Spring has sprung, which is great. Kind of. Part of my brain is super excited that things are turning green again and the sun is shining, but the other part of my brain struggles to maintain that cheeriness because I've seen it before, and it doesn't really take the edge off everything else like it did last year. It's beautiful, but it doesn't balance out.
I want it to be fall. That's right, I'd be content with skipping summer. I just want to be at the finish line, at the place where my mantra is "screw it because I don't care anymore" and America and hot showers and fluffy comforters are only a short time away. Instead, I've got to slug through about eight more months.
I think one of the biggest strains on me mentally has been my inability to communicate with anyone in any meaningful way for far too long. It's too expensive for almost everyone, especially my college friends, to call so mostly I get to talk to my parents and a couple of fellow volunteers from training (and I truly appreciate that), though my reception isn't great and our calls usually drop at least once during any given conversation, if not more. Lately, I've found myself thinking, "If only I had Skype!" I don't even care about the other things I could do with high speed internet, I just want to talk to the people who matter to me. That's it. I sporadically keep in contact with a few people via email, but email is so inadequate at this point. It takes too long to write things out that would take two minutes to say, and conversations don't develop naturally. Not to mention that I'm pretty sure the old adage "Out of sight, out of mind" is fairly true. Usually unless I send the first email to people, my inbox remains empty. I get it, people are busy and have their own things going on, but it would be nice to know they remember I exist.
To be fair, it's taken me over a year and a half to get to this point, probably because I'm an introvert and I've been keeping myself distracted. Also, it's the cumulative effect of feeling like my presence at my school is useless thanks to most of my students not doing the work, or blatantly cheating when they do, and knowing that the teachers at my school aren't going to change their teaching habits. And even though I've been in this community for over a year and a half, people remain incredibly unfriendly to me. I know it's the Ukrainian mentality, but you'd think they'd have a sliver of empathy. As it turns out, they don't.
Okay, I'm done complaining. You can go back to your regularly scheduled lives now.
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