*flicks on light*

Wow. Um…I didn’t know it was possible for a digital space to get cobwebs.

Well, hello, readers. I know it’s been a minute. But I’m back, and I’ll be making an effort to make more posts.

How do these things usually go? Example that seems unrelated that leads into the topic of the day. Right…

The Rudyard Kipling novel Captains Courageous revolves around Harvey, a proto-Kardashian who has spent his whole life being pampered by his wealthy parents. When he is lost at sea, he is picked up by Portuguese fishermen. Harvey is at first thrown off by the rough lifestyle of living on a fishing boat, but eventually joins in the work and grows adapted to the lifestyle. The novel ends with a matured Harvey reuniting with the parents and, with previously unseen resolve, heads off to Stanford to prepare himself for running the family business.

Now, I’ll be honest: I’ve never read the book. This is a summary cobbled together from passing references to the book I’ve heard and a cursory glance at the summary on Wikipedia. But there’s one aspect I’m pretty sure Kipling skimped out on: Harvey’s process of readjustment.

Going from a life of luxury to a life of menial labor with no warning. Being dropped into a crowd of people from a foreign culture, whose mother tongue is not your own. Going from never having done a day of honest work in your life to working your fingers to the bone regularly. I can imagine the reverse culture shock would be real for Harvey.

Well, I don’t imagine. I know.

Today marks 3 months since I started the trek back to the United States. I was lulled into a false sense of security upon returning home. Aside from jet lag, nothing seemed crazy different. Of course people wanted to hear about my experience, but I went to church, visited family, celebrated Christmas, and vegged out on the PlayStation. Nothing different from my time in the summer, aside from a lot more thoughts in Spanish.

Then I returned to school.

My first clue that things were different, and not in the good way, came on my first night back in my dorms. As me and my friends were getting caught up, we talked out into the hall and ran into three girls I only sort of knew from last year. They joined us, and I ended up sitting around, nodding idly as a bunch of references to events I wasn’t present for flew past my head.

Then they started private school kid-ing.

Private school kid-ing: [prahy-vit skool kid∙ing]

verb

A condition in which adolescent or young adult-aged humans from an upper middle-class to upper-class background become so absorbed in their upbringing that they form an echo chamber where the unifying point is: they have money. Named for the commonality of many victims of private school kid-ing having gone to private schools.

Examples of private school kid-ing include, but are not limited to: casual discussions of crashing your car, mentioning you’re going to your cottage this weekend, extended discussions revolving around Patagonia or Lululemon, reminiscing about your senior year class trip to Costa Rica, or breaking from one of these or similar conversation points only to see your friend(s) who went to public school and/or don’t have parents paying their way through college with a glazed-over expression.

Once the discussion turned to AirPods, I made my leave. My thought process can be summed up as such:

The hard thing about returning is the realization that time didn’t stand still while you were gone. The freshmen you live with aren’t the strangers to each other they were when you left; in the case of my dorm, they’re a tight-knit bunch. Great for them, not so much for the guy who was gone for all semester and is trying to make new friends like a socially-healthy human bean. New friends of old friends are great, too; these new friends having in-jokes and/or drawn-out conversations revolving around stuff you don’t know about? Not so much.

Now, enough talk that makes it sound like my friends and floormates are horrible people. (Much love to the broskis, the…siskis?, and 2nd Boer.)

I should mention that I came back during interim, which is Calvin’s equivalent of a J-term. It’s a time where you can take a class, but it’s also a time where a lot of people take some R&R or go on month-long study abroad trips or non-academic trips. You can imagine the kind of disappointment experienced when you haven’t seen someone in 4-13 months, return to school, only to learn they’re in [Arizona, Ireland, Mexico, Cambodia, Austria…] I enjoyed my interim class on The Inklings (read The Great Divorce if you haven’t), but in many ways, it was a lonely three weeks.

Are you guys getting sick of this ‘feel bad for meeeeeeee’ crap? Because I know I am.

With the start of the semester came the return of several things I had been missing: human contact, friends who had been elsewhere, more opportunities to see said friends since people were out of their rooms for more than three hours a day, and a little more time to get readjusted from the relatively lax schedule of La Universidad de Oviedo. (Thanks for that last one, polar vortex. Could you freeze fewer people to death next time?) Last month, I went to Calvin and Hope’s first Re-Entry Conference, a conference designed to help returning students get readjusted. I laughed and nodded along with people returning from Ghana, the south of Spain, Hungary and other places as they told of their good times and their struggles with reverse culture shock. I wrote down suggestions to help me and walked away thinking that was what I needed.

Maybe I’ll never be the same after my time in Spain.

And maybe that’s not necessarily a bad thing.