Settling In

It has been a bit over a month since i have got here and I have to say these last two days have been the first time I have been able to process actually being in fort collins. I knew graduate school was super busy and with work and social time, but that last month felt like a year.  so much happened and i honestly just wanted it to stop. I found myself not wanting any more new experiences. when our teacher told us about a field trip to rocky mountain national park, i normally would have been sooo happy that our first week of classes would be spent outdoors camping but by the time that came around, i really wanted to just be in my house watching netflix. its sounds so odd to be saying that but i was tired of meeting new people, of being social, of being on the go. Finally these last two days have been more balanced, sorta.

i find myself rushing to the next social event with my new cohort. there are so many excuses to be out on the weekends:birthdays, salsa dancing, bonding, mexican soccer team is playing....and i need that release from the stress of always doing something with work or school. But that leaves my alone time to a minimum and i find i spend this watching Breaking Bad. My time now for myself is my time to zone out and not do anything productive or meaningful. That free yoga class seems too far, that bike ride seems soo stressful, so instead i sit and stare at the flashing pictures on my labtop. I often think of paraguay when i didnt have a computer, i used to read, i used to do art, i also used to zone out. But somehow it was different. Now i am so tired of reading for class, picking up my own book seems like a chore. i think i should have expected that. But i did not expect much, i did not prepare myself mentally for graduate school as i was still adjusting (and still am) to the USA. Everything here seems new. It is another peace corps.

Fort collins is soooo very different than the bay area. the people are oddly into guns, hunting, beer and not into dressing well, but prefer that wilderness look from a second hand store-look. i find myself wondering where did the attractive people go, but maybe that is just me adjusting...

It is true that they like to be outdoors. I like the ability to bike everywhere, i like that everyone bikes, i like the beer. Seeing deer heads on the wall, tvs EVERYWHERE in the bar, no Asians nor blacks nor Hispanics nor Filipinos , is a bit different than what im used to, but ill adjust.

School has been a whorl wind of assignments, readings, thinking. i still can not keep my classes straight. the material seems to all blend together and i find myself doing a reading for one class when it was for another.

But i like my house, and the material of my classes. I like the folks in my graduate group. There are 20 and only 4 are men!!!! The mean age is YOUNG, even my director said so... 25 years!... I am the second oldest in the group which makes me feel a bit weird, especially when interacting with the two youngest in the group:21, 22. how did they get into graduate school at such a young age???

I found my niche of folks i really enjoy being around three girls from mexico; they are awesome. They make me happy, i feel more free and relaxed talking in spanish, more myself for some reason. I can not hide my identity in a foreign language. I am myself because its difficult to hide in a culture you do not know how to hide yourself in. i feel, so much more, the ability to be loud, spontaneous, over reactive, expressive, when i talk in Spanish and being around  latins than i do with americans. Maybe it is because i remember being like this in south america. I was less insecure in some ways because I was already seen as the weird one. Americans will judge me more.

I find myself thinking a lot about south america. I remember events in Lauren's and my trip and my desire to return comes with a rush of emotion and excitement. Normally it occurs when i am in class. The air con is on too much, the lights too bright, even the squirrels on the outside trees look menacingly at me. i remember the green hills, plots of land in the andes. Lauren sleeping on the curvy bus ride after eating our bus snack of corn nuts like things and beans. I remember the conversations with locals that enlightened me. Overheads, readings, white boards, graphs, diagrams, discussions, group work under the bright lights of the stale classroom are hard to adjust to.

I remember my house in the community, my neighbor, the cows and the way the sugar cane field swayed with the afternoon wind. i remember at night looking at the corners of my room and seeing the spiders come out of their webs. I remember reading under my one light bulb in my room and having bugs fall into my book after running into it. I remember the days where it would rain and we would lose power and all i would have was the light of the opened window in my corridor to lighten my room, and i would sit on the window sill watching the rain cause pools underneath the roof. I remember the laughter and smiles of myself and the people around me. I remember WHO I WAS, which is perhaps the most painful part of these memories. I remember the silences of drinking terere or of that soap opera that i really enjoyed because i was surrounded by my neighbor, and her daughters. I remember the committees meetings outside of my house under my Inga tree. I remember them making chipa and laughing, gossiping and all i could do was serve them terere..

I remember. so sometimes its hard to be here in fort collins