Wanderlust

As I speak, the World's Fair is happening at AUP. I wish I could be there - it's fifty bajillion times better than any other school's multicultural fair because of all the nationalities there (about 100 in all), all displaying their culture's food, music and alcohol. It's about 4 PM in Paris, so people are probably pretty buzzed and slowly making their way to get totally wasted under the Eiffel Tower. Good times.

I should probably be going to sleep now because I have to get up at 6 AM, but for some reason I felt compelled to look through my Europe pictures (probably because I was looking at some EAP stuff). While I flipped through them I noticed that over there I looked and felt my best - I lost weight like nobody's business, and even though I had a bit of a skin problem I felt beautiful and chic and was having the time of my freaking life. I want that back. This is why I want an international job - I want to just comb the world for God knows what reason and take it all in, doing as much with my life as I can. I just don't know what to do. But I love traveling and playing at global citizenship... Santa Barbara is much too boring for me (and the public transportation SUCKS). Of course there are little joys here and there - for example, I had a gospel choir concert earlier and was having so much fun just screaming my lungs out for the Lord - but in the four years I've been here I've always had that misfit feeling.

I'm a big city person (especially a big European city person) and a traveller, so UCSB feels kind of like a bubble - two hours to the nearest big city (which I don't even like) and its own little self-contained environment. Some people love it here, and while the beach is nice, there's only so much you can do here. I'm dying to get out, but I know that once I get out of here my future is really, really, really uncertain. My bachelor's degrees can't really do anything by themselves without graduate school, so I'm going to be working crap jobs for a while... I was so lucky to have had that experience last year and I wish I could keep it going. But how long would it be till I got tired of travelling? Maybe it's better that I had that brief glorious time when I was twenty... although I would love to go back and do another proper Grand Tour (you know, one including Italy and longer than TWO WEEKS) before turning twenty-five because of all the sweet deals you get in Europe. And before the Real World leaves me too jaded. It'd be nice to go back to Europe in a headspace somewhere between the naive twenty-year-old I was then and the cynical, bitter late-twentysomething I am destined to be; old enough to know better but young enough to enjoy.