Tired of Caca Talkers

Tired of Caca Talkers

Everyone is talking shit. It’s the last week of the program and everyone has gotten to know each other. Of course I have contributed to a lot of it, but I feel like other people have taken it to another extreme. Most people are self-interested, for a specific reason, and to some large extent those reasons are justifiable. But the cliques continue to talk about each other, everyone is venting about the program, and collectively—irritated at some of the logistics.

Either way, this was bound to happen when you put 30 people from the United States in one large trip to a different, unknown country. For me, this has been a different experience: forced to live with a bunch of students who come from more privileged backgrounds.

I am currently rooming with someone whose both parents are lawyers, and with someone else whose father has a Ph.D in Biochemistry. Many of the students come from comfortable backgrounds. It has not been a challenge trying to communicate with them, but rather I have had difficulties trying to connect with them. Most of them have noble intentions, a lot of them really care about the world—but they speak of their passions with such confidence and pompousness. To them, their life is so simple, yet they complicate things. Because they have had and still do have so many opportunities and options, they freak out when the answers are not so clear to them. But to me, it has been different. I have had to fight in order to have one or two doors open. To me, my life has been about one step at a time. I do not freak out about my future, because I have already come a long way of what I was expected to be at. I am taking one step at a time.

A lot of the things I hear at this place is peevish complains about the complications of what kind of life we are living in now. I feel like I am progressively retreating from the rhetoric behind and asserting a more self-realization dialogue with myself.

This program has definitely  helped me define who I am. Even though I am, by the government’s definition, middle-class. My upbringing has been that of a working class. My mom is a penny-pincher, and my dad never carried money with him. They taught me the value of hard work and finances. Sadly, I do not practice it. At least, not until now that I am in this place with people who did not grow up with similar economic situations, but those I (in my head) always aimed towards.