Stateside.

Obviously I'm back in America now. The pace of life is a little different here, and time has somehow slipped away from me. I still have so many things to say about my time in India and hope to (slash plan to...hopefully) keep writing a few posts until I feel that I have adequately documented my semester in blog form.

For now, though, life moves forward. I've moved back to Massachusetts and have three days of classes under my belt already this semester. My new roommate and I finally rearranged our furniture so that it has better flow and my half of the room isn't in the standard move-in setup. It's the small things, you know?

Being in America is strange for a few different reasons; life is more fast paced here, I occasionally think it's really strange to be brushing my teeth straight from the sink, I spend as little time outside as possible because the air is frigid, and it's dark out before dinner. I found that I've already adjusted to the hatred of parking off "the hill" at Gordon College and hate parking in Woodland, the parking lot down the street-- yesterday I found myself thinking "Who am I?!? In Coimbatore I walked all the way to the grocery store and back, not just back from my car!" and decided that for the rest of the semester I won't be parking on the hill at all. Parking in Woodland will be good for me.

Another adjustment that I dealt with was the weird feeling while I was home of having all the time in the world to do anything. But that is a feeling one gets while home on Christmas break regardless of whether the traveler crossed an ocean or not. It's just weird to have no classes, no work, no obligations to speak of. Time to sit and think and sleep and eat and do nothing or everything (but mostly nothing).

And now I'm at school and three days of classes have gone by and I already have all this homework to do and I need to be in friend-making mode again because my friends from last year transferred or moved off-campus or dynamics have changed too much and now I don't really have any "people." It's another adjustment back to a schedule. A whole other slew of people who want to hear my say that India was great and the food was super spicy and the people were friendly and no I didn't poop in a hole and yes there was poverty but I lived in a nice apartment. It's a little exhausting, but I guess I should have expected that.

I wish I could refer people to this blog, to the entries that I thought about and invested time into while I was gone and will hopefully have time to continue investing in now since I'm not nearly done saying things. But time is fleeting and I have four classes and I sleep about ten hours a night these days and as it turns out when you come back from a semester abroad the only person who continues reading your blog is your mother. When she happens to notice that you posted something new. Alas, I don't think the acceptable response to the question, "So how was India?" will ever be, "I talk all about it on my blog- why don't you check that out?!"

Despite the apparent lack of reason, I do hope/plan to keep updating this blog with India material (of which I still have so much to share!) and just in general. So for those of you still reading this (Mama), I'll try to keep posting fairly regularly and keep it interesting. Although life at Gordon College is a little more mundane and less, well, exotic than life in India. Sometimes I still do some pretty cool things here.