So it’s been a month since the last update. I’m lazy, what a surprise. I’ve been back in the U.S. for over 3 weeks now and it has actually gone pretty fast for me even for the slowness of an unemployed summer. I have to admit, Spain was fun and nice but it’s good to be back to all of my favorite places to eat, golf, and hang out. It’s nice to be back to knowing 100% of what’s said and 15 minute, hot showers, back to the American Dollar, which is worth nothing anywhere else.

My journey back to the U.S. was not as simple as my departure. My original flight plan was a mess, Sevilla to Madrid to London to Chicago to Pittsburgh, a 20 hour ordeal. The first flight went without a hitch, I didn’t even get knived waiting for a taxi in Sevilla at dawn like I expected. The flight from Madrid to London was a frantic moment as I realized I had 25 minutes before my plan took off and I was in the wrong building and needed to bus across the huge airport. After getting completely lost for a few minutes I made it to the plan in time. Now the flight was running late and it landed at 3:35, 70 minutes before my next flight. After a few mishaps at the cluster fuck that is Heathrow I made it to the check-in desk 15 minutes before my flight left only to be denied. The reason for not letting me on the plane was that they needed 30 minutes to process my information because the flight was in-bound to the United States. Yes, make sure you be weary of all those American citizens wanting to come back into their own country. I mean really, if I wanted to attack the United States, don’t you think I would pack a truck full of explosives I made in the comfort of my own home within the U.S. and drive it into a government building rather than try to avoid multiple layers of intense security to attack it via an airplane? I mean really America, fucking think, you damn retard. Uh oh, I might have just upped the terrorist watch level to orange.


This all led to getting a ticket to another flight to New York instead a few hours later, but the seat was not guaranteed. After waiting 3.5 hours and being repeatedly told they could not get me on the flight because it was completely full, I got my ticket thanks to the absence of some random people at the last moment. It was there, in that terminal in London where I may have never been so upset in my entire life. It wasn’t fear or anxiety, I had lived in another country for a couple months and almost died a few times there. I really wasn’t scared so much as tired of a lot of things, mostly having to be so fucking independent. It’s always me and myself. I always have to go it alone through everything in my life, and the prospect of having to spend the night again without lodging in a second foreign country just put me over the edge. I was sitting in my seat bubbling with total anger, disgust, and sadness. Squeezing on that last flight made me feel better but I still had to land at 10pm at JFK in New York only to have to meet some random dude and take a taxi with him to LaGuardia and sit in an uncomfortable seat for 6 hours or so with snoring minorities all around me. Eventually my flight left at 8am to Pittsburgh and I met my mom and grandma at 9:35am. I had never been so glad to be home.

Sure, that was a long useless story about my airport experiences but I feel better for finally talking about that. I went up to State College this past Thursday with the help of Jeremy to help clean and move the rest of my stuff out of my old apartment. I have to say it was a relieve to be done with Executive House Apartments and their hallways that smell like rotten vagina. Two days before I found a place to live for the fall. Having refused to live in a place that makes you sign a 12 month lease (every place in State College), this left me homeless as of August 25 and obviously very bummed out for the past few months. The whole not having a place to live really skewed my view of the next couple years. Who would have guessed that being homeless might twist my perception of the sphere of bunnies and rainbows that is our world and my place in it. Thankfully I don’t have to drop out of college and thankfully I won’t be living in a van.

For the first time in a while I have a clear vision of what is going to happen. I’m going to finish my course work this fall (easier said than done) at State College and heading to Pittsburgh for student teaching where I’ll be living with my long time friend Sarah. After that the real fun begins. I’ll be collecting letters of recommendation and references, finalizing my resume and cover letters and sending them out to various schools. I’m really going to be focusing on a job in North Carolina and I’ll figure out the certification problems at some point during my senior year. Ideally I want to land a job in NC, as I’ve said before, and in a location that’s maybe 60-90 minutes from the beach if I’m really really lucky. Obviously if I land a job I won’t have much time to find housing for that area so I’ll more in likely have to live in another apartment for my first year and hunt for a house while I’m down there. After that though I’ll get my small house and really start the rest of my life. What I haven’t mentioned is the girlfriend part but that is a variable I am not worried about until I land a job. I’ve waited this long, what’s another year, right?

I think I’ll be sad to leave this area because of my friends. I really do love all my friends but I’m also not an idiot. Moving 550 miles away from everyone I know isn’t the best way to keep in touch with people. Hell, the amount of people I talk to daily from senior year of high school to now has gone from about 100 to 15 including friends from college. I’ve been really impassive about it all too, I haven’t really cared to try to keep in touch with a lot of people as bad as that sounds. If I don’t see someone on a day to day basis it’s really hard for me to keep in touch. If I move to NC I realize that every single friendship I currently have will be reduced to AIM conversations and emails that get sparser and sparser. On my occasional journeys back to West Middlesex on holidays and such there will be the infamous “Let’s get coffee and catch up!” At the start I’ll try to invite people down to visit me and stay at my new pad but I’ll usually be let down because other people do have lives and it is a 550 mile drive. My dream of everyone I know just moving down to NC with me and coming over to my place with my pool, hot tub, and 60 inch LCD 1080p television with leather furniture every day to hang out just isn’t viable. It really is sad that my main motivation for moving down there is the improved climate, but I really just can’t do 8 months of winter for the rest of my life.

I guess the big gist of this all is that I’m excited to get the next year done and out of the way. In less than 300 days I will be walking across that stage with my diploma and I can’t wait to be done shoveling money I don’t have to Penn State, to be done paying $7,400 a semester to work my ass off.