Superior Post 100!

If I had been posting every other day, then this hundredth post would mean that I've been in Peace Corps for 8 months. But that's not the case.

And if I had been posting twice a week, it would mean that I've been in Peace Corps for almost a year. But that's not accurate, either.

As of this one hundredth post to this Peace Corps blog, I've been in Georgia for nearly 22 months. Unbelieveable.

Perhaps the time to go into all this would better fall closer to the close of service, but it's doubtful that such an auspicious post number will be reached again before I leave. Maybe the blog will enjoy a brief afterlife as a chronicle of the day-to-day existence of a returned volunteer, a shadow of its former culturally-enlightening self, but that's like celebrating the 150th episode of X-Files when you know that the series should have ended a whole season earlier.

Much has changed between post 1 and post 100, and not only the quality and length of posts. Most of this "much" is pretty obvious, and probably too cheesy and personal to go into. Instead of making a giant list of cheesy, personal changes, I'll just go ahead and mention the cheesiest, most personal change in the hope that I can hang onto one or two readers through the end of the paragraph, bearing in mind that I'll leave out pretty much every detail and unnecessary word that I can. No adverbs, I promise!

This week, I ran a project design workshop for a group of the new volunteers, most of which with I had only a passing acquaintance beforehand, and I managed not to spend a single second hiding alone in my room. 22 months ago, I was petrified that I would pass my Peace Corps time completely devoid of friends, except for a select couple who I'd attach myself to like a barnacle. This was an improvement over freshman year of college, when I would leave my room ten minutes before my roommate arrived so it wouldn't look like I'd spent the whole evening inside alone, and even more so over high school, when I went an entire year without saying a word in Civics class because I didn't know any of my classmates. I suppose the one word that sums that up is CONFIDENCE! I suppose that another phrase of summation would be NO LONGER A PSYCHO! Told you it was cheesy. But you read anyway, didn't you. Which means I win.