Home, a "Hangover," and Summertime in General

This is my first blog post so bear with me. I don't even know if this will be good. I want to be a writer professionally one day, but sometimes I don't even think i can write well so I thought I'd start a blog to get a bit of practice.

As all of you know already (and if you don't, you must be a complete stranger so thanks for finding my blog intriguing enough to at least read this far) I got back home from England about two weeks ago after practically dying of homesickness for about two months. Each day that passed I got more and more excited. I had not seen anyone in my family or any of my American friends in month and I was really looking forward to catching up with them all. When I first got home, however, things were just...odd and they still are, two weeks later.

After being away for just about eight months straight, give or take three weeks or so, I find it completely awkward trying to talk to, interact, and hang out with all of these people on a daily basis again. The night I landed back in New York and got back to the house, I should have known this would be the case because I found it really hard trying to come up with conversation with anyone in the house. My sister all of a sudden had grown up and was going out all the time, and my parents just made general small talk, asking how my second semester went, asking how I enjoyed England, and other similar pleasantries. It didn't bother me at the time, because I just gotten off an eight and a half hour plane ride and I just assumed I was too tired to really take in anything, but the days that followed were no better. Having not seen them for ages, being away from the family and the friends of mine that they met and knew, I didn't know what to talk to them about. The times I got drunk and spent the next day running out of lectures and into the toilets of Lipman throwing up all the alcohol? The girl I was trying to get into bed? The only two in the house I felt I could talk to were Booster and Buddy and that was only because they were dogs and couldn't talk back! My relationship with them hadn't changed at least.

If I thought things were going to be better with my friends, I was wrong. The first time I met up with them, most of the time was spent in a terribly awkward silence. Again, pleasantries were exchanged: "How's it going?" "How was your semester?" But besides that, we didn't really have much to say to one another. We tried talking about girls we were into, but not knowing them ourselves killed those conversations pretty quickly and it was the same story whenever we tried relaying adventures we had had with our respective friends at University. Once those conversations failed, we ended up reminiscing about our time in high school together the whole time. It seems that without common friends to ask about ("Did you hear what Thom did?") or a common enemy to bitch about ("Jessy's such a whore"), we have to try ten times harder to make conversation. Two weeks later, it's still not really too much better but it is getting there and I guess that's all I can ask for.

I guess I'm just disappointed by the fact that I had been looking forward to going home for months and now that I'm here it just feels a bit anti-climactic and weird. The thing is though, I know it will get better eventually, but by the time it does it will be time for me to go back to England to finish my third and final (already?!) year of Uni. And even though that's still three months away, I'm starting to get nervous and panicky that it will be the same way when I fly back there, though ten times worse because I'll be living completely on my own.

On a brighter note, however, I went to the movies last night with 6 other people to see "The Hangover" and that made me feel considerably better. Never before have I laughed so hard during the movie, and never before have I heard an entire sold out theater laugh once a minute. It was so funny that I'll need to go see it again just to catch all of the lines that I missed due to the raucous atmosphere the movie caused to descend over the audience. I highly recommend it to everyone! It's quickly ascended into my top five movies of all time.

Now re-reading this before I push "publish post," I'm beginning to feel pretty nervous. I think I picked too gloomy a topic for my first blog and I don't think it sounds well written or anything at all. It sounds pretty rambly and everyone who reads this is probably going to be bored out of their minds (Lucky for me, however, I'll probably get a total of two or three readers and no more). I don't really know how to end this so I guess I'll end it with a list of hopes for my summer:

1. Get over the awkwardness of being home and learn to sustain conversations with my family and American friends.

2. Show Holly and Jo a good time when they come to visit the end of this month, and meet up with Caroline a few times as well.

3. Start my dissertaion - or at least the reading for it - so I'm not stressing about it come september when I have 2 other essays and presentations to do at the same time.

4. Be Happy and Have Fun. :-)

And that's me done with my first blog! :-)