Day 3

After yesterday's joke about subtitles, I'm kind of liking the idea of putting subtitles for my daily posts. This one is tentatively subtitled "Struggling with Hammers". It will likely never change. I do struggle with hammers.

Today was mostly dorm prep work and nothing incredibly interesting to report. There are requests for more pictures of my door decorations, wall decorations, etc. but:
a. my family went to China and took our digital camera with them, leaving me photoless save for the cheap and poorly designed webcam on my laptop
b. due to privacy concerns and confidentiality, I probably shouldn't take pictures of anything with childrens' names on it. Meaning no more door decoration pictures. Sorry guys! If i feel up to it, maybe I'll blur out the names so you can see the awesomeness that is my door decorations. Otherwise, just take my word for it. They look awesome.

I guess the one interesting thing was how today highlighted how much I can struggle with integrating socially with people I don't normally work with (RA's) and how much I can pull it off sometimes given the right circumstances. Today, I definitely felt the creeping up of feelings that I wasn't really on the same level as many of the other people working here. Lots of my colleagues have been or are going to be RA's next year. Some have already graduated college. Almost all of them are from the Chicago area (which I now know is colloquially referred to as Chicagoland?). I feel out of place and quite foreign at times and struggle to integrate and socialize with people talking about areas of Illinois that I don't know and college experiences as RA's that I probably will never have. It just felt...weird today.

It got a lot worse when we went out to dinner as a group, and I could watch around me as different circles of conversation went on and I was stuck outside of all of them. It was unsettling and a wake up call to the possibility that I might leave this 6-week experience without ever talking to some people. I got so scared and anxious at dinner that I worried I'd leave without knowing every one of my coworker's names.

That, to me, makes me feel bad. To be part of a community and workspace with only twenty other people and not even know their names?

I can already tell that several groups of friends are forming, and I know people here and there but really have no solid social ground to turn to. That name thing just scares the pants off of me every time. Especially because if I don't focus, I know there's going to be one day halfway through the camp when I have to ask someone to do something and I won't be able to find them because I won't know what face goes with what name.

At least we have name tags.

In my defense though, we had a post-dinner snack party to celebrate how much hard work our group had been putting in, and I was cheered up by the fact that I could converse and still laugh with people even though I sometimes felt isolated or different. It was a good reminder that I could also leave this camp without the crippling embarrassment of not knowing names and maybe even making some real friends. We'll see though.

All I know is that I have more work to do. But today ended a lot better than I thought it was going to.

Signing off,
Kevin