Hello, small-but-apparently-active blog following! I’d just like to give you a very, very brief update on my life and what’s going on so that you don’t think I’ve disappeared. I’m presently studying abroad in Santiago, Chile. I got here in July and will be here until December. I’m studying at La Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, taking a poetry class, a Spanish class (with the rest of the study abroad gang), and an intro to programming class, which is very interesting indeed, surprisingly.
My main issue right now is that I’ve been trying very hard to write something great for my first blog post of junior year. I want to write something fun, interesting, relatable, profound, you know, the works, but it’s deceptively hard to write when you’re abroad without your piece dissolving into just another one of the going-abroad-is-amazing-and-here’s-why-you-should-do-it-too posts. And well let me qualify that it is, it is amazing, and it’s such a wild experience, and it’s certainly not like there’s a lack of fun and interesting and relatable and profound things here to write about, but everything I’ve pumped out on my computer recently hasn’t felt quite right. I’ve so far tried to compare going abroad to the new DJ Khaled album and dulce de leche ice cream, I’ve tried to write a letter to me from my laptop charger about what it’s like to be plugged in to a different socket, I’ve tried to write about how my family’s recent move from NJ to Colorado is relatable to this whole thing… it’s been a mess. Everything I wrote felt kind of inorganic, and, honestly, I want to keep your blog-reading experience as organic as possible.
(Quick, completely optional anecdote regarding the word organic that my stream of consciousness is telling me to put down on this page: I was in Boston over the summer, and one day I was walking around in Back Bay probably looking for a place to read or get a coffee and this uber pulls up to me, and the girl in the back rolls down her window and asks me where the Whole Foods in Cambridge was. What? First of all, geographically speaking and when you factor in the amount of time it takes for you to drive from Back Bay to Cambridge, we were nowhere near Cambridge. Second of all, why didn’t the uber driver use a GPS? Don’t you have to enter your destination to request an uber or have I been doing it all wrong? Third of all, do I give off the aura of a person who knows where the nearest Whole Foods is? Should I be worried about that?)
So anyway, I wanna make this next piece a good one. Give it some time. I’ll make it worth it.
I miss Tufts and the US, really. There are so many things there that I never even realized how much I appreciate, how much they are the WD-40 that keeps life smooth and easy. It’s eye-opening. Being abroad, I think, is like when you step out of the shower in the morning and just get that crazy smack of cold air on your whole body that you’ve been avoiding for so long. (But see doesn’t that sound a little cliché? Like, great, Adam, tell me something I don’t know about what it’s like to study abroad. So you see my issue.)
I’ll stop rambling for now and get this sucker uploaded to Jumbo Talk. Moral of the story, blog, is that you shouldn’t think for a moment that I’ve forgotten about you. Como acá dirían, no, poh, no, poh!