though. I could not do quarantine again. I do not know what I will be doing when I am next in the US, though I don’t have as much anxiety about it as I’d expect from myself. Except for health insurance, which I am very concerned about.

I am trying to write these graduate school applications and have more or less lost sight of anything to say about myself.