Who Am I?!

I am from Vermont.
I go to school in Denver.
I work in Michigan during the summer.
I am living in Spain.

Thanks to this, I have friends from Tokyo to Stockholm, Palestine to L.A., Alaska to Quito.  If you were to make a map connecting all the places where I have friends, and where they have friends, and where their friends have friends, I truly think we would all be connected.  

I read a statistic the other day that said there are more people on facebook than were alive 200 years ago.  How insane is that?!  We are truly a globalized world. 

With resources like facebook, Skype, gmail and tumblr, it is as though I never really say goodbye or leave any place behind.  For some reason, that really bothers me sometimes. Because I am never truly "here," it feels as though I am living in 4 or 5 places at once.  It's like this: I wake up, go to class, see my friends (who are from all over the states).  After lunch, I have an intercambio with my Spanish friends, Antonio and Carola.  Before dinner, I sign onto facebook, and chat with my friend Rachel, who is in Denver.  Bored, I go through tagged photos from my travels in South America, and get nostalgic, then chat with my friend Luca, who is studying in Canada, but is from Australia.  Before bed, I skype with an old high school friend whom I haven't seen in two years, but we talk regularly.  And tomorrow I will probably call my mom on gmail because we haven't spoken in a week or so.

So while, yes, I'm living in Spain, I'm also still living my "other lives" at the same time.  That is weird to me, thinking about it like that.  Life is simple, it is s-i-m-p-l-e, but it is so easy to feel overwhelmed as I look at all I've done and all I'm yet to accomplish.  I love technology, and as my Puerto Rican friend said last week, "internet is the greatest invention of all time."  Yet today I yearn for the simplicity, the challenge, of living abroad independent of all I have left behind.

Which is quite ironic, because here I am on google blogging about it.  *sigh*

I am trying to imagine a time when people abroad only communicated through hand-written letters, when photographs were developed and not "uploaded," when newspapers and radio were the main ways of communicating the news.  I am thankful for technology and (sadly enough) it is almost impossible to imagine my life without the internet.

So today, I spent 5 hours on my computer organizing and planning and writing and editing. I think now it is time to go outside (though it's raining!) and embrace the laid back Spanish lifestyle and do some people watching!