I have a habit of telling people my guilty pleasures. Even if they don’t ask me, I feel like I am sneaking behind their back if I don’t say it right away. Occasionally I will just blurt out that I secretly read someone’s blog or I fell into a hole in the sidewalk yesterday (ok…not a guilty pleasure, but I guess I feel like I need to tell the world all of my embarrassing moments)!
I sit here in disbelief as I write my sad love affair with my 16.3 glorious ounces of Peter Pan crunchy peanut butter. This is usually not something I have an intense craving for in the United States, but here I have been yearning for just one spoonful of peanut butter. Yesterday was the day. I did the deed. The overly priced jar of peanut butter was perched on the grocery store shelf in all its glory, almost to say it had a shimmering glow and surrounding hallelujah chorus. Purchased and placed carefully into my backpack, I walked with a new skip in my step all the way home…beaming.
Well, alas, in less than 24 hours I regretfully inform you that the jar is very, very empty. There is not a peanut to spare and the spoon is clean. I don’t want to think about how immensely bad that decision was, but my goodness how deliciously fleeting it was.
Think about thick, gooey peanut butter in your mouth; I was faced with a challenge today that was similar to trying to talk with a enormous spoonful of peanut butter on the roof of your mouth and tongue. Tonight my friend/host fam member (I can not for the life of me remember how they are related…but everyone here is related!) came over and…wow.
He is a talker for sure, but little did I know what the conversation was going to turn into. I found myself in a 3 hour long conversation just between him and me where I really had to defend what I believed. This may sound easy to you, but it is really hard when you are passionate about something and you don’t really speak the language with enough efficiency yet. You have to think about what you are trying to say, how to say it, how to convey it in a way that is not offensive to the other person or culture, and at the same time try to understand the thought he is trying to convey very rapidly in both language and content. I also felt like an underdog because every time I would try to say a thought, he would cut in and continue with his thoughts. There is no patience in passion, and he was very passionate about this. I take a little bit longer trying to say what I want to say because of all of what is going through my head.
This was great practice, but my brain shut off about 9pm, and we still had an hour left in the conversation. There is so much to learn and prepare for the next time we see each other. I just didn’t realize how difficult it was going to be to have different opinions (and different opinions enough that I actually spoke up about).
In less than 24 hours, I have reached the bottom of the jar and I have opened a jar that may follow the rest of my visits with this guy. I am excited to see where it goes.
“If you can’t control your peanut butter, you can’t expect to control your life.” -Bill Watterson (Hopefully I’ll have better control next time!)