What may well be the last post from bella Italia

I try to treat a lot of things with a sense of humor here, much like in life. But occasionally, there are times when you have to sit down and really take stock of your situation. Normally, this is how I would begin a post about how I tied my own shoelaces together or left the house wearing wet underwear because of a washing machine accident. Instead, I’m going to use it to begin an actual, serious reflection on things here, jumping off from the fact that I am feeling right now the very strange progress of two growing sensations:

(1). I want to go home more and more as time goes by.

(2). I feel like things in Genoa are going better and better all of the time.

As I start to wind down my first trip here, I cannot help but find this a little bit strange. Shouldn’t these sentiments be mutually exclusive, or at least working against each other? DOD had some good insight into the matter, suggesting that (1) may be due to the fact that I’ve known since I arrived when I would be leaving and have been planning on it. Fair enough, but at the same time, I also feel more and more like there is a lot of work left on the table for me to do, increasingly so as I spend more time here and get to know the resources available. Shouldn’t this be leaving me with a sense of unease about returning? I find that it doesn’t.

In fact, I’ve already started sleeping badly, which I attribute to anticipation about coming back to the States. Some of this may also be because I’m dreading packing – I haaaaaate packing. But in fact, as I search my feelings, I know this to be true: packing is not the real issue. It’s excitement.

A distinct issue, quickly overtaking the excitement issue, is the fact that I’m much better accustomed to writing funny than I am writing serious, or at least accustomed to writing I imagine is funny than writing I imagine is serious. And so we find the forces of my creativity, stuck in a quagmire not of their own designing, committed to an adventure in foreign territory for which they weren’t really equipped and probably don’t have the resources to prosecute to a successful conclusion, if such a thing is even possible given the state of affairs in which this post is currently embroiled.

One last ‘surge’ before I quit both writing and flogging this metaphor:
The closer I get to coming home, the less I want to do anything except pack up and go home. Today in the archive was by far the most difficult day so far, and for no other reason than I wasn’t sure I really wanted to be there. I bit off a little more than I could chew in one day, and so I was stuck trying to figure out whether a task half-done that I’ll not be able to finish tomorrow either was worse than a task not begun at all.

Does this reveal something profound about me, or the human condition? Hm. Not exactly. But, if that hasn’t worked, we can always withdraw and get back to basics. So have you ever heard the one that starts, “a ham sandwich walks into a bar…”?