the memories of me will seem more like bad dreams

If all of the trips that I am planning come to fruition, I only have one more weekend in Hyderabad. This is impossible to believe, and I'm rather sad about it. I was not particularly happy here at first--I was used to my insane, incestuous group of friends, and the group here seemed too grown-up/nice/mature/well-behaved to make for a truly entertaining experience. However, as my shyness gradually disappeared, I became a lot closer to the other expats, and life has once again become as vibrant and ridiculous as I want it to be. That's not to say that they have replaced my home friends in my affections. But, the difference is that I am relatively confident that my home friends will be waiting for me when I get home, while the expat community will cease to be a community as we slowly reintegrate into the California office. Like I've said countless times before, I'm in end-of-summer-camp mode, desperately wishing that summer camp could continue, but feeling nostalgic for it in large part because it's coming to an end. Within a week of being back in California, I'm sure that I will be quite happy to have my life back--but there will be some definite sadness when I say goodbye to Hyderabad.

I was pretty sure that I would learn something about myself on this trip, but at this moment I cannot decide what the lesson is. I'm not sure whether it is uplifting or sad to discover that I've ended up being exactly the same with a completely different group of people as I was with both Loro 1 (freshman year) and Loro 2 (senior year). My life seems to repeat itself in disturbing ways, which I shall not enumerate here. But the intense repetition, the parallel scenarios that seem to occur in vastly different contexts, make me wonder if there is some lesson that I am supposed to learn from all of this that I am just failing to grasp.

Is it true that at some point we all have to grow up? Will I be satisfied six years from now if I continue to view life as a long-lasting ironic joke? My time in India has shown me that, given sufficiently intelligent acquaintances and some amount of social interaction, I can become part of some type of entertaining community. But at some point, entertainment isn't enough, and it's so hard to break out of entertainment to talk about anything serious, to get support for difficult decisions or to just discuss something that doesn't revolve around dead turkeys and fetal corn.

Conversely, I felt like I was going insane at the beginning of the trip, when there was no constant stream of jokes to lighten the mood. With every group of friends I have, I've chosen humor over closeness, at least for the first several months, and then I find it difficult to break through to the next level. So, that doesn't seem to leave me with a lot of choices in the matter.

I think the impending end of my experience is making me feel more melancholy than I should, and the tone of this post is perhaps darker than I mean it to be. I didn't feel quite this way when I was getting ready to leave California--but there, the goodbyes were more like 'I'll see you again in six months,' and so they were focused on doing fun things together and with the expectation that those fun things would occur again. Here, the goodbyes feel more permanent; while I will see the Californians again, it could be years and years before I see anyone from the India or Dublin offices. Sigh. I guess I can create a saradoescalifornia blog and write it for them, but it just won't be the same.

I still have some work that needs to be done for tomorrow, so I'm going to figure out whether to do it now or wake up early tomorrow. Tomorrow will be fun, since I have a team dinner at Mainland China. Then, I need to pack for my extremely exciting train trip to Hampi! Goodnight, everyone!