Routine.

I’m not just being lazy about blogging.

I can explain.

The thing about DTS that is taking me a lot of getting used to is that from Monday morning at 6AM to Friday night at 9PM, most of my life is decided for me. I get shook out of bed by one of my more chipper roommates, and by 6:15 every morning I’m downstairs stretching. We have a 20-30 minute group exercise, breakfast, and some combination of morning group-time and lectures (varying by day) that keep us busy until lunch at 1PM. After that I have work duties. At the beginning of DTS we were allowed to choose which chore we had for the term. We work in teams, and the other Austin and I are assigned to the roof. I’ll write about the roof some other time. It’s my happy place. That keeps me busy until 2. We have dinner at 6, which gives me free time a few of the days but there are events and activites and group meetings peppered throughout the week that suck up chunks of our afternoons and evenings to the point that I have an average of only 3 or 4 hours a day of free time unless I’m willing to cut into my sleep. And on top of that there are food duties; they switch week to week. You might get lucky and get lunch prep, which takes 5 minutes, or cleanup for any of the meals, which takes 15. But last week I got breakfast prep. It meant I spent an hour of my precious evening time shopping, and an hour of my precious sleeping time waking up at 5AM and cooking. By the end of the week I was running ragged and I ended up needing to spend all of my saturday in and out of napping to recover. This week I’m on dinner duty and the two hours before dinner are erased. It’s kind of discouraging. 

And it’s difficult. The days go fast and begin to run together and weeks go by in what feels like moments. When you only have such a limited amount of time you have to make hard choices because I’ll have four hours of time and about 7 hours worth of things I want to get done and another two hours that I’d like to spend sitting around recuperating from the frenzy of the day. It’s causing me to have to be a lot more decisive with my time-management. I have a tendency to be flippant, to spend too long deciding what to do and ending up procrastinating good chunks of time away. And I just can’t do it, so I'm getting better. But still, I long for a time with no hourly schedules. Schedules, perhaps, but ones that bend in the rainfall. Schedules that allow for an evening digging my hands deep into the city and finding myself in some new corner of my neighborhood that cries out to be explored. My nature is developing a certain longing to be free, or at least to be able to improvise. 

The first two weeks I spent a lot of time online. It was kind of a waste, not only because nothing happens on the internet but also because the internet is really slow here, so you spend twice as long and hit refresh a lot and get frustrated at everyone else. It’s not that the internet is slow in Thailand, it’s that we have 30 people on one internet connection, and any given night just about every single person is on at the same time. And one person decides to skype home and you burn inside because it just destroys the bandwidth for everyone else. Garrett Hardin is mocking me from his grave every time this happens. And I’ve noticed that it’s not really making my life better to be online for an hour unless it's because I actually have something online to be doing. So I'm trying to be more constructive. I’m getting really diligent at reading. I’ve finished three books so far and am making progress on a 4^th. I’m playing guitar again and getting better at ukulele. There are so many thoughts that pass through my head that I want to spill out to you dear readers like a bowl of polluted water onto a potted rubber plant that I'm fighting for every minute to put thoughts to word for. They will have to wait, though, for my firm thai mattress, whose complete lack of pliability and cushioning is becoming more and more homely to me, beckons.