This winter break is seriously driving me bananas.

Is it wrong and incredibly selfish of me to feel irritated that a select few “friends” of mine have made very little effort (actually, none at all) to see me so far? I’ve been home 3 weeks now and I’m starting to feel like I’m wasting my life away because I’VE DONE ALMOST ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. I don’t have any friends left in this town, and my “college” friends are scattered far and wide around the Chicago area. I’m seriously going to rot in this joint.

I’ll be perfectly honest. If I don’t ever go back to Champaign, I think I’ll be fine. In my head, I’m done with college. I’m over it. There’s no point in going back for one semester to see people I’ll never see again because obviously I’m not worth the effort to them.

It’s funny. Like I said, I’ve been home 3 weeks and haven’t really done anything but already I’m in need of another getaway.

I think I’m ready to go back to Costa Rica now! If only.

Thanks to my seasonal unemployment situation, I’m bored out of my fucking mind, and you would think that with all this free time comes all this fun that’s supposed to come with being a 21-year-old in America, but noooooo.

It’s funny, I’m finally at a point in my life where my parents have FINALLY FINALLY given me near-unlimited freedoms (i.e. no curfew, less criticisms about my drinking, less interrogations about who I go out with, etc.) and yet I’m doing absolutely nothing with them. Quite literally, nothing. I don’t think I’ve socialized with a non-familial human being since…last Friday? Last Wednesday? I don’t know if this is because it’s cold, or because I’m stuck in the far out suburbs, or maybe because I just don’t really have any friends at all anymore.

My New Year’s Eve was spent in the hospital. The “things” I was talking about in my earlier post, well they got worse. About a couple hours before 2011 arrived, my parents and I took my 19-year-old brother to the behavioral unit at my mom’s work. Basically, he has been telling some people very scary things over the past year, messages that hinted at suicide, and when my brother refused to leave his bedroom to go to our usual NYE family party, enough was enough. I’ve known that he’d been having suicidal tendencies for several years now, and needless to say it’s been a relief to finally get him the professional help he’s been needing.

Since then, my brother has been diagnosed with social anxiety disorder, or so my dad told me. It’s a disorder that’s characterized by a persistent, chronic fear of being in social situations, something that can lead to other conditions like depression if left untreated. Which, now that I think about it, makes total sense, because my brother doesn’t socialize with anyone. At all. He’s perfectly comfortable hanging out with me and our 13-year-old brother at home, but he rarely ever gets out of the house to hang out with friends. I don’t even know if he has any of his own friends; the few times I’ve ever seen him out, it’s typically with me and our mutual friends. And then there are times where I wonder if this is all my fault, for being such an overbearing, bossy, dominant older sister.

See why I feel so completely shitty about my life right now? Definitely could use a very stiff drink at the moment…

New Year is a rather strange holiday for me. Although they signal the start of a new calendar year, for me it doesn’t really signal much else. My own personal New Year has always been around my birthday, mostly because in August my age changes and a new school year begins. But alas, 2010 is coming to a close, and naturally, reflection occurs.

Earlier this year I made a series of propositions for myself, things to work toward to in my life. (The only “resolution” I actually made this year was to develop Kim Kardashian-esque hair, which I actually think I didn’t do too bad on.) One of them concerned my family, and I guess it’s safe to say my view on things have changed a bit since January. The 4 months I spent away in Costa Rica could not have been more of a mixed blessing. My time abroad made me realize my real mother, on some level, does love me. I no longer worried constantly about whether I’d get that dreaded phone call. Since my contact with them was limited, my anxiety about my family lessened. Instead, I trusted that everything would be OK.

And then, I was exposed to another kind of family life. It’s a bit unfair to compare my real family to my host family, but living with an actual loving, respectful family was like taking a giant breath of fresh air. My host mother is quite possibly the most loving person I have ever met; the complete opposite of my real mom. With them, I didn’t worry about anything. And I’m starting to truly miss that.

I’ve realized something. Home is a very relative term. For years, my “home” has always been here with my family in this typical suburban house. It’s where I’ve always planned to come back to, it’s where my life essentially revolves around. But now, two weeks into my return to American society, I find myself longing to go “home” elsewhere. I never thought I could settle my life anywhere outside of the Chicago area, but now I can. Even though all my belongings and memories are here, I can’t quite say that I feel like my life is here anymore. I’m starting to feel like there’s nothing — and nobody — left here for me anymore.

2011′s going to be quite the year. If all things go according to plan, I’ll be completing my undergraduate degree in May. There’ll be no going back to university after that, no going back to any kind of schooling after that. Maybe things will get better, or they’ll continue to get worse.

But all I want for the new year is to find that peace of mind again, the one I miraculously found in my time away. I need to be at peace.

Earlier this week I found out I wouldn’t be able to return to my seasonal job for winter break. Apparently all my files were already gone from the system and it would have been too much of a hassle to do paperwork again just for two weeks of work (which is totally unfair because I’ve already been home for nearly two weeks, so in total that’s almost a whole month of labor I could have gotten). But they did say they were very much willing to take me back once I return home for good after graduation. Not sure what upsets me more, the fact that I’m just going to end up poorer and poorer or that I now officially have nothing to do for the remainder of break.

Or the fact that technically, I am now *shudders* unemployed. I really need to start figuring my shit out.

Yesterday I chatted with one of the friends I left behind in Costa Rica (actually, he’s one of those boys I was talking about, but again that story is for another time). He most certainly is not in the holiday spirit, and it saddens me. Background: This guy came to Costa Rica from Nicaragua about a year ago to join his older brother. Now, Nicaraguans aren’t exactly the most welcome of people in C.R. — it’s kind of how Mexicans are viewed here in the United States. He and his brother have been mostly working odd jobs as bartenders to save money for their family. Well, yesterday this boy informed me that both he and his brother are out of work and now struggling. He’s even considering going back to Nicaragua since he has no real friends in C.R. anyway, and was super sad about spending Christmas alone. Just talking to this guy was depressing enough; it almost makes me feel terrible for kind of breaking his heart.

And makes me even more wary of my own employment troubles.

So my body’s been suffering from the most random ailments lately. Before I left Costa Rica I started getting an extraordinary amount of bug bites, something I still can’t pinpoint to this day. They obviously weren’t mosquito bites, since my anti-mosquito wipes didn’t appear to work against them. They itched like crazy, and some even bled from all the scratching I did. Bad, I know.

Then there was the nasty fall I had last Saturday at the club (again, before I left C.R.). The combination of drink, high heels, and that damned unsuspecting step in the VIP areas led to me completely eating it on the floor that night. A couple hours after my silly mishap I noticed my leggings were stained and when I rolled them up, my right knee was bleeding profusely. And a week later, I’m still keeping two bandages over the giant scrape, which in itself still hurts like hell.

Now to top it all off, these weird welt things have cropped up on my hands (and feet, now that I think about it). All over my palms, all over my fingers. It hurts to stretch my fingers or to pick up something; not to mention they’re also incredibly itchy. WTF is wrong with me? (I really really really hope I didn’t pick up some disease from Central America! That would just S-U-C-K.)

Anyway, I’ve never really been much to write obsessively about my love life on this blog because a.) I don’t want to sound like some angst-ridden 15-year-old (even though I think that’s what I do sound like most of the time) and b.) I know there are people who know me in real life reading this. But hey, to hell with it. I think I need to get this off my chest.

So the story (situation?) goes something like this. Before I left home for Costa Rica, I’d fallen really really hard (again) for someone. But, seeing as how I was off to go live in another country for 4 months, I knew it couldn’t last. Or it had to be put on hold. I don’t even really know anymore what the ending was. But for me, it was tough. Incredibly difficult. That first month in C.R., I was sort of a wreck.

And then, things got crazy. Being single in C.R. was way more different for me than in the U.S. I don’t know what it was — if it was the mere fact that I was having the greatest adventure of my life in another country, or that dark tanned Latin men have always been one of my weaknesses, or that most Latin men themselves are just excessively flirtatious and have a great appreciation for women (that’s really the only way to describe it, LOL). Or maybe I just used them all to distract me from the love life I had left back at home. Who knows. But all I know is that I had never really fully taken advantage of my single nature until this past semester. (It must’ve been the Spanish thing. Seriously. — And the alcohol.)

How crazy was it? I don’t know exactly how much I should divulge here. There were married men involved, a bartender who had to leave the scene early to take care of his kids, foolery in a parking lot, foolery on the beach, a Canadian, and another bartender whose face I can barely recall but hey, he gave us free tequila shots the second time we saw him. By the time I left the country, there were really only two men who’d left any real impression on my mind (that second bartender was really super nice, maybe even cute, but I didn’t meet him until my very last weekend).

Those two I shall talk about for another time, but the point of the story is this: I don’t know exactly where my heart lies anymore. I’ll always have a soft spot for the-boy-from-this-summer, but at this point I’m getting too weary over our story (’cause believe me, it’s kind-of-a long one). I feel bad about the way things left with one boy I left behind in Costa Rica, because he was super sweet, and as all my friends kept saying, we “matched” so well. My nature now is to go out somewhere and find someone new to distract me (as seems to be my habit), but seeing as how I’m stuck home in the suburbs now I’m left to deal with my feelings, whatever they may be. I know exactly who I want but at the same time I don’t want who I want because I’m tired of all the emotional drain. And clearly there’s no point in brooding over anyone in Costa Rica. I wish I could just be content being single here at home, because I know I’ve done it so well for the past 21 years, but I doooon’t wannnaaaaa.