Am I waiting to Start?

Wow, its been over three months now. I can hardly believe it!

This point of my excursion reminds me of the month before the end of the semester; the part where you know your time will sooner than later be coming to a close and you have to start thinking about what your plans for after its all over will be. Its like my time in Argentina has been a semester at school and now I have to make plans for summer, except when it all ends I'll be going back to an endless summer - which in my case will be starting in mid December. "The Rest of My Life", right? Wait, I thought that was what graduation was supposed to usher you in to? I feel like I've postponed it for five months by flying off to Argentina. Maybe its the lack of an income. The thing about an income is that it makes you feel independent, like your life is finally yours. Even though I've been living thousands of miles away from my family, paying rent, and making all decisions on my own, I still feel like my adult life hasn't "started" yet.

I wonder if maybe its the kind of thing that doesn't actually "start", just one day you look back and realize you're in the middle of it... or the end. I think if its going to be like that then it would be quite easy to never start the life that you wanted to because you were always waiting to do certain things until your life "started". I know that's how I do things - If I know I will be doing something temporarily, I want to wait until its over before I begin my "routine", because ya know, you can't mess up the routine. If I keep waiting for my life to "start" to start focusing on what I want to do who knows how long it will be before I do them?

Then again, I could just wait until I get back to the States... Its only a month and a half away. What's a month in a life?

Could mean a lot.

Everyone Should Have Been a Communication Studies Major

The week beforehand I received a text message from the pastor of the community center/church I aid, asking me if I would be able to attend a meeting on Missions the coming Wednesday. I replied affirmatively and thought nothing more about it until... I met with my director on Monday and she asked me if I had anything planned for Wednesday. "Yeah....I'm going?" It was then that she informed me of the pastor's expectation for me to have something to say about Missions, something about "how is the church in the US." Okay, I could do that. Strange that he didn't mention it to me.
So Wednesday rolls around and I make it to the church with a couple of lines of notes to give myself some direction for the meeting. I had arrived early and little by little more and more people started trickling in and taking seats in the main sanctuary. "Oh, there must be another event going on at the same time," I thought. No. I was the event. By "meeting" he meant "service". There was a midweek church service about Missions and I was to address the congregation - in Spanish. Good thing I had notes! Haha....ha.
Regardless of my surprise, everything went fine. I went up, made a joke, apologized for my bad Spanish, spoke for a couple of minutes about the church here in the States, received applause and a little gift from the church, and took a seat. They gave me a hot pink scarf! Just in time for summer :D
I'm just glad I don't have stage freight.

Shopping

My friend Pri and I had been meaning to go shopping together for a while now, so we finally went this last Saturday. She met me along with two of her other friends in Palermo Soho and took me somewhere in the middle of everything. There is a section of shops that are run by independent designers so they are cheaper than the surrounding ones, which are known for their high prices. One of the first shops we went into was kind of crazy - There were a lot of clothes, a lot of customers, and a lot employees wandering around. They didn't have a desk to purchase your clothes at; instead they had roaming employees that came up to you, asked you if you wanted to try something on, took it off the hanger, left you to find an open fitting room for yourself (um, ok), and then expected you to find one of them somewhere in the store in order to buy the clothing. This seemed a bit backwards to me and quite hectic. Seemed like it would be really easy to steal something in all of the business.
Another shop we went into had several designers sitting with their own batch of clothes. You went up to a rack and asked the individual designer to try on something and then took the piece to a fitting room and then paid the designer directly. This place was also a bit labrynth-like but atleast it had a friendlier atmosphere. One other thing I thought to be odd was the fact that many places carried "unique" items - there would be a skirt or shirt that didn't come in any other sizes sometimes. Some stores seemed to carry hardly anything. I wondered how they stayed open!