i stress less

Honestly, what will become of me?
Don’t like reality
Its way to clear to me
But really, life is daily
We are what we don’t see,
Missed everything daydreaming.
Flames to dust,
Lovers to friends,
Why do all good things come to an end?
Travelling I only stop at exits
Wondering if I’ll stay
Young and restless
Living this way I stress less
I want to pull away when the dream dies
The pain sets in and I don’t cry
I only feel gravity and I wonder why

-From “All Good Things” by Nelly Furtado


A few of my friends got together last night in Sofia to celebrate… one just returned from the states, one had a birthday, and another is finishing his service this week.

Walking home from the bus station today I felt a deep sense of sadness. Nostalgia for my life as it is now. I know that in fifty years time I will tell my grandchildren, дай Боже, that these were the best days of my life. Of course they haven’t been perfect, but oh they have. This is living. Perfectly alive.

When we parted ways today, it was difficult. Each time I give a goodbye hug, I have to take a mental inventory of my calendar for the next few months and work out if I’ll see him or her again. It will break my heart to leave these friendships.

I’m not so terribly naïve to believe that we’ll all keep in touch online as we do now. We will resume our lives in our respective states. We’ll go back to our friendships, start some new ones, and pursue our careers and academic pursuits. At best, we’ll Myspace each other for a few years. We’ll keep in touch like that – commenting on each other’s spaces – until our lives get too bogged down with life, or until the comments and pictures and information seems too foreign to be that person we remember and we realize we no longer know each other.

But we’ll always have these memories.

I was never a big fan of high school. And college was not a social experience for me. This must be how other people feel when they graduate high school, except I have the very real awareness that I will not always be friends with these people.

My counter part is my best friend here. She has helped me out of more situations than any friend should ever have to. She has given a tremendous piece of her life to me, as many counterparts do. She’s seen me through some of the stupidest, silliest, and most humiliating moments of my life, and she continues to invite me along, help me out, and most importantly trust me. Of all the people in my Peace Corps life, I simply cannot imagine my life with out her. And in just a few months my life will be very much with out her.

I am petrified about returning. I have no concept of how my life will be. There are so many experiences that have changed who I am which may cause difficulties in my fitting into the spaces I used to fit before. I am keenly aware of the deficiency of my friendships at home. Bulgaria has taught me some enormous lessons on friendship. I have had to fight to keep a friendship when it would be easier to let it dissolve. I have swallowed my pride to maintain a friendship. I have been more honest, more reflective, more helped, more involved. I have been less judgmental, less judged, less pretentious, less selfish, and less insecure. I have cried more and danced more. I have shared more and eaten more. I have never had such an abundance of friendship in America and I am afraid beyond belief that I never will again. Peace Corps puts all these random people in very similar situations and for this reason alone, I have met an incredibly diverse group of people. I’ve made friends I never would have made normally and am so glad of it!

How do I reconcile these feelings of happiness about going home and this sadness about leaving this life? I reckon this is an example of the dynamic that makes life worth living. Static is boring and useless. There is no pleasure with out pain.

Something else I just wanted to gripe about: I love Myspace, as you may be able to tell from all the previous references. But I have seen some spaces that make me ill. I see some spaces from people I used to be friends with in whatever previous era of my life and I just feel grrr toward them. It seems as if they are using one idea to fill up all the nothing in their lives. There are a couple of folks' spaces I've happened upon, who aren't actually my "friends," who blab all kinds of God talk all over their space. It's overwhelming. I'm a Christian (whatever that means... christian church, christian music, christian recording label, christian store, christian tee shirt, christian coffee mug, christian door mat), but I just don't understand.

From a psychoanalytical point of view, mine that is, which is the best of all armchair psychologists' points of view, I would have to question if these folks are not compensating for an insecurity. Right, like confident people don't have to tell people they are confident. What would you think of a person who all the time told people he was happy. Why do you have to shout about it all the time? Just be it!

Maybe that is the - a - problem with Christianity. We've lost the meaning of what it is so we run around shouting that we are one. We don't know how to identify ourselves with this idea in any better way than to draw it all over our spaces. But saying I'm a Christian doesn't make me one any more than my saying my hair is red makes me a red head.

I am a brounette, btw.

I'll leave it at that. I will not venture on the very hefty topic of what really is christianity. ... today