A quickie update from the shell-shocked hippie.

Well, I'm back.

Sort of. 

I'm about to start Year Two of my grad program at ASU. Returning to the baked desertlands of Arizona merely three days ago, I checked the syllabi for my fall semester classes, uploaded a shit-ton of Tanzania pictures onto Facebook, and then promptly fell into a strange dazed limbo of un-productivity. Needless to say, culture shock. Jet lag. Mental weariness and homesickness for a country that's not technically "home." Yet, it is.

 

This morning, however, I snapped out of said limbo by means of an electronic roundhouse kick to the face, in the form of an email from one of my professors, reminding us we have an assignment due at midnight. On an entire book. A book I have not purchased yet. Let alone read. B'ohh.

Time to wake up, I guess. But for those of you who need some context, here's a little recap of pre-summer events:

So in May, my first year of grad school was D.O.N.E. Done! Big collective sigh of relief? Thank you. The last semester was a good one... yours truly scored a 4.0 GPA (yeah, I'm bragging a little). It's also been busy because of all the shenanigans going on in the AZ legislature... crazy bills being passed and whatnot... so this little activist has been spending a lot of free (?) time up at the State Capitol. Like I said, there is a blog post regarding these shenanigans that is looooonnnng overdue. It's been very educational, to say the least, and my heart is telling me more and more that my future lies in advocacy work in some form. Something that many people around here (including some in my program) are finding difficult to understand. I think a lot of people don't quite know what to make of me... we have a lot of future government bureaucrats and policy analysts who try not to be political, and a few mid-career private sector folks with conservative leanings who probably think I'm the devil incarnate. But so far no one has said that to my face. At least not in class. At the rallies, I've been called more than a few things.  ;-)

So educationally, I'm doing A-OK. In terms of rock 'em-sock 'em experiences, I'm doing just  fine. What I'm having trouble with is the readjustment from my mind-blowing trip to Tanzania.  

I moved from downtown Phoenix to Tempe at the end of May, into a room in a house I found for rent on the ASU student advertising listserv. Awesome. There's nothing like moving in with strangers two weeks before you leave for the summer. The place is about 70 years old and, as such, has a lot of 70-year-old quirks... i.e. my closet-sized bathroom with a faucet nozzle in the wall (yeah have you ever heard of something called a swamp cooler? It was new to me until I moved to Arizona), and the RAD peach and brown floral wallpaper gracing one of my bedroom walls... but the place is totally my style. Which is, I think, eclectic and humorous and with TONS of character. And the rent is cheaaaaap.

So I'm back in most respects, but not emotionally. Not yet. Emotionally, I'm still somewhere else...