9/29/14

I said goodbye to Macomb today. I said so-long to my family, friends, and everything I’ve known of as “home” for the past twenty years. As great as it was to be reunited with everyone, I’ve never been more ready to get the flock out of there. The anticipation of being out West has been haunting my memory ever since we set out for the river. We have conquered the mighty waters of Ontario, and we are now ready to climb MOUNTAINS.

So again, we are on the long winding roads to our next destination- Yellowstone National Park. The excitement takes a while to sink in when you are sitting in a van with six or seven other people for twelve hours day after day. We woke at about 5:55 a.m. today, hopped on in, and slept. Whoever said that road-trips were “fun” are sadly mistaken. I slept for a good amount of the day, regardless of all the homework I still had to catch-up on. Writing and typing in a bumpy vehicle is unexpectedly difficult. And after my computer died, I also died. We live a life of EXHAUSTION. So the lesson plans to be made, research to be done, groceries to be bought, and journals to catch up on do not seem that important while I’m struggling to stay awake. My urgency to do my homework has also not set in yet because, well, I am a procrastinator. Boy, will I be hating myself in a few weeks.

We may be away from campus, but we still live the same woes of a college student; showing up class still half asleep, forgetting your pencil but especially your brain, not making connections between the real world and the lectures/philosophies being drilled into our heads, because hey- it doesn’t really matter right now. It’s fairly easy to say that we experience all the same things that the other kids do, because we are in college just like the rest of them. We experience things the other kids could never even imagine. And they won’t. We will never be able to explain our ECOEE to anyone. Everyone else’s problems may seem small and petty in comparison to ours. “Your feet hurt from walking all the way to your 8 a.m.? Oh, I’m sorry, I can’t imagine having to wake up after 5 a.m. to walk less than 3 miles to sit in chairs that aren’t covered in mud and sap.” In all reality, it will be US who struggle to understand THEM. I have a certain something that comes to mind when I think about approaching the world after these long four months.

“Two things define you: your patience when you have nothing, and your attitude when you have everything.”

Cassidy Depoy