The lunch room was set up horizontally with four long rows of tables. We weren't "cool" but we weren't the "losers" either, so we sat in a neutral area on the left by the serving line. Michelle was talking to Bridget and Klara while I tried to keep a conversation going with Kristen, who snapped her gum to the annoyance of the others.

"I want to study abroad in Spain," I quirked.


Michelle made a "pffting" sound which was occupied with a rolling of her eyes, so I stood my ground. Although I had no clear reasons for wanting to go to Spain, I knew that I wanted to travel after befriending a girl named Merisha. She was my inspiration.

I met Mersiha the year before after Michelle introduced us as people rushed past going to their first class. She was mistakenly introduced to me as "Mersika" and I was excited at the thought of meeting someone from another country. Granted I had known a couple of Indian-Americans and one Chinese-American, but I still hadn't met a real foreigner my age. She was intriguing to me in the extremely homogeneous school setting because she came from Serbia, spoke of cultural situations I pretended to understand, and she had a thick accent which was sometimes accompanied by foreign words.

Those few years we had together I spent a lot of time talking to Merisha, trying to figure out her life back home. She told stories of teachers publicly humiliating her and not being able to do math homework because their calculators didn't work. I started a habit of saying, "uh-huh" each time she spoke of some historical aspect of her country, to which I had no information about.

Although others weren't taken in by Merisha being different, I was. She didn't stand out because the others weren't attracted to those different than them. But I found how she handled our school interesting and I tried to understand how she did it with so much ease. Her English seemed perfect to me. She had no trouble with communication and her basic English skills were more refined than our own. During class she received higher grades than most and she was always chosen to write inspiration speeches for our class. There seemed to be nothing she couldn't do.

Only one mistake jumps out when I now look back with the perspective of being an international student. We had a religion class together our senior year with a former nun turned religion teacher. She stood tall with short, red hair and glasses so thick they looked like they were from the 1980s. Mersiha and I were sitting in the back row when she came to join us as we worked in groups on an assigned project. Merisha became confused over a word and turned to our teacher to ask, "What does 'Caucasian' mean?" All she received was a look that could hurt with scrunched up eyes that glared and a mouth that signaled disappointment. Mersiha turned to me confused and asked, "Doesn't she know English is not my first language?" High school wouldn't be the same without Merisha and I learned through her the good and the bad of being an international student.

Mersiha opened my eyes to the possibility of traveling out of the United States and over to the lands I had only read about to that point. The love of traveling was already instilled in me, as my mother once said, "I blame myself for how much you love to travel. I should've never taken you on all those trips while you were growing up." Suddenly Mersiha acted as a catalyst that sparked my desire to get out. I could be her: young and living in a new country, starting out fresh.

So there I was at lunch with Kristen snapping her gum, Michelle rolling her eyes at me, and me standing strong with my persistence that I would be traveling abroad.



"No matter where you are, you will always miss home," Merisha said with a sigh.

The summer before I was due to leave

People I've met:
-franzi
-liz
-mersiha
-hugh
-pearly
-nickx2
-gaz!

It's difficult to record my past memories when my most recent ones are fading from me. How much I loved New Year's Eve at Grandma's, drinking fake champagne, and feeling cool because I could stay up so long. Then New Year's Eve last year when Gaz made me cry. Or the year before when my high school friends were partying and I stayed home, friendless.

Shopping with my mom every week.

Lisa pounding on the tub singing "tub thumping" as Aunt Mickey screamed at her. Lisa pretending we were going to the library and me being so naive I didn't get she was kissing a boy in his house while I waited outside. Playing on the playground with Albert. His name was so old fashioned that I remember. Or when we were in Pymatuning and she announced she had a boyfriend, named Albert, only for years later to be married a second time at twenty-one. How our lives change!

Lisa and I always wanted to write a book on our family, maybe we should.

The first time we talked about it was in high school. It was a drawing class that I took as an elective and in some sort of coincidence, she had signed up for as well. We were laughing in the back row of desks and talking about how we thought our family was crazy. "We will have to write a book about this one day," I laughed. She agreed, however, I was serious.

Memories swirl around me. One moment I am at Aunt Mary Rose's house in northeast Ohio, playing with her older children. The game is 'Bullshit' and I have devised a plan of sneaking peeks under the glass dining room table to see what each player has claimed to place down. Giggle fits from me led to everyone figuring out what was going on and then my memory blurs and moves on. Now I am at Aunt Marcia's house with Lisa in the backyard. We are bored, roaming the backyard, and she happens to show me her dead bug collection telling me that she will need it for a school project. Lisa and me playing in the backyard turns to Markie and me playing in the low ceiling basement of our grandparents' summer house on the Ohio and Pennsylvania border. My head hits the ceiling, I feel closed in, and he's urging me to slide on the slabs of wood with a roller in each corner.

Working Memoir

Title: And That's Not Sarcasm

Inspirations: David Sedaris, Miss New York Has Everything

Outline:
1. High school lunch- Spain
2. Betty discussion volunteering-Alchemist, Frank
3. England->Australia
4. Geovanny, fourth grade continents, ninth grade gray koala, Noozles
5. Shy->Hargraves
6. Reverse culture shock->Franzi, matej, red, billy
7. Month vacation back under->first time not belong
8. Finshed bachelors->cleaned life
9. Master's->a new start, again



The traveler in the family, they call me. The one who is not happy in one place too long, always dreaming of where to go next. Mom blames herself, saying that it all started when I was just a baby. My parents were always going somewhere and taking me on vacation or a long drive for the weekend.

The year came in college when I knew I wanted to do a study abroad despite my fear of traveling alone for the first time. There I was this girl, shy as long as she could remember, socially awkward, and never been out of the country.

Getting my second acceptance letter was a little daunting considering I have this habit of putting off looking at things that may bring bad news. I figure that what I don't know can't hurt me, even though it runs though my head until it's the only thing I can think about.