next!

I've been home in Madison for a little over 10 days. I'm going a little crazy. I need my next adventure to start NOW, but I'm trying to be happy in the moment...

Sitting at home now, and finally with nobody around asking me things and distracting me, I'm trying to finish my application before it's due in five hours. I've wanted to apply for this for a year, and the application is fairly easy to write, mostly because I've thought about this stuff a lot... the challenge is how to sort through all my ideas to write coherent answers.

Sipping iced green tea that has been waiting for me in the fridge. Wishing it was raining like it did yesterday. Contemplating making my favorite pasta that I haven't had in what feels like ages for lunch.

I've realized that I come "home" to Madison to remember that it's really not my home anymore. Although I'm happy to not be where I was a year ago, I miss how I felt in my old life in Madison almost as much as I'm missing Doha... and I already have a kind of preemptive nostalgia for London, interestingly enough...

Driving to Iowa to pick up some of my sister's college stuff yesterday, a song came on that I listened to all the time in Doha and I saw myself in my mind, driving on the dusty roads at dusk, the Corniche on my right, desert on my left... the memory floated away easily when I turned my head and saw the little red farmhouses perched on the rolling hills full of corn and verdant trees that are characteristically Wisconsin.

On that drive, I also finally understood that for the first time in four years or so, I could actually stay in the same place for three years or more if I wanted to... and my plans seem to be arranging themselves that way. I'm trying really hard to make myself let go of my ridiculous expectations of my fabulous life in London. But at the same time, I'm determined to make this an amazing year, if not my best year yet. For now, I am pretty content with just thinking short-term and continuing to look forward to being crazy busy and working really, really hard all the time...