Oh man, it's been awhile

I’m not quite sure how it happened, but somehow I found myself back from Mendoza, surrounded by piles of homework and group projects and dissertations, overcome by exhaustion pretty much every hour of every day, forever without time or energy to try to codify my life into written words, and cada vez más intimidated by just how much there was to write down, to make sense of, to ensure that I would have something to look at four years from now in order to pry back those memories. So I just didn’t write. Instead, I read about Chilean fashion trends during the Unidad Popular government, I meticulously summarized every single chapter of Mario Vargas Llosa’s La ciudad y los perros, I wrote a lovely little paper about punctuation and Pablo Neruda, I celebrated the examen del grado (think defense of thesis) or a Chilean friend in San Antonio, I went to a few epic-length, animal-inundated asados, several songs (or several versions of the same song) were lovingly made by my friends in honor of my new name, Mily, I made up a song about daiquiris (a word which sounds even cooler with Spanish pronunciation), I made a gringo-ified telenovela for grammar class, I survived my very first (and then second and third) earthquakes, I successfully cooked an entire meal of Jew Food for my friends, helped make an entire meal of Finnish Food with my friends, I suffered an itchiness relapse, I gave two dissertations in three days—one that lasted an hour, and another that lasted about 40 minutes, and I managed not to sleep ever. And somewhere along the way, I realized that when I wasn’t consuming myself with worrying about homework or when I’d be able to get to the gym, I was occupying myself with everyday worries, with trying to manejar relationships, friendships, plans—things that at times pertained to being an exchange student trying to deal with the complications that inevitably arise in that context, and at other times things that had nothing to do with studying abroad. At times I can even forget that I’m here on an exchange program; there are those days when I don’t speak a word of English, when I don’t see another American, when I don’t walk into the COPA office, when I go to class and am surrounded by Chileans being just as uninterested in how the precordillera de los Andes was formed in the sexta región as I am, when I take onces in my friends’ apartment before typing-up a joint paper and later watching the week’s episode of Lost, when I sit quietly on the micro as it speeds past the slate-gray sea on a cloudy day, or the bitingly bright blue sea on a sunny day, on my way to Valpo, when I get stopped in the street by someone asking for directions, when I pass by the supermarket to buy apples before class, when I realize that writing blog entries forces me to pull myself away from that part of my mind that isn’t here as an outsider, to face looking at my experiences through the lens of what I really am, which is someone who isn’t permanent, who despite all the luck she’s had, is still just another estudiante de intercambio.

And amid all of that, and perhaps partly because of it, I’ve made the decision to extend my time in Chile. It’s something I’d been thinking about for quite awhile; it took me some time to finally break the idea to my parents, and then to finally decide to make it official, and even more time to actually announce it openly. So instead of coming home in mid-December as originally planned, I’ll be here until mid-March living with Chilean/Finnish friends, doing an independent study about contemporary regional literature in Chile, traveling, and writing. I’ll be spending Christmas with my friends and their families in San Antonio, and then New Year’s will either be spent there or in Valpo; in January I plan to travel around doing research for my independent study (right now I’m thinking Chiloé, Puerto Montt, Valdivia, Arica, and Valpo) before going to Perú and Bolivia in February. Plus, it’ll be summer as opposed the darkness that is Minnesota in the wintertime. Needless to say, I’m fairly excited; it’s the kind of thing I’ve wanted to do forever—one of those abstract dreams that never really seems possible, but that you always swear to yourself that, if the opportunity ever arose, you’d grab onto it so tightly that the skin around your knuckles would split and tear. I’ve been using lots of lotion lately.