Family, assorted neighbors, friends, Romans, countrymen, people lending ears, those of you who are wondering whether I'm here to bury Caesar or to praise him:
...hi.
The following is an update on the lack of updates, of sorts. It will be as poorly-worded and confusing as that last sentence, and inasmuch as I have every doubt that anything of consequence will be spoken, I have equal amounts of confidence that it will likely contain as much awkwardness as the opener.
More simply put, get out while you can.
I suppose this post could serve as a form of apology for the fact that I failed to bless any one of your existences with Lydia's monthly snarkletter, so to speak. Not that I owe you guys anything; heck, in the timelessly inspirational words of Lesley Gore: "It's my [blog], and I'll [write] if I want to."
But in more deep and sentimentally meaningful terms (here it comes), I'm probably going to talk about a whole bunch of crud about why I haven't been feeling like writing and why this lackage of postage has occurred.
Not that I owe it to you at all.
But maybe I do owe you an explanation.
FIRSTLY, as most of you know, I was in South Africa for the semester. (WHAT!?) If you didn't, well, I probably don't know you, and better you find out now than before, when the information could have served toward stalking me more effectively. I mostly just chilled and did school, although I did several things that made me feel very nauseous, including, but not limited to, jumping off a very tall bridge attached to a stretchy rope against my parents teary-eyed wishes, obtaining a nose piercing through a fairly unorthodox methodology (yes, my nose. Yes, I AM cool. How dare you assume otherwise), riding a poorly ventilated ferry to visit Nelson Mandela's jail cell, climbing one of the "new 7 wonders of the natural world" (by my count there are now 21 wonders...I have my doubts on the new levels of inclusiveness this club is now displaying), a.k.a., Cape Town's Table Mountain (the nausea part of this was instilled by the sandwiches I ate beforehand, which is why I no longer believe in mayonnaise), AND, of COURSE, with marine biologist hopes in full rapture and fullness—full fullness? Nevermind—searching for the terror of the ocean, a.k.a., not exactly so terrifying, a.k.a., actually kind of adorable, a.k.a., just with largeness and scary teeth, a.k.a., the great white shark. Which I saw, in all its not-so-gory glory and misjudged majesty, swimming through my barf as it sank to the depths of the Atlantic Ocean.
I'm sure the presumable hundred dollars I spent on soft serve vanilla ice cream throughout the trip contributed to the questionable digestive state. Although, seeing as the entirety of the latter half of the trip was taken in a bus that smelled like moth balls, all of Africa could have made me nauseous and I would never have known the difference!
Can you smell the bitterness? It smells like napthalene. And vomit.
Okay, facts: I'm bitter because every time I've driven anywhere since I've gotten back, I've gotten motion sickness like I haven't had since the fourth grade. I'm bitter because I'm enduring reverse culture shock in all its forthright ugliness. I'm bitter because the STUPID housing office put me a hundred thousand miles from the science building, which is where I'm actually going to be living next semester (actually it is exactly one mile; pardon my gross exaggeration, but walking that twice a day is still TOO MUCH) #biologymajorproblems #geneticsfordayzanddayz #stereotypemenow. I'm bitter because the vast majority of everyone I care about lives at least an hour away, if not fourteen days away (although by now we know my guessing skills are a little off), and I hate driving because yesterday on my way home from someone's house the world decided to swallow up every on ramp ever created and I had to call my dad crying because I didn't want to sleep in the parking lot of Walmart. And FINALLY, I am bitter upon bitter because for some reason, whether it be genuine gentility, thoughtful interest in my goings on, or morbid, torturous tendencies, everyone keeps wanting me to talk to them about how the freaking trip went.
Here's my preface question: what if it sucked? What if I came back from "my big adventure" and people ran up to you asking things like, "WOW, HOW WAS IT? WAS IT FUN!? I AM SO IRRATIONALLY EXCITED FOR YOU TO TELL ME ABOUT IT ALL," and you said, "I wish I had been in a coma for the entire time I was there." What would people say? Would they label you as ungrateful? Probably. Would they doubt your sincerity? It's highly possible. Would they wrinkle their noses and stalk off in disgust? That would be picturesque. What also is picturesque is that I made that exact face as I wrote that sentence...and now I'm laughing. HA. I am so funny.
You would be so judged. No one would ever want you to go anywhere again. They'd just say, "Wow, I hope you never go to Australia, because I love Australia, and I don't want it to smell like your throw-up."
That isn't how I feel at all. I just wanted to make that point.
Usually my answer is along the lines of this this:
"South Africa is beautiful. The countryside is unreal and the culture is cool and blended and exciting and the history is fascinating and the people are awesome. The boats made me lose everything I had eaten beforehand, but that's okay. I'm happy to be home but I'm happy I went."
This is more ore less true, but it feels like a lie every time I say it. Usually I just end up saying it was really cool, because ultimately, that's what they all want to hear.
Now I'm going to pretend you actually are interested in why I don't like talking about it. And I'm going to talk about it.
It's in thirds, if that makes it easier to follow.
There is a third of it that is rapturous and joyful. We had a freaking WATERFALL on our campus. It was sunny every day and then ten seconds later it would thunder and lightning like the apocalypse was upon us. There was a game reserve full of zebra and antelope a literal minute and a half down the road, that we could chill in for free, whenever. We learned Zulu. We ate delicious bread. My friend met a lady who named her baby after him. Most of us got to work at awesome non profit organizations for three weeks, and most of us shed many tears when we left them. And then we moved, and on the way to the new place we got to pet cheetahs, and when we got there we lived five minutes away from the beach. We saw penguins. PENGUINS. There are penguins in Africa. And then, to top off the already insane cupcake with cray cray frosting, one of the most widely influential leaders in the past century (as a general rule, your opinion on him is not welcome on this post and you may debate his life choices on a less classy piece of the internet, thank you), who was from South Africa, died while I was IN South Africa. I literally lived history. All of that doesn't fit in an easy answer, and to describe it doesn't do nearly as much as it did to see it firsthand.
Then there was a second third of it that was honestly really, really rough, and moderately difficult to talk about. The last time I bailed on America (that's a way better way to say you left the country), I was sixteen, and I did not get homesick one bit. Granted, at that point in time, I was in high school, and I hated high school's guts. Now, I am in college, and it is probably one of my favorite things. Also, another one of my favorite things is my boyfriend, and guess where he was not? Africa.
For the sake of fairly accurate disclosure, this time around, I felt lonely and useless and gross, for a good majority of the period, and part of the reason I'm not talking about it as much as is expected is that I'm trying to recover from the blows that my emotional constitution took while I was travelling and "adventuring."
NOT TO MAKE ANYONE DEPRESSED, JUST TRYING TO BE REAL.
The last third of it all is this: it seems like everyone and their relative comes back from their study abroad experience raving. Absolutely raving. Potentially raving mad; that's always a possibility.
America, I presume, went on just as it normally did. Except apparently the government didn't...awk. But that aside, it was just normal life, ¿verdad? It was another semester at school or months at work or however long just doin' your thang. And that's part of why it's hard to answer the question of "how was Africa": because people expect that the entire time you're there you're breathing in magical adventure dust and frolicking with monkeys. Firstly, monkeys are gross. I would never frolic with a monkey. They eat garbage and poop garbage and throw pooped-out garbage. Actually that might be a stereotype. But nonetheless...no. None of that. The trip was far more mundane than people realize. We had problems with the wifi and toilets that didn't flush and breakfasts whose origins we questioned. We took taxis and avoided being robbed more often than usual and got takeout four times in one week, but would you consider that a thrill ride? Most people would not.
Then again, most people have not tried Nihao Kitchen's fried rice.
Shoot. Dang.
But for some reason, the whole freaking world has this expectation that studying abroad is living in pure exhilaration every minute of the day, like we pulled a Dorothy and went from black and white Kansas to technicolor Oz, and we were all just running around yelling about how cool it was, all the time. I don't know. I've never done drugs, but I did see Across the Universe, which is almost the same, and when people describe study abroad to me, sometimes it kind of sounds like they maybe just sat around and tripped for three months.
On that note...that's it.
I have spent a lot of time feeling like I was failing everyone by leaving the country and not being stoked for every second of it, and I'm really over it. If you ask me, "How is Africa?" or you have asked me this in the past, and I stared at you kind of awkwardly and stuttered a lot and said something really vague, I promise it's nothing personal. I'm just trying to hold back the verbal emesis (emesis = vomit, because I needed another word for it, because apparently I've talked about it five times in this post) that has partially made its way into this downer of a webpage. It will come. Eventually. Right now it's just sitting inside me like a giant onion that's making me cry and causing blockage of feelings and can only be removed by peeling it away a little bit at a time.
Soon it will be better. And I will write more eloquently and beautifully, and we will all be happy, and we will all dance around joyfully in the radiance and ecstasy that life as we know it should be.
...is it just me, or did that last sentence sound like studying abroad?
Bye!
