reflection
I've been here for a while now, but I still have a bit left to go.
Peace Corps has a lot of change-the-world connotations, but most of the time I feel like I'm in stasis (a stasis?) and the world is changing around me. Friends and family get married, or pregnant, or just move. Political and economic seas change. People get older. But these surreal developments have no effect on my life; the extent of my interaction with most people from my former life is instant messages about when I will return.
My "real world" consists instead of loudly explaining grammar points, tangentially engaging in faculty-room banter, or pushing flying plastic and printed page. Both of the latter are progressing in the kind of slow motion you only notice when you get distracted and then look back at it, like shadows moving across the porch. Whether anything will remain visible after I leave remains to be seen.
Puns are such a nice, pure form of humor. The locals love them --nobody groans here. The English department has amassed several lifetimes' worth of incorrect usage jokes. They love the way sheet sounds like shit. They love how some English words end in "s" even though they are not plural. They love deliberately getting their possessive pronouns wrong.
Peace Corps has a lot of change-the-world connotations, but most of the time I feel like I'm in stasis (a stasis?) and the world is changing around me. Friends and family get married, or pregnant, or just move. Political and economic seas change. People get older. But these surreal developments have no effect on my life; the extent of my interaction with most people from my former life is instant messages about when I will return.
My "real world" consists instead of loudly explaining grammar points, tangentially engaging in faculty-room banter, or pushing flying plastic and printed page. Both of the latter are progressing in the kind of slow motion you only notice when you get distracted and then look back at it, like shadows moving across the porch. Whether anything will remain visible after I leave remains to be seen.
Puns are such a nice, pure form of humor. The locals love them --nobody groans here. The English department has amassed several lifetimes' worth of incorrect usage jokes. They love the way sheet sounds like shit. They love how some English words end in "s" even though they are not plural. They love deliberately getting their possessive pronouns wrong.
posted by ben at 6:23 AM
1 Comments:
I tried to compose a thoughtful response to this, but it isn't working for me. I'd like to say something about you're not missing anything by not being here any more than we're not missing anything by not being there. But it all sounds trite and forced. And the quadruple negative doesn't help.
Yours hasn't been a Rip Van Winkle experience. Trust yourself and hang in there.
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