2 (or ducks in a row.)

I had my final appointment on Friday at Passport Health to get my Pre-Rabies #3 vaccine and my anti-malaria medication. The fifteen minute trip cost me just under $450, which brings my total to $1100 on vaccines and medications. I begin the anti-malaria medications next week.

Friday night my roommates and I threw a holiday/good-bye party for our apartment. One graduates and moves to Turkey in January, and the other two will study abroad in Denmark and Italy for next semester, leaving our apartment vacant and to be taken over by the soccer team. It might be the most successful party I've ever thrown in my collegiate career. Cheese platter, mulled wine and cider, silk nog, baked goods, snowflake-making and holiday coloring book drawing. More than 30 friends came to share their evening with us and it felt good to have them in our apartment, there with us, celebrating as we should celebrate the end of tenure at Goucher, although three of us will return for our senior years. I had one of those "stand in the corner and cross my arms and survey the scene and be satisfied" moments, which I don't think I will get enough of over the next few weeks.

I spent Saturday in the city, seeing old friends and walking around as if it was summer again. My heart is still here, in Baltimore. At night some friends threw a holiday party in Hampden, and I saw a mixture of roots, here and DC. The integration I began to see this semester has really made me happy, and drawn me closer, I believe, to many of those I pushed away from at home in the district.

I don't believe people when they say they'll miss me, wrap their arms around me and say it repeatedly. I smile, yes, but I have yet to let myself invest in such words, believe that I have created something here that will not shatter and disappear before my return from Costa Rica. Something in me says I'll come back and the trains will all be gone from the station, departed and left me behind. Things will change, indeed, but I know how quickly by which four months can go, how this severance from the mid-atlantic has different intentions than all those prior. Is it even a faith I must have? No, I think it's more solid than faith. I just have to let myself believe it.

This period is the end. I would not call it the "home-stretch," no, that comes at the end of April; this is just the first run in terms of this journey. But it is the end, the end of Goucher, of Baltimore, of the mid-atlantic for several months, and I think knowing that makes me a bit of a flake. I gravitate toward plans I end up shifting toward others, sometimes out of comfort and other times convenience, and although 99.9% of my environment doesn't care, I feel I let down the .1% that does. If there are too many plans, I must force myself to do things not out of obligation but out of want.

The two things with which I struggle are obligation and responsibility, dependability. I play too much into these roles, partially because of the family environment in which I grew up, but also because I too quickly take the blame to subdue anyone else's failure or reaction in case it is reflected in my own self. This pattern gets me into trouble. Trouble trouble trouble. Whatever happened to the girl in high school who went to shows and did schoolwork, a presence but never a being. But now things are much more complicated and I spend too much time separating the tangled wires. Is there time to separate?

There is no time. I flip through my slingshot and there is no time to waste, which begs the question:

Do I savor or spend?