Tuesday

Well, paper is now officially turned in and finished (that happened yesterday). Rachel left yesterday morning. I am still sick. Those are the short updates to life.

The longer updates have to do with more complex things. I have been feeling kind of homesick in the past few days. Maybe it is because Rachel was here, reminding me of home. Maybe it is because I am reaching the first dip in the graph that I was given when I was in Germany - basically, it is a correlation chart of moods of students in study abroad (it was specific to my Germany program, but I think it applies to abroad programs in general). Once the honeymoon period starts to wane, the first dip happens. I dunno, it just has been affecting my mood the past few days. And being sick doesn't really help.

And I have this irrational fear of getting fat again. I mean, I have never felt particularly good about the way that I look. But I was listening to this conversation the other day and this girl, who I thought was perfectly slim looking, was described by a third party as "chubby". "Chubby"?! She wasn't a stick figure, in that she had shape and whatnot, but she was definitely smaller than I am. I called out the third party on word usage because, seriously, it was a WRONG perception. I framed it around the idea that that girl was slimmer than I am. Which makes me wonder if the world as a whole views me as being "chunky" or "chubby". It has taken me a long time to not feel guilty every time I eat a meal, or to wear anything that is even remotely fitted and I worry that I could easily fall back into bad habits. I have definitely been eating worse here than I do at home and I don't work out as much, but I don't know what I can do about it without starting the cycle all over again. Paying attention turns into being obsessive, I count down the minutes until I can allow myself to eat a specific portion of cereal and spend all of my time planning out how and when I am going to eat. Essentially, I don't know what is wrong with the world today when a young woman has to be a size 4 before she is worth anything. I don't know.

And I need some suggestions of books to read. I think I have been lazy in respect to time management and am feeling intellectually stunted. I want to go to the store tomorrow and get some fun books. Because what is life without fun books?

And it is snowing. Well, more like hailing, but frozen precipitation coming down. And the walls vibrate and I am terrified that the window upstairs is going to blow open today (SSH's way of dealing with it was to send a guy out, who was shocked to see that the window wasn't still open - as if he thought we would have just been sitting with a wide-open window for the two days it took him to get here - and so he took off the locking mechanism and that was about it... so if it opens again, we have no way to get it to shut again). It is hard to describe the place where I live because it is on a bridge and in a bridge. 14 stories up. Ah, fun with prepositions. Scary all the same when I watch bottles I have on my dresser inch forward with every gust...

More to come later.

-B