2005-03-18 - 11:30 a.m.
Reading people's online journals is normally a relaxing activity: I get to hear what everyone is doing and I get a few opporunities to actually laugh out loud. However, yesterday it made me really sad for the rest of the day because it reminded how everyone is so interconnected back home. Especially since most of the diaries I read namecheck each other and hang out with each other. It seems to me sometimes that there's a big party happening over in America with everyone I know and have met attending, while I'm over here adjusting the dirt-caked ties of my students on their uniforms before class.
When I read e-mails, it's just a small pinprick of vision into one person's life back home. I can convince myself that that one person exists over there by themself and I'm over here by myself--we're two children in tree houses, screaming to each other in tin cans. But online journals are more complicated, especially since there's all this talk about community--it's a lot of pinpricks that I'm fruitlessly pressing my eyes up against.
A lot of my sentiments about this are selfish: I want everything all the time and I want to make sure I'm a part of it. Coming here, I knew, would entail having to leave a lot of things behind for two years. I can't expect to serve here and enjoy an absurd amount of social interaction at the same time. But I'm just saying. Sometimes it gets really hard to deal with the fact that I'm not really interacting with people in the way that I want to and that I won't be able to for at least 19 more months.
