Counting Again

1000 hits!

I guess maybe that would be more exciting if this blog wasn't more than two years old, but still. Averaging more than one page view a day is better than less than one, right?

Tomorrow, I will have been in France for a month. That's a weird thought. It seems like last week that I was wandering through Celtic Classic thinking about how much I love Bethlehem and how much I was going to miss it, but I'm also so settled in my life here that it's a little hard to believe I've only been walking these streets and talking to these people for four weeks.

It's also hard to believe there are still six months to go. I know it will fly, just like the last six months have, and I'm already worrying about how much I want to do and how I can't possibly get it all done, but it sounds like such a long time. And it is kind of hard to shake the feeling that my life is on pause right now, like I'm taking a time-out from whatever I'm really supposed to be doing to fool around in France for a while. I don't necessarily mean that in a bad way, but there's no way around the fact that this is ultimately a detour, of one sort or another. I'm a little worried that by the time I figure out what it means, it'll be over, but at the same time, there's so much happening that I'm not there for and so much I feel like I could be doing instead that it seems really important to make all this time count for something. I do sometimes feel like I'm in exile. That part of it doesn't bother me as much as it did when I was in Ireland, though (for a variety of reasons, none of which is any reflection on Ireland itself--or on France, for that matter).

I also realized today that by the time I go home at the end of this year, I will have spent more than a year of my life outside the U.S. Assuming I travel after my work is done and stay abroad until around the end of May, the grand total will be just shy of fourteen months. I'll be twenty-three in May, so that's... roughly 5% of my life.

Maybe not that much compared to some people, but I think it could be worse.