The World's Tiniest Violin Playing Just For You

On May 17th, 2009, Your Lovely And Witty Author Of This Blog walked her sandaled feet twenty feet across a platform and received her college diploma. There was smiling. There were proud tears. And then, after everyone cleared out and I was left to move myself in to a big, new, empty apartment, there was the sheer panic of not knowing what the hell I was going to do.

People expect great and extravagant things from bright young people. So clearly I felt I needed to be great and extravagant. But there I was, working part-time in a coffee shop where I made less-than-minimum wage. I really loved it. I loved smelling like coffee grounds and sweat. I loved mopping the black-and-white tile floor at the end of the night. I loved how the skin cracked on the backs of my hands from the bleach water in the disinfecting sink. I was so tired of being cerebral and I wanted to be off the map. I didn't want to be responsible and I definitely didn't want to be an adult. All I wanted was to be back in my dorm room the night before my graduation, where we slowly drank ourselves into a numb depression, feeling the final moments of camraderie, knowing we had battled through four years of growing up and making grades.

Thankfully after college, something happens. This thing is called Life. Life goes on. Life doesn't wait while you decide to be a baby and drag your feet. Life gets in your face and tells you to go call the Wambulance.

So I applied to Teach in Chile. I felt proud. I rose to the call of being a bright young adult. I was going to do something great and extravagant.

I didn't realize how long ten months really was, though. And I am sitting in my living room and I haven't showered all day and I'm eating four-day-old pasta and feeling bad for myself. Tomorrow I have to lesson plan for at least the next two weeks' worth of classes. Winter is setting in and it is flipping freezing in my apartment and the sun sets at 5:30 and all I have is this flimsy blanket and it sucks. It isn't at all glamorous. If Life told me to go call the Wambulance right now, I'd tell Life to shove it.


I remember feeling so excited when I received the opportunity to come down here. I sentimentalized it. I told myself it was going to be a dream experience; what I had always hoped and wished for. In many ways, it is. But on a day-to-day basis, it's still life. And life has its ups and downs. We are all feeling the reality of being without our support systems at home. We've settled in to life here, and it's adult life: we pay our bills, we cook our food, we go to work. We take crowded subways. We battle with sickness caused by the never-lifting cloud of smog over Santiago. Our computers crash; our Ipods break; I cause fires by burning toast on my gas stove.

But I have this really adorable roommate, Emma, who is French. And as I'm sitting in my sadness and my own unshowered filthiness, she comes flitting up to me, with a tomato in her hand, and she makes the tomato talk to me. It tells me in French-accented English, "Hello, I am a little lonely tomato. I do not know if I am your tomato. But now I am alone on the shelf and I need to be eaten because I am rotting. I used to be the prettiest little tomato of my company." And then she runs away, la-la-la-ing into the kitchen, squishes the tomato into a pulp in her tiny hands, and chucks it into the wok.

Life here is weird. But it throws you funny curveballs just when you need it the most.