un-hiatus!

When you're in need of a scream but not of attention or pity, a good place to get it is in your car - windows down, sunshiny summer morning, driving not-too-fast down a slight downhill curve of a not-too-busy road that you know really well. All the stuff after the hyphen is just additional and personal-choice kind of toppings, so take this advice with those toppingsy grains of salt. The windows down make you feel like you're in the midst of a greater nature than just the surroundings of your car interior, and the sunshiny summer morning will help to diffuse that scream into a smile conclusion. But I have to tell you; the sheepish-grin-because-you-feel-stupid-for-having-to-conduct-alone-screaming-time will feel better than the forced, teeth-baring, cheek-scrunching full-on kind you put on to try that reverse psychology (physiology?) thing on yourself. Probably because the first is more honest.

I have learned a lot of things - have grown a lot - through the time period of this blog's existence. It's been over a year, on three different continents (counting this North American one right now...four! if you count that silly Morocco stint), countless definitions of home, and even more precious, life-changing encounters with people and places than that countlessness.

I have learned - in the end, through practice - what this blog means to me; as opposed to my journal, as opposed to my [now-defunct; RIP] facebook photo albums, as opposed to other people's expectations and other people's travel blogs, too. Hello, place for the recording of daily strawberrys and unabashed unloadings of pictures and ah-hah moment compilations for the glad and the sad days. And the whooshing away of my own designs and careful plans.

I have lived a day-to-day intensity of huge joys and huge wonders and huge, bratty tragedies through a summerful of people from all over the world, in a place which my feeble descriptive skills only render flatly technicolor and uniformly unicorny. Corny. 

I have found, time and time again and actually, pretty much from the very beginning, that home is seriously freaking where the heart is. And I know that's seriously freaking cliched, but when you're trapped between a rock and a hard place looking for the right expression at the right moment, a lot of times, cliches will do just the trick to quench your language thirst; scratch that expression itch, whatever floats your boat. Like a cool bottle of Coca-Cola or Diet Mountain Dew or bananaooyoo, whatever your vice.

I have felt indignant and possessive in perhaps the most productive way I have ever been indignant and possessive - on my way to figuring out this whole hyphenated identity thing (bleh) but still raaather far from fixing the whole indignant-and-possessive character flaw thing going on here.

I have taken serious steps toward remedying things like this (and like this), cause I don't want to be a noob anymore. It's about a whole year late, this summer, finally learning to cook things from my momma, but the noob stage of my life is officially over. At least in the kitchen, anyways, and at least in my attitude about it. I won't take any of that damsel-in-distress crap ANY LONGER, SELF, and that's final. Cooking is not as big of an opponent as I used to make it seem with the size of my cowering and whimpering. Harrrrrrumph!

I have finally understood a bit of the love in my grandma's frugality, and held her hands - they tremble now, as in a continuous aftershock of her lifetime of labor, of love - in a way that felt differently warm from the expo hand-holding.

I have learned the beauty of the here and of the now, and the overriding importance of realizing that these here-and-now moments continue and expand. They consume the whole world and your whole life, if you'll just let them. I'm not insisting that I feel good all the time, in every great or cruddy place. Just that there is always beauty in your situation. No matter how bleak. Promise. (Escaping it! for example.)

I have thought a lot about spatial allocations of people in crowded places resulting in all kinds of awkward physical and emotional contact. Or lack thereof.

I have sewn things and grown things and moaned about Friday night things and thought it made me sound grown up. Pffffffffffffffff to the t. But then had other days, too, when I could feel a little better about the moan:grown-up-ness ratio.

I have celebrated a quarter-birthday, then a whole-birthday, then the birthday of this tiny baby of a thing compared to my twenty-two years. [Insert old-man laugh here.]

And I am learning to throw out the repetitive self-consciousness that masks deserving recognition (for...like, growing up, for example!) and have apparently grown up enough to be pretty embarrassed about some of these posts on this here blawg, too. Hurhurhur. And to recognize that the screaming-while-sitting-alone-in-my-car opening probably isn't the best introduction to a post all about how I Learned Life Stuff and am now Grown-up and Mature, Etc. over the course of a year abroad.

But is actually a pretty perfect one if the post is, rather, about the progress of growing up, with all its doubling backs and continued deficiencies and in-spite-of-all-that hopefulness.

Yeah. Closing the full-circle loop.