Well, I’m home. Home being Ames, IA USA. It’s been nearly a month since my return to the country and as far as I can tell the world is more or less the same. For that matter, I am more or less the same as I was when I left South Africa on the 18th of August. I feel like some major cataclysmic shift should have happened upon my return…there was such a momentous buildup to the beginning of Peace Corps and then the same towards the end, surely I can’t just come home without something changing. There’s no drama. I can’t even claim to be dealing with reverse culture shock because after all of the constant back and forth between first world and third world in South Africa this really isn’t that much different. I guess my biggest problem is that I just feel…normal?
That said, I have entered into the perilous world of job searching. And when living in my parents’ house unemployed and with little hope of finding a big-girl job in any sort of expeditious manner (you know, the economy and all) it is difficult to maintain any sort of cool, calm and happy demeanor without some level of emotional fluctuation.
Being back in Ames does have it’s merits. I have a car to drive which means oh so much more than simple mobility- if I decide I want to buy an avocado, well then I can go buy that avocado the moment I think of it. If I want to read a book, I can go to the library. If I’m depressed because I don’t have a job, I can go to the mall and cheer myself up by participating in the great American past-time known as mass consumerism. Until you have relied solely on unreliable public transport for two years you will probably never fully appreciate the amazingness of the personal automobile.
Speaking of great American past-times, I have to admit, one of the things I am currently struggling with is football. Living in a college town, football and the craze that comes with it is inescapable. Iowa State played University of Iowa today, the biggest rivalry-induced sporting event of the Fall semester, maybe even the whole year? You’d have to ask a real sports-fan to get the answer to that though. I’m in no way opposed to sports or supporting a team but there’s just something about this college football thing that creeps me out a bit. Maybe it’s the masses of identically dressed and fake-tattooed college students that get to me or the facebook pictures of newborn babies dressed in the school of choice’s colors. I feel like by virtue of being a citizen of Ames or even the State of Iowa I’m not allowed to not care who wins. And because I really, truly do not care who wins I think that I, in some odd existential way, feel alienated from my community.
Anyway, I think with that it is time to get out of my head and go be a normal, social person.
