Insanity

Yesterday was the swearing in ceremony.  If you missed it but would like to see it, I believe that the embassy still has the recording posted online.  You can find out more information from http://www.facebook.com/sanjose.usembassy.

Whoa.  Nelly.  The last twenty four hours have been surreal.  I expected to be physically tired after the ceremony, but I thought that as usual I could keep my emotions on lock down.  I was so wrong!  In the middle of swearing the oath, I was overwhelmed by an intense feeling of the “now”-ness of things.  Everything had a sharper outline to it, and time passed neither too slow nor too fast.  My hand raised and the backs of my friends in front of me, I felt like I was cemented to the spot – like I couldn't have walked away if I wanted to.  Again, and a recurring theme in my blog, it just felt right.

This marks, however, the beginning of two years with really high highs and really low lows.  And what's on tap for this week is taking my thoughts and emotions on quite the ride.  On the one hand, the rest of my life starts tomorrow.  Woo!  A huge boost of excited energy and confidence in my own abilities – I made it through training.  On the other hand, I say hasta luego in a more final way to my friends (this is particularly difficult) and family in the US as well as my host family and newly-minted volunteer friends.  Boo.  Arriving in low or confused spirits isn't a great start in an environment that already seems alien.

“Yeah, it's overwhelming, but what else can we do?”

MGMT gets the credit for expressing in words something that I've always had floating around inside, but could never quite capture.  The song has obviously got a different slant than the one that I put on it, but I guess that's art, too...you put something out there and people take it for what it's worth to them.  Or at least that's how I conceive it, and I'd welcome other points of view on the subject.  But I digress.  This song considers the consequences of pursuing exactly what your dream is, nothing more and nothing less.  It's not a completely happy song, but it's hopeful in its own way.  It'd be such a relief to give up and give in and be something less than what I ought to be.  But there's something deep down that fights that, maybe an instinctual abhorrence of intellectual and spiritual death – and it's everyone's right to look for what it is in this life that saves us from that, to throw ourselves wholeheartedly in the pursuit of life, joy and peace.  To realize our potential and actualize it.  Which, when I bend the lyrics of MGMT to fit my own circumstances (remember my uneducated concept of art), is what I hear in those lines.

So that may sound a little nuts-o, but it's what keeps me from really losing it today.  Low spirits have a weak bite compared to grand notions of destiny, haha.

Getting down to business, this week is going to be ca-razy.  Tomorrow I take a bus for Santa Cruz – I haven't been able to get in touch with anyone from my community, but they know I'm coming tomorrow.  There's an fund-raiser planned for the evening of my arrival and I'll definitely be helping out with that however I can.  Then...the week.  Meeting all the families in my community, eating my weight in pancito and drinking gallons of cafecito.  All part of the job, ladies and gentleman.