and so the summer is spent

My time in Sri Lanka is pretty much done. I'll be going to Australia for about two weeks on Friday, and then (depending on status of Danish residence permit) I'll be off to Copenhagen for a semester. I have a lot of jumbly thoughts running through my head, but pulling out a few, I realise that I'm terribly terribly fond of Sri Lanka, an Australian passport is a phenomenally useful thing for a Sri Lankan to have, the idea of spending four months in Europe makes me equally excited and terrified, and oh-my-goodness I really miss Princeton and its people.

Looking back at my summer, sometimes I feel a pang at the thought that it has been far less exciting than many of the summers I've been hearing about. People I know are spending their summers doing wonderful things all over the world, and I've spent it drawing furniture, tutoring cousins, cooking up unlikely plans for Princeton to get involved here, and blogging about unnecessary things. It doesn't sound particularly thrilling, really. Perhaps the real highlight of my summer is the day we went to a bunch of schools in Galle, and I read to the children, and I realised how eager they were, and how much fun it would be to set up English and theatre workshops for them.

This summer, I have become more and more frustrated by the peripatetic nature of my life right now. I have one foot here, one foot there, and seemingly no roots anywhere. I feel like I could make myself so very useful here, if only I was living here. If I was doing architecture here, I'd also be working. I feel like I'm wasting an awful lot of time waiting for that day, possibly more than five years down the line, when I actually come back...only to find that my lack of work experience and foreign education are black marks against me. arghhhh!

But what if I had never set foot in America? I try to erase the memories of my two years in college, and I find that they are too precious for me to wish away. What if I were planted more firmly in the land of Uncle Sam? Got summer jobs or went on all these wonderful summer trips they plan...all that jazz. In which case it is likely I would see my family and friends for a total of four weeks a year. Yes, I'm sometimes a little bitter that coming home for the summer means that I can't go to China to teach English, or go to Brazil to study architecture and learn Portuguese, and I'm often cross that the ridiculously short period of time I spend here means I can't do any real decent internship where I actually learn immensely, but I dunno. Perhaps next summer, I will have to spend part of it away doing thesis research (but given that I don't even know what I want to write my thesis on, goodness knows what next summer will bring) but perhaps I will be back doing research here. Oh I don't know. I'm at that prickly stage in life where nothing seems to FIT. I want to know where I'm going in life but I haven't got a bloody clue.