I was starting to doubt the wisdom of emptying my dresser onto my bed. At first it seemed like a great way to organize what I wanted to take, what I was going to leave, and what had somehow found shelter in the corners of my drawers. The latter being my style from a couple years ago would be donated so the the poor could laugh at my former "Fashion sense" then burn the fabric for warmth. All this had been sitting where I normally sleep. It was there for two days and never showed any intent of packing itself. The couch has proven a comfortable substitute but with only a week left in the states I decided that my clothes were lazy and would not be ready in time. Today my bed is empty after a half hour of decided what would stay and what would go.
In high school Spain was a year away and seemed like a distant commitment that I didn't need to worry about like the apocalypse or a doctors appointment. I could make plans to make my transition easier then never had to follow through with them, the rationale being "I have plenty of time." I don't have plenty of time, in fact I am about to power through Spanish 202 in six days. Now this would seem impossible to most people, but I'm not most people, I am a champ of Bullshit. I can look over a lesson, get the general gist, then make up the specifics as I go along, if whatever I make up is wrong I can claim that I'm using Spanish from a different part of the world and you a clearly not as cultured as I am for not understanding that. Unfortunately being so well versed in the subject of BS makes it impossible to listen to it from anyone else. This hurt me in school, when I tried to replace to teachers made up information with my own I lost points, but I refuse to stand down because, after all, I am an expert.
My room has been emptied of my clothes and my head has been filled with Spanish. It is not light work deciding how I want to be seen in a foreign country. I have to worry about every White American stereotype ever conceived. I can't be fat or aggressive or arrogant or ignorant. Perhaps BS is not the best way to got in Europe, people in the United States love it, but Europeans tend to be better informed according to a fact I just made up. So I have to appear as if I have no preference or dislike to anything around me. If I tell positive stories about the US then the older generations think I am closed minded and unwilling to try new things. If I adore everything around me the young generation sees me as a typical tourist weenie. Thus I have been working on a contemplative nod, the perfect medium between willingness to participate, but to cool to really care if I do or not.
I'm feeling one more step to being prepared, with all the clothes I like ready to go. My wardrobe available for the next few days consists of two pairs of shorts, twenty pairs of underwear(The Christmas gift you can give your children every year!), and whatever shirts I steal from my dad. Y ahora yo will be prcaticaring un poco del espanol, Ariba! Idios Mio! Madrid, Sangria, Soccer futbol!
Monday, August 30, 2010
Thursday, August 19, 2010
Waiting
My inbox is still empty. Now maybe I have received an e-mail in the past couple seconds from the Bokoff-Kaplan agency, but somehow I doubt it. I try to distract myself as best I can, but whenever I have some downtime somehow my inbox is open again, and I'm left staring at the twenty livemocha.com messages I have not read. I will close my Gmail account without reading them.
The e-mail I am waiting for will tell me the exact date and time I will leave this country. It should also give me the date and time I will return here, ten to twelve months after my departure. I am a Rotary youth exchange student, I will be living in San Sebastian, Spain for the upcoming school year, and if everything goes well, for some of next summer. Although I have already finished high school I will be completing another senior year in Spain (2ndo de bachillerato). I will not get any college credit for next year, but I don't mind. And although I will spend another year in school, I'm glad it is not the American version of it. When I was in high school I did not think very highly of the institution, I though it stifled creativity, was intellectually imprisioning, and broke tender spirits, not that I am bitter or anything. I was sure that almost everyone else was going to the parties that I had seen in movies, where a DJ blasted music to colored strobe lights and 89 percent of the girls looked like Meghan Fox. I don’t know where these females would have come from, but I expected that they were like werewolves; girls that were shy and intellectual in school, who mutated when they entered a party, to resemble all my favorite actresses and celebrities. Now I understand that this was most likely not the case, and many of the other kids were like me, but I cannot help my continued weariness of American high school. I would like to take this moment to wish my sister all the best next year, she will be in ninth grade.
I am supposed to leave the first week of September, and that is why I check my e-mail so often. I am not yet sure when I leave, the travel agency that works with Rotary has been fantastic, but the waiting is painful. I like to think of myself as a pretty calm guy (which is most likely wishful thinking), and when something is out of my control I can let it sit. But when my host club, my outbound club, my country officer, and (the most stressful) my mom, are desperate for the information that I don't have it unsettles me. I know that brooding over something out of a person's control can make them insane, so my distractions are many and varied. First, my online language teaching community, livemocha.com, I have been working from Spanish 101 through 202. I don’t want to look like another “dumb American” when I arrive in Spain. If anyone out there is looking to get some fundamentals down in just a few weeks get on livemocha.com, it is significantly freer than other learning methods, and in my opinion, better. The people learning on that site are from all over the world, and they all help each other out. I am graded by native Spanish speakers, and get a chance to teach some English. When my mind is worn out, I turn to my body for a distraction. Recently I have been pushing my physical limits with an activity called "tricking." My front flip is looking pretty nice, and I have been working on Aerials. There are an amazing number of videos on Youtube teaching just about anything, but I do wish I had some gymnastics training. I have been writing fiction for some years, but this summer I stepped up how much work it put into it. I am not going to show the fiction to anyone anytime soon, but it keeps me entertained. I know there is a large amount of people who would love to read my writing, so I had to do something else. I have created this blog so that my mass of followers (many of them imaginary, some other ones made up) can be entertained by my adventures next year. Maybe my mom will read this too.
I wish I had discovered the art of distraction years ago, and then the high school summers might not have been so wasted. I can only remember wondering if there was a way I could get out of going back to school. So I am challenging myself in every way I know to try and make the time pass. I think I'm going to go check my e-mail.
The e-mail I am waiting for will tell me the exact date and time I will leave this country. It should also give me the date and time I will return here, ten to twelve months after my departure. I am a Rotary youth exchange student, I will be living in San Sebastian, Spain for the upcoming school year, and if everything goes well, for some of next summer. Although I have already finished high school I will be completing another senior year in Spain (2ndo de bachillerato). I will not get any college credit for next year, but I don't mind. And although I will spend another year in school, I'm glad it is not the American version of it. When I was in high school I did not think very highly of the institution, I though it stifled creativity, was intellectually imprisioning, and broke tender spirits, not that I am bitter or anything. I was sure that almost everyone else was going to the parties that I had seen in movies, where a DJ blasted music to colored strobe lights and 89 percent of the girls looked like Meghan Fox. I don’t know where these females would have come from, but I expected that they were like werewolves; girls that were shy and intellectual in school, who mutated when they entered a party, to resemble all my favorite actresses and celebrities. Now I understand that this was most likely not the case, and many of the other kids were like me, but I cannot help my continued weariness of American high school. I would like to take this moment to wish my sister all the best next year, she will be in ninth grade.
I am supposed to leave the first week of September, and that is why I check my e-mail so often. I am not yet sure when I leave, the travel agency that works with Rotary has been fantastic, but the waiting is painful. I like to think of myself as a pretty calm guy (which is most likely wishful thinking), and when something is out of my control I can let it sit. But when my host club, my outbound club, my country officer, and (the most stressful) my mom, are desperate for the information that I don't have it unsettles me. I know that brooding over something out of a person's control can make them insane, so my distractions are many and varied. First, my online language teaching community, livemocha.com, I have been working from Spanish 101 through 202. I don’t want to look like another “dumb American” when I arrive in Spain. If anyone out there is looking to get some fundamentals down in just a few weeks get on livemocha.com, it is significantly freer than other learning methods, and in my opinion, better. The people learning on that site are from all over the world, and they all help each other out. I am graded by native Spanish speakers, and get a chance to teach some English. When my mind is worn out, I turn to my body for a distraction. Recently I have been pushing my physical limits with an activity called "tricking." My front flip is looking pretty nice, and I have been working on Aerials. There are an amazing number of videos on Youtube teaching just about anything, but I do wish I had some gymnastics training. I have been writing fiction for some years, but this summer I stepped up how much work it put into it. I am not going to show the fiction to anyone anytime soon, but it keeps me entertained. I know there is a large amount of people who would love to read my writing, so I had to do something else. I have created this blog so that my mass of followers (many of them imaginary, some other ones made up) can be entertained by my adventures next year. Maybe my mom will read this too.
I wish I had discovered the art of distraction years ago, and then the high school summers might not have been so wasted. I can only remember wondering if there was a way I could get out of going back to school. So I am challenging myself in every way I know to try and make the time pass. I think I'm going to go check my e-mail.
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