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.