Goodbye Summer
The summer is finally over.
It started with my grandmother passing away and me going to my cousin's house every day to mourn. After a couple of weeks this died down, but I still wore solid black for 40 days as part of our custom. I spent a lot of time thinking about death and funerals and future deaths. I cried a lot. Then, as most people do when they are falling into a pit of sorrow, I focused on those things that would sadden me further. I watched a lot of Law & Order SVU and E! True Hollywood Stories about tragic deaths, kidnappings, and murders. I only chose to see very sick parts of the world.
It didn't help that many of my Deaf Studies friends had gone back home to various parts of the U.S. for the summer. As for my friends here, we no longer had the consistency of a class schedule to put us all in the same place at the same time for a few days each week. The elementary school where I volunteer closed for the summer, and although I searched adamantly, I couldn't find a summer job. I became very lonely, which isn't good for me because I get energy from socializing.
One of my simpler characteristics is that when I'm becoming depressed, I try to pick myself by distracting myself with familiar guilty pleasures. In 2006, after Armen and I broke up for the first time, I started watching Friends and got to the point where I'd often watch the show for many hours at a time. To this day, I still watch a few episodes a week even though I've memorized all 10 seasons of the show; it's just something to have on in the background while I'm indulging in other things, such as playing the Sims 3. The Sims 3 was another guilty pleasure that came at the perfect time - the game was released this summer, at the height of my sadness, and I spent at least 50 hours playing on it that week. And then, of course, there was the release of the latest Harry Potter movie. Between the hype of that, rereading the books, playing Sims 3, and finding other Facebook games to play, I somehow returned back to being the part of myself that I like. I'm not sure when it happened, but everything is fine now. The summer forced me into introversion, and I must say that it's grown on me. Actually, I could've done with another week of summer so I could play some more Sims! But that's alright.
The elementary school where I volunteer started it's new year today. I went in to volunteer and there was a fresh new batch of cute 1st graders in the classroom, four of whom are deaf, and all of whom are feisty. I'm definitely going to enjoy this year. Although I was exhausted all day, didn't have any lunch, and was on only five hours of sleep, when I was walking back from dropping off a couple of the kids at their buses, I thought to myself, 'I wish I could do this every day.' I will be doing it every day this week, but my new semester at CSUN starts next week and that's a different ballgame.
This year, I'm on the Deaf Studies Association (DSA) board again as the secretary. I am aware that the title does sound slightly insignificant, but every person on the board did so much work last year that it didn't matter who was who. This year, we have a bigger board, and all the board members are my friends. We'll work hard to improve DSA again this year, and again it will be a lot of work. After all, last year I spent more time on DSA than I did on studying! Pretty much, if school is in session, my world revolves around DSA.
Jamaica! I applied and was selected as one of the 17-ish students from CSUN Deaf Studies and Deaf students who are going on a trip to visit a school for the Deaf in Jamaica to work with the kids there. We'll be taking a course this semester to prepare all of our classroom and outdoor activities and learn about Jamaican culture, and then in January 2010, off we go for ten days! I'm very excited, and also slightly nervous because for the first time in my life, I'll be in an entirely different country than my family. But I will be with many friends and a couple of faculty members, and hopefully not get food poisoning (knowing my luck and immune system I can see this as a possibility). Mostly, I'm just excited to meet the kids there and have a blast with them.
So that brings me to the end of my summer and beginning of my fall semester. I'm honestly a bit nervous about the new semester. I'm worried that I won't do well in my endeavors, but then again, I have a knack for proving myself wrong.