With everything from residence life, getting organized for classes, making sure I manage to do laundry on occasion and of course scheduling all of this around fun, which consumes my every waking thought, I have no idea how it is
already the end of August. Where this month went, I have no idea but I will
tell you one thing, I know I enjoyed every minute of it.
It has been about 6 weeks since I moved to Macomb and while
things have been a whirlwind lately, I figure now is the perfect time for me to
add a post (mainly to make sure Grams stays up to date- but actually). This is mainly due to the events of the past
week that have shown me definitively that I am in a completely new mindset as
well as a new environment.
This past week has been challenging…to say the least. It has
tested my patience and forced me to get creative in pretty much every aspect of
my life. This is not due to the fact that I’m homesick. This is not due to the
fact that I’m overwhelmed with classes and work. In fact, I’m feeling pretty
solid in both those areas. It is however, because being Canadian is hard
sometimes. Brace yourself for some slight whining, all with a comedic twist of course.
This week I learned that sending mail requires secret added
fees that one can never quite predict. This may also require you to borrow
cheques from your supervisor. I learned that sometimes you simply cannot use
Canadian credit cards to pay for things, like student fees. I learned that
putting things into your tote bag at Walmart to avoid using plastic bags will
get you called out by a security person who is accusing you of shoplifting (I
promise that in this instance, I had a receipt and fully paid-for items). I learned that metal seat belts are very hot
in the sun and hitting on will result in spilling beverages all over your newly
washed dress (of course these last two are more to do with being Holly and less
to do with being Canadian- but then again the arctic tundra and my igloo never
prepared me for hot seat belts so there’s that). Needless to say, it’s been
quite a week. Some of you might be cringing as you picture me throwing one of
my classic “diva dip” tantrums. I am proud to say, however, that I pretty much
laughed my way through all of these. I owe a big part of this to the people in
my life who have quickly become a support system for me. While they can’t
always help, they are there to laugh along with me or listen to me vent before
trying their best to come up with solutions. No matter how frustrating things
got this week, I went to bed every night feeling happy about being in Macomb.
Which brings me to my main point (because I’m over this whining business and I
know you’re over hearing about it).
Something else that has been at the forefront of my mind
lately is how comfortable I am at WIU. And by comfortable, I mean like hundy-p,
I do not want to be anywhere else. Macomb and WIU has won me over, I was
inclined to use the phrase “captured my heart” but that suits me as well as a
tiara on Honey BooBoo so let’s not. Since I realized this last fact (about
loving Macomb, not Honey BooBoo, that one was never a secret) I have been
trying to figure out why this is the case. I have been thinking a lot about my
experience at STARS College last year, when we were sitting listening to
current and past graduate students talk about “finding your fit” at a graduate
school. They claimed “you wouldn’t know it until you knew it”, which at the
time I, maybe too obviously, rolled my eyes at because I wanted to be told
where the best school was. I didn’t want to be responsible for picking a school
where I was uncomfortable and homesick for the entire 2 years. When I returned
from my interview at WIU, I had a good feeling about this, but I assumed my
close attachment to my family and to Vancouver would bring me inevitable
homesickness for my first semester in Illinois.
I have been asked a lot lately by different people in Macomb
and from back home, how I’m doing about being so far from home. I think about
this a lot because I feel like I should be missing it more. I feel like it’s
almost wrong that I’m not missing Vancouver, even a little bit (sorry sorry
sorry to those who just read this and are now contemplating deleting me
forever). Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of people I wish I could see
everyday, a lot of things about BC that I am excited to one day see again, but
I’m absolutely 100% content at WIU. I am
engrossed in the environment, the culture and in getting to know the people.
On some deeper level, I think I was yearning for an
experience to have on my own. I owe a lot to UBC and the people I met there,
but being so close to home I never really found my independence. That’s
something I’m finding here, and I’m loving it. I literally can’t think of any
other way to describe where I’m at except in “a really good place”. When people
ask, that’s always my response and I have yet to be able to explain it in more depth. Despite my meagre attempt on this blog, there are still so many
thoughts rushing through my mind about how unbelievable it is that I am not
homesick at all. For me, Macomb is home right now. I’m right where I need to
be, doing what I need to do, meeting who I need to meet and that feels amazing.
GGLI,
hollyd