Studly Abroad

This entry will have nothing to do with studs, so maybe I should save that title for some occasion where I will have to deal with small bits of metal on pants, attractive yet prolific males, or man-horses. Or maybe not. Maybe I will just write it now because I think it is funny.

I'm in my room blogging because I am exhausted from talking. The morning for me consisted of three ten-minute sessions of filling out paperwork, sprinkled in three hours of sitting around in groups, talking while drinking coffee. There are roughly 50 other Junior Year Munich students here this semester, and all of them, every single one, makes me feel like an underachiever. Which is an accomplishment.

I thought I had a high ACT score? Theirs is 2 points higher! I thought I was a big deal, traveling around Europe by myself for three months? Big deal, they've been here for four! I thought I had an extensive knowledge of the German language? Big deal, a girl who's been studying it for half as long as I have can chatter away fluently because she READS NOVELS TO HERSELF OUT LOUD!

Who DOES that??

I guess if I go on to grad school next year, I'm going to have to get used to this. I'm going to have to remember that this level of perfectionism and education is not normal, that these people are the top twenty percent of the top one percent of the world in pretty much all respects, that most people cannot afford to send their children to Florida much less to Germany for a semester.

Still, I feel like I should probably buy some polo shirts and carry around my copy of Ulysses, just in case.