I'm sorry it seems like I took another long break, but I've been busy! We had our Mid Service Training about 3 weeks ago and then I went to Nicaragua (Which was amazing on so many levels!!!) and though I probably could have blogged and kept up with the world a lot better than what I did, I decided not to.
This post is about Diminishing Relevance. I know my post in the pocket last year was more rant than actual subject matter, so I'll make my personal thoughts on it brief. Volunteers to some degree have to deal with the lowering level of relevance when it comes to friends and family that are not with them. A lot of people say "Out of sight, out of mind" and it is true. Keeping up a long distance relationship seems to be harder though we are more technologically advanced than we were 10 or 20 years ago. I know I got internet in my cabina for the sake of talking to people more in the States, and so far it seems like I've talked to people less. Is that to say that they have forgotten about me, naw, it just means that they are busy with their own lives. I also had to come to the realization that their world doesn't stop just because I call, and it's one of the many painful realizations I've come to in my time here.
The other side of this whole relevance thing is that the things that I used to put value in, I don't. I may be getting a little older also, so some of this may be my age talking (I'll be 29 in September); but I feel like I am falling away from my race. I mean even growing up I was either ahead of my time or on another planet, which probably kept me out of trouble, but the point is that I don't feel like I relate to black people anym... Correction, I am still learning what my relation is to my race. Maybe I'm part of a subsection of the race, or a niche group, but I don't, and have not since childhood, feel like I belong. Hell, even people here don't recognize me as black (check the past blogs)!!! I go home and I find that things that are of importance to friends and family aren't even relevant to me (or maybe they never were), but relationships are like theme parks and you do have to pay a certain price to make them enjoyable... Wait, that may have sounded offensive...
Finally, people want to feel like they belong, no matter how much they say they don't. Why do you think Facebook is so popular and I am writing this blog right now? Everyone wants to feel as if they are relevant to some degree, like their life matters or has mattered. Would it be better than the alternative of not mattering to anyone at all? At the end of writing this, I don't have any solutions, I may even have more questions, but I do know one thing. Sometimes a little absence (and also absinthe) aren't necessarily bad things.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxEPV4kolz0
