So, you're back....

Back again, on my bedroom floor, sprawled out in front of this screen blogging....

I leave for India tomorrow night (technically the flight is 1:30 AM Sunday morning, props to my mother for buying the tickets with the worst itinerary ever), my bags are mostly packed...clothes...gifts for the relatives...everything except for my books. I've got a few dozen books, novels and non-fiction both, spread out in the living room back cover turned up so that I can periodically glance down at each volume's summary and credentials in my attempts to pick out eight of them to take with me.

This is all too familiar, in the past 10 years, there have only been two summers where I didn't go through this ritual of packing, preparing and mentally crossing off the comforts I'll have to do without for a long chunk of time. This time it's only 6.5 weeks, in high school it was all three months of the summer.

No memory foam mattress pads, no fluffy pillows (my uncle in India is allergic to cotton), no carpets, no peanut butter, no unmelted chocolate, fruit flavoured yogurt, 2% milk, cookies (biscuits are way less satisfying), no shorts or skirts above the knees, no tank tops no dresses, no friends, no uncooked vegetables (that means no salads), no bug free existence, no air-conditioning....the list goes on.

Somehow, despite all this, whether by choice or not, I keep finding myself at this spot. This year though, it might be the last time in a long time.

This time, I'm going back to visit my sick grandmother, to find, talk to, and film my older relatives because in the last year, they keep dying, and I'm (hopefully) going back to my orphans from two years ago to prove to them that people do return, and I'm trying to teach a thing or two to street children.

I guess I'm also going to try and figure out my own relationship with the country and a huge extended family that knows me only through updates on my academics. I think the goal is to answer a lot of questions about this land and these people who are at once mine and not...

The other goal is to not, unlike two years ago, get sick repeatedly, and to not catch malaria. No more eating street side cashews (don't do it unless you want to spend hours and hours retching and convulsing), no more weird insect bites that morph into giant pustules, and definitely no more viral fevers that require sketchy blood tests or quarantines.......

I'll keep you posted :)