Here I am! Driving into Ohio territory and seeing the Ohio sign makes me giddy every time.
I'm totally pumped to be home, but I have a feeling I'm going to be lonely here and there. Considering I lived with 13 other people in D.C. I honestly thought I was going to hate my living arrangement. But that never happened. I never became sick of everyone, or felt like going home wasn't really home. I feel like a lot of people have a lot of adjusting to do when they move away for a quarter or semester. But I didn't. I got along with every single one of my roommates. Naturally, I had annoyances and wishes to be alone for an hour or whatever, but I never got sick of coming back to a full house. Now I sit here on a Sunday night at my mom's house, wishing I could go home and see all of my roommates like I've been doing for the past two months. Living with so many people made me appreciate and embrace all of our differences.. most of the time.. and I can cheesily say that it has helped me grow as a person.
Living on Capitol Hill was insane. The election was one of the best experiences I've had. I drunkenly ran down to a Capitol Hill bar from my house just a few minutes before they announced Ohio as a win for Obama, and from that moment on everything went crazy. Every morning I woke up I saw the Capitol and the Supreme Court. I rode a metro to and from work(I'm going to hate driving now) and walked all of the time. I loved being able to people watch throughout my commute, sprint to the metro before it left me almost everyday, run into everyone on the metro with my abundance of bags,etc. The metro makes me want to live in a city. Is that weird? It makes an atmosphere so much more exciting.
I interned at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs which is a Latin American policy research group made up of ALL interns and our lunatic, eighty year old director, Larry Birns. My first day was one of the worse days of my life. I was assigned a letter to the editor, and I had no I idea what I was supposed to do, and was given no direction. I stared at the computer screen for a good two hours and forced myself not to cry from my frustration. It was probably a poorly written letter, and I'm not even sure that it ever got published. But from that moment on, I learned so much about writing, words, and Latin American policy. I was able to publish three of my pieces at COHA, and was able to build on my foreign policy knowledge. I interned with people from all over the world; Italy, China, Taiwan, California, Hawaii, Honduras, Pennsylvania, Nebraska.... and slowly everyone bonded, learned from each others writings, and became comfortable enough with one another to constantly make fun of ridiculous Larry.
I already miss D.C.
But I am completely happy to be home, and to be able to reconnect with everyone and have an awesome winter break.
However, winter break brings the time to be closer to June/graduation, and I'm not sure I'm ready to take my life totally seriously yet since I'm debating whether to apply for the Peace Corps and/or Teach for America.
This is another long, and drawn out subject to talk about.
More on that later.
