Today, while procrastinating on finishing my essay for my "imagenes de las mujeres en la literatura espa~nola" class, I was looking through my old emails at my xanga subscription digests from bygone ages. (I just figured out how to read in binary, and I was looking for one message a friend sent me a few years ago and refused to tell me what it meant. Now I can decode it! sweet victories.) ....Yes, there are still a few digests from my highschool days collecting dust in my inbox.

I smirked at some of the quizes whose pictures had dissappeared due to having been removed from whichever photo-hosting site in which they used to reside, smiled at those pictures that still remained. I laughed at the cute poems and photos of people, computer-generated hexcode images, complaints from people from back in the day.

It made me realize I really miss my friends from high school. I mean, I knew before that I missed them, but it helped put it into a blatant contrast.

I miss LGHS, I miss SFHS. I miss UCSD, too, but I feel like most of my real friends I left behind when I packed my bags for the dorms.

I had a dream the other day in which I was walking around the perimeter of my elementary school in the autumn, with fiery amber-red leaves falling from the trees, coating the sidewalks, draping my view with a vibrant sepia, the color of faded photographs. I crossed paths with a short friend from LGHS, who although is not a child, has always been associated in my head with childhood and youth, due to her short stature, playfulness, and childlike manner of speaking. In my dream, she asked me, "why did you leave us?"

Its dreams like that that make me wonder what the fuck I'm doing here in Spain. Obviously, I'm staying for the rest of the year; I'm excited about living in a dorm, away from the hellish host fam, and making my spanish skills uber-sweet. But still. We're trained to think that exploring the world is a good thing to do, that it makes us deeper persons, but I feel that after a certain point, one's experience of new cultures and ideas is saturated, and starts spreading thin. More than ever, I feel drawn to staying in one place, and exploring the personalities and customs of the people who are already close to me, the people I already care about, rather than consistently push forward and explore things that are "new and exciting".

I have a lot of webjournals. Xanga, Myspace, Livejournal, Blogspot, Facebook...While I was happy when I only had Xanga, and joked about the people who had fifteen zillion different journals, I eventually did collect several, as there were different people I could reach with each one. Xanga is for my high school friends. I'm inclined to post this to one of my other journals, because there are definitely some people from UCSD who I am missing like the hole of a doughnut, but I also miss the daily rants, the coloquial, physical presence of these friends. I wonder if when we're all done with college, we'll all be living in relatively the same area--I doubt it. I find this depressing; that school, careers, individual motivations do not help us to select our communities, rather, to separate us from the people and friendships we love. I shrink from the example of my parents, whose closest friends have never been a part of my life--only a glimmer in the eye with the pronunciation of the name, the occasional christmastime letter, laced with photos of unfamiliar faces. Always unfamilar faces. And while the idea of exploration and new adventures is tantilizing, and the posibility of regret for being locked into one place due to attachments repugnant, I always seem to find that the adventure is never as exciting nor as gratifying as the smile or hug from a friend I love.  

There are many things I could do with my future. For the most part, I have no idea what I want to do as a profession. Sometimes I can't even figure out what I like to do as a hobby, and I find myself resorting to discovering myself through understanding things that I do not like, that I do not want. And the one thing that I know I do not want in my future is a lifetime of unfamiliar faces.

I wonder if anyone else has an emotional attachment to their xanga anymore.