The Post Brought to You By the Letter W...

There's a concept that is talked up a lot during study abroad orientation at K called "the W curve". The basic gist is that your emotions during your time abroad will follow the curve of... you guessed it: the letter W.

Essentially, when you get to ___________ (insert place here), you'll be euphoric, happy, discovering new things, making plans to move there... please refer to the first couple posts of this blog. As the weeks pass, the trend indicates that you'll start to feel more comfortable, more at home, and therefore the novelty will wear off and you'll begin to return to the Land of the Actually Living from way up there on Cloud 9... please refer to the subsequent posts. Those of you who can follow a train of logic to its conculsion should be able to figure out what comes next: you begin to notice only the bad things, and they start to get to you, you feel homesick, annoyed, an even stranger stranger than you thought you were, I AM NOT AN ANIMAL! I AM A HUMAN BEING!, that kind of thing. Then things start to look back up again, and you'll once again return triumphantly to Cloud 9, and then: lather, rinse, repeat. You get it.

Personally, and I now recognize, niavely, prior to coming here I thought that this would be bullsh*t. Only for the weak-minded. Absolutely not applicable to me. Well, today tells me that I was wrong.

And the confusing thing is: I still love Rome. I love waking up and walking to class at the Villa Farnesina, walking into a room there and seeing Raphael's Triumph of Galatea fresco on the wall. Or walking into the next room and looking up at the ceiling to find Guilio Romano's The Wedding of Cupid and Psyche. It still never fails to amaze me that these things are just here for the looking. They still fill me up with joy and are hugely gratifying, as is walking past a vendor at a market selling fruit, smiling and being confident enough say buongiorno, and being rewarded with a smile and a free peach for my trouble. I still absolutely love Rome.

The things that are really starting to bug me are small and would normally not have this huge influence on me, but right now they seem to be eating my life.

I dislike being surrounded at school by people who seem to have lost the PIN number to their brains. I know how that sounds, and I know it sounds hugely arrogant and unapologetically rude, but I really am not used to this amount of outright indifference. And it's coming from all sides, and since I have to go to school, I can't seem to escape from it.

I dislike that my roommates have never been introduced to the concept of washing dishes. I don't eat with them often, but most of the time come home later and cook dinner for myself, if I can find one clean plate and one clean pot among the detritus of four days of dirty, moldy, starting to grow eyes and glare at me dishes. Really, I just don't like how dirty they are. I'm not a meticulously neat person, but I put my foot down at dirty. And I define that as having to brush the bottoms of my feet clean of Cheerio crumbs and shredded parmesean cheese before I go to bed.

Italian women have this really uncanny knack for making you feel as though you are the lowest, most unintelligent glob of protoplasm that ever oozed its way out of the primordial soup. I am absolutely not a moron, and I know this, but whenever I have had to interact with an Italian woman (a huge generalization, but accurate to my limited experience) I start to feel like a tiny little speck of nothing that they can't believe they've deigned to bother with. I hate feeling like this.

I really am kind of homesick. Not outright homesickness, like, "I want to go back to the States because everything's better there, and I want to move to Texas and not remember one word of any foreign language and call French Fries 'Freedom Fries' and forget the rest of the world and its cultures exist, hey hand me a Big Mac, will ya?". Not like that. Mostly I'm homesick for things like people who are passionate and driven in their education, or if they're not, who pretend to be. I'm homesick for my friends at home, and the fact that I could, without ruining any tenuous living relationship, tell them to wash their goddamn dishes. I'm homesick for being communally grossed out by all of our hair stuck in globs along the hallway, and then doing something about it together. I'm homesick for professors who treat me like a colleague more than a cretin, who are genuinely eager to share their knowlege and who would consider it unprofessional to make me feel as though my ideas are worth less than the oxygen it took to voice them. Really, I'm only homesick by comparison.

Yes, it was naive of me to think that I might possibly love every moment I spend here. Hell, anyone who has met me knows that that was an impossibility from the word go. I guess the one good thing about this whole W curve thing sneaking up on little 'ol unsuspecting me is that I'm getting to experience all of these emotions completely authentically... and authenticity is always a good thing, even if it's authentically bad or unpleasant or annoying.

Please, if you're reading this, don't feel bad or concerned for me. I'm not languishing away in some dark, unkempt corner of my apartment, starving myself and sinking into a depression. No, the more accurate description would be that I go through the school week pretty much consistently annoyed, and then the weekend comes and I get to do the things that I really like to do (this weekend it's the Galleria Borghese and the Vatican Museums) without the things that are annoying me interfering (my roommates are pretty much gone when I come home on the weekends). And I have friends at school who are fun, and with whom I like to do things, but alone time is essentially non-existent here unless I'm out in the city by myself, so the annoyances can really build up the pressure.

Just needed to vent my spleen a little; hope you enjoy it. I have to say that, from your perspective, this instance of negativity now and then will probably make for more interesting reading (I'm flattering myself that you're interested at all...), and that's the way I intend to think of it from my perspective, too: this instance of negativity will only make for more interesting living.