After one (happy, crazy, growthful, changing, difficult, spectacular, lovely, joyful, lonely) semester of college, I have come to understand these things:
1) Mostly, you relate to the people you knew previous to your first college experience in a completely different way after you've come home. To me, this means that I am officially an adult in the Cline/Scholl crowd; I partake in adult conversations, without fear of giving my own opinion or even telling Kevin to shut up. It also means that stupid high school cliques are no longer in control of my social life. (This is where I insert a five-minute long sigh of relief.)
2) People are hard to live with. It doesn't matter who they are, where they came from, how similar they are to your own personality; people are just hard to live with. And once you can master the "art of losing" all the things that make your life familiar, it is five hundred thousand times easier to live with another person.
3) Pop-tarts and string cheese can be a suitable meal for anytime of the day!
4) It is completely normal to eat by yourself, whether you're in the cafeteria or hiding out in your dorm room.
5) Friends require upkeep. After about six years of having three perfectly synced friends who practically fell into my life, this was the hardest for me to come to terms with. It takes time for faces to become acquaintances, acquaintances to become casual friends, casual friends to become close.
6) Facebook is a SICKNESS.
7) No matter how awkward I feel about the whole "Third Culture Kids of APU Unite!" thing, I have to admit that it does make me feel ten times more comfortable when I realize that a professor is a former MK or a classmate spent most of her life in a different country. It's not because I can't relate to your average American, it's because I can relate better to people who have had similar experiences to mine. And that's true for everyone, whether we're talking about the language you speak, or the kind of school you graduated from, or the place you grew up in. People are naturally drawn to those who are like themselves. And no matter how self-obsessive that might seem, it's good.
8) You are different. I am different. We are all freakin' different, so it's completely futile to go around acting like you're God's gift to society. Get over yourself.
9) 7:15 Walk/Jog classes are never a good idea.
10) Sometimes people suck. (That's why forgiveness is such an intense theme in the Bible.)
11) Tie-dye is way cool in college.
I started this blog entry about a month ago, but I got frustrated with how Blogger changes the language if you're in a different country and since I was in Ecuador (South America, not Africa), everything was in Spanish and it just bothered me. So even though the new semester has already started, pretend it hasn't.
