The crunch

Very much in spite of myself, with each passing day I think of how there are less than five weeks before I will be back on American soil…

Welcome back to my blog, by the way. It’s been a few months since I last wrote here.

I don’t know if I have a good justification for my absence. I haven’t necessarily been doing anything that’s been exceptionally interesting or out of the ordinary. In many ways it has just been the same old, same old…with the difference being only in the intensity and/or frequency in which I do them.

For example, I still go to school. That’s more or less a given. I still go out with friends. Obviously. I still exercise when I fail at psyching myself out and can pick my lazy self up from the relative comfort of my firm-ish twin-sized bed. I take pictures when I can, hesitantly, as I am still months behind in editing some of them. I try to samba at every opportunity that presents itself. And finally, I still go to the Catimbó ceremonies that I mentioned some time ago (but I believe that I failed to inform you that one time was the first but definitely not the last time I went). Nowadays, I find myself trying to catch up on sleep because it hasn’t been coming easy these past few weeks.

In spite of that, all in all, I feel that mostly things have just become a lot calmer. Maybe it’s due to the fact that Carnaval has been long gone. Or, perhaps it’s because the winter is upon us and my already low incentive to go to the beach has pretty much gone to bits what with the chilly gusts of wind and torrential rainstorms that to suddenly show up and pockmark what would have otherwise been an idyllic weekend by the seashore. Mainly I think it’s due to the fact that life here is no longer full of so many twists and turns. Instead of discovering new-found treasures, jewels that once shone so brightly have shown themselves to be fools’ gold and the diamonds in the rough have been polished into something much more valuable than I had originally thought. In other words, I feel that I can honestly say that Brazil finally feels natural to me (and that when I said this before, it had been profoundly immature): a pot-purri of losses and victories and something in between. My glasses have gone from rose-tinted, to an impenetrable black, to clear.

I can very much recall the goals that I had wanted to accomplish before I came to Brazil, but now I marvel at how much they have changed. (I think it would be cool to list them in my very last blog post.) Nowadays, I just want to accomplish what I have to at PUC, visit and photograph a few places within Rio de Janeiro, cherish my last few weeks with the few great friends I’ve made since I’ve been here, plant a few seeds (this sounds a bit weird, I know, but let’s think metaphorically here), and get back to the United States in one happy, healthy, and determined piece.

PS: I know that the readership has probably dropped immensely due to the lack of action on the blogs (but let me tell you that, if study abroad was an orange, then it’s very difficult to write about a life that you’re trying to squeeze 100% of the juice out of at the same time!). It happens. Nevertheless, if there are any particular questions that you have about my experience in Brazil, I thought it would be very interesting for me to address them in an upcoming “Questions & Answers”-type of blog! So if you have any questions for me, please include them in your comments!