life update

It's been a while since I've updated this, and, for posterity's sake, I feel compelled to document a few of my life's most recent events.

Flight back to Washington was quite uneventful. Lucky for me it was the holiday season so Delta was offering free on-flight wireless. So I passed the wee hours of New Years Eve morning reading a random Caring Bridge site of a person I don't even know. It was fun though. Much better than sitting there wishing I could sleep.

It was rather disorienting coming back, though. It didn't help that I flew in the very early morning and so didn't really sleep that night (except for a half hour or so on the plane and an hour or two on the bus from Seattle to Bellingham). Instead of going immediately to my apartment upon arrival, I went shopping instead. This was an odd experience - it had seemed like I was in SD forever, and that my life in Bellingham was just a distant dream. But being back here made it all so real again. It felt somewhat like home, although the feeling was different than when I got home to SD three weeks before. But, I knew where I was going, and I realized that Bellingham no longer confuses the crap out of me. So that was a nice feeling.

My water heater broke, probably sometime in my absense, although I didn't realize it was broken until later that evening when I attempted to take a shower and realized the water wasn't warming up...at all. Unfortunately, it was New Years Eve weekend and so I had to wait til Monday for it to be fixed. That was...interesting... especially because the stupid thing was leaking and so I had to keep putting new towels by it to soak up the water as to save my carpet from utter ruin.

I slept in the New Year. In one of the lamest New Years ever, I decided that my level of exhaustion (and my frustration with said water heater) warranted an 8 pm bed time. So, go to bed I did. I got about 14 hours of sleep. It was glorious. Maybe even more glorious than watching the ball drop. Ha.

Since then, I've been...not doing much. Ok, that's not true. Classes started Tuesday. I enjoy my German class, although it's interesting to say the least, given my lack of exposure to the spoken language or most of the vocabulary. Grammatically speaking, I'm far ahead of the class, but, unfortunately, I can't really say anything, because I don't have the vocabulary to back it up. My library-check-out textbooks and my rescued-from-an-abandoned-house-1950s-textbook taught me how to say things like "I have ten fingers," but unfortunately modern textbooks focus on things like "How are you?" Oh well. I am considering taking the class pass-fail. That way I can slack. I like slacking.

I'm taking an American Slavery class this quarter. It should be fun, and I am sorta viewing it as a last chance for me to switch from Nazi Germany to something that I would have more faculty support for. However, at least so far I have not been nearly as passionate about what I read about slavery as I am about Nazi Germany. A fellow student asked me yesterday if I was ready to be depressed by the slavery class. I was taken aback, and then realized that the fact that I'm planning to spend the rest of my life studying the Holocaust says something about my freakish and somewhat disturbing ability to read things and be relatively unaffected emotionally. Yup, I'm a disturbed freak.

Speaking of disturbed freak, I have lately been becoming increasingly depressed. I don't think it's anything to be too concerned about, but I do think that I need to find a roommate for next year. It's really hard on me to live by myself in a city where I don't have the established social circle or family that I had in the Midwest. I love my church, but I especially notice how hard it is on me during the weeks where my church's small group doesn't meet. I get slightly irrational and feel like an emotional basketcase. I need people. Maybe I'm not an introvert after all. I have wonderful friends back in the Midwest, but, however wonderful it is to talk to friends over the phone, it's not the same as being able to talk to someone face to face (and not on Skype).

Also, I'm starting to definitely feel misunderstood and out of place here. I am labeled as the "quiet," "antisocial," "shy" girl. Not to mention conservative and naive and a bunch of other adjectives to describe someone like me. It bothers me, because I don't believe that I'm shy. My motivations for being silent are usually just that I am either a) not aggressive enough to get a word in or b) don't feel as if I have anything valuable to add to said discussion and so remain silent. This comes from not fitting in here, I think. Although the culture here is similar to back home, there are also important differences. People here are more outgoing than people back home. People talk more here. They're more exuberant. I often feel as if (especially in class) it's a huge competition to see who can talk the most. And that's a competition that I'm not particularly interested in winning. I need to be interested in winning it, though, if I want a good participation grade. So it's hard. I'm just not aggressive. I'm passive aggressive. Haha.