There's A Fine, Fine Line (Aug 7)

• Well, today I did a whole day of training for my new WAY Mentor Program on no sleep. Yes, after waking up at 8 pm, watching the Olympics with mom and the boys for a while and then visiting with Katie and Carrie until 3 am, I decided not to sleep between then and my 7 am alarm. It wasn’t too bad either, until about 1:30 pm. But by then I was on my 4th cup of coffee and we were doing enough new things to keep my brain mostly occupied. And then I came home, managed to stay awake until Mom got home, and promptly fell asleep at 7 pm (and basically stayed that way until 5 am this morning). 
• I’m surprised, and slightly horrified, at how easy it is to fall back into the routines that I had here before I left. So much has happened to me in the last 6 months but I’m going about everything here as if it hadn’t. It makes me want to cry. I don’t want to forget all of my memories, experiences, and relationships. I can’t, can I? But it’s easier to quickly summarize my 6 months and then get to talking with someone about our task at hand or their lives than to go into detail about mine. And it seems kind of selfish, to only want to talk about my super-exciting life. Especially when I’m met with, “I always wanted to do that, but I got married and had kids instead” (that was literally a response I had yesterday). How rude of me to be parading my world-traveler-ness in these people’s faces when they never got or took the chance to do the same. This is a weird balance that I’m going to have to figure out. I started a little with Kathreen yesterday. I was just telling her random facts - about coffee, food, the lack of sandwiches – about life in Korea throughout the day. She was very appreciative and amused, and I definitely thank her for that. I also spoke with a woman (who, as it turns out, knows Liz Carr from forever ago) about my time in Korea and she was really interested. We compared the schools here and there and it was a nice conversation (especially because I had an interesting first impression of her). I guess I’ll just have to figure out how to be recently back from a completely unique experience and how to do the things I have to here at home at the same time. One of the million reasons I wish being home in the US meant I got to see Carlee.