Sunday, June 26, 2011

Ride of Steel! or A Really Sentimental Weekend

I spent this past weekend visiting friends in So Cal and spending a day at Six Flags. There were five of us, including two of my beloved housemates, all of us preparing for two year stints abroad in the near future. One girl is leaving for Kenya in two weeks, another for Senegal at the end of August, I am leaving for Turkmenistan in September, and two girls are in the latter half of the PC application process.

The weekend provided an opportunity to reflect on our individual preparations with each other, and at the end, we said good bye. One observation made last night was that none of us are old enough to be saying these kinds of good byes. None of us have any comprehension of what it means to leave everything that is familiar for two years. We said what could amount to permanent good byes to people who have shaped our development over the past four years. I do not regret my decision to join the PC and I am excited for the challenges and opportunities for growth it will provide, but I was reminded of how young I am this weekend, and how little experience I have in the world. I have never left my friends and family for such a long time before. I do not know what it will be like to not see them for possibly two years. 

We also talked about how this is an experience that will force us to confront who we are. All five of us consider ourselves to be adventurous, exploratory people, but travelling by ourselves to a new country will test that, and we have to be ready to accept it if we can't make it, if we really aren't what we have always thought ourselves to be. Which would be a huge blow to one's pride.

But this is the point of going. To test myself, to see who I am, to grow, to be challenged, to have an adventure. I am little, I am inexperienced, and I will probably be scared, but I want this, and I am grateful that I have friends that are going through this experience with me, however far away they might be.




Also, thank you to Tiffany for being a pansy with me on all of the roller coasters, and to Rachel for making me open my eyes on Superman even though you were terrified, too. You should become a crisis counselor.

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Family, Waiting, and Band Aids



I am leaving California for Oregon next Friday, so I am trying to see as much of my family and friends as I can in my last week and a half here. I went back to my hometown to visit my sister, niece and father today, which entailed Americanized Chinese food, playing skee ball at Chuck E Cheese's, and swimming in a blow up pool in my sister's back yard. As I said good bye to my father tonight- whom I will see in a week, granted- I realized how much I am going to miss him when I go to Turkmenistan.

We have had a turbulent relationship during most of my life, but over the past two years it has turned into what I would imagine constitutes a healthy father-daughter relationship. I ask him for advice, he gives me restrictions, I break said restrictions, and he adjusts his expectations in order to deal with me. Last summer, he explicitly told me "You can leave the state [for work, school, etc.] you just are not allowed to go to the east coast or leave the country." I was applying for the Peace Corps at the time. With time, he has grown to be surprisingly compliant concerning the plans I have for my life, which are so terribly different than the plans he had for me.

This lead me to consider how this experience would have been different had I accepted my other invitation option to leave in June. I would have been so busy, consumed in rapid preparations after finals and graduation, that I wouldn't have had time to reflect on anything, or think about my family at all. I would have had to be focused on my departure, and probably would not have even thought about my family or friends until I arrived in country and finally had some down time. Not leaving until September has allowed me to take time to visit everyone I love, but it has also given me time to fester over the changes that will ensue, like slowly peeling off a sticky Band Aid. I know that I already made my decision, and there is no going back now- and I don't want to, really- but which would have been better? Ripping the Band Aid off quickly by leaving in June, or this anticipation allowed by the slow peeling that is leaving in September?

This is my dad. If he ever learns how to use the internet and finds this blog, he probably won't love that I put this picture  of him on here, but he is such an adorable man, I couldn't resist.