ups and downs

Lone pagoda near Kiyomizudera, Kyoto

I'm feeling depressed today. I'm not entirely sure why... but I suspect that a lack of sleep and a slight, lingering cold (or allergy?) has just worn me down. If I were able to maintain a constant level of energy between classes AND a social life, I might not feel so malcontent right now.

Even though I'm calm, I feel somehow sad inside. I'm lonely even though I've got a ton of friends here. I want to go home even though Japan where I really want to be. I'm short on cash and pressed to give what little I have left in my bank account to the travel agency scam just to get myself home.

What it comes down to, though, is that I definitely need more sleep to be a happy camper.

It doesn't help that with all the talk of coming back to the states, I've been obligated to think about the people I'm leaving behind here. Certainly I'll miss my host family a lot-- but the friends I've made at school have been the real diamonds in the rough. Thankfully, a great number of the people of whom I've grown fond are University of Oregon or OUS students and I will probably see them again. There are, however, a few people whom I love dearly but I don't expect in all seriousness to ever see again after this year is over.

When I moved to Washington from Michigan in 1998, I lost my primary group of friends to neglect and distance. Since then, my policy (and thus the source of some of the greater drama in my life) has been something akin to "No Friend Left Behind." To me, this means that anyone who is important in my life, all changes aside, should be someone who remains important to me forever. I lost Lesley, Sian and Emilio, my best friends in Michigan, because I was too naive and selfish to admit the importance of maintaining ties over distance. Certainly, I can't help either I or my friends change but I'd like to feel that I can maintain a sense of value and a shared appreciation over the nature of the relationship.

It makes so much more sense to me now why I worry so much about other people and have trouble moving on. I guess I should just trust that those who are meant to be in my life will remain there whether I try to keep them or not.

I hope that those of us who have formed some sort of mishmash cameraderie here in the Kokusaibu Freak Show can maintain that spastic friendship in a different and similarly bizarre context and surrounded by another sea of alien peoples in Eugene, Oregon.

Hmm, given the degree of our mutual insanity, anything within the realm of possibility is likely.