I’m Audi 5000!

Hi Elephants!

I’m finally doing it. I’m gettin’ outta here!

After I graduated from CU Boulder last spring, I immediately started planning how I could go back to school, preferably without taking any GRE’s, GMATs, or LSATs. My adviser suggested grad school, and brilliantly reminded me that there are schools outside of the United States. Schools that do not require GRE scores. Schools where I can get my wonkette on and study tourism and travel (I salivate).

I applied and was accepted to school in Europe. And now I’m moving… to Europe. Not to another city or state, but to another continent.

I’m going to the Netherlands! I’m going to ride my bicycle everywhere and smoke weed in public and have conversations in multiple languages and… wait… I’m pretty sure I can all of that here (at least in Colorado).

So why am I so excited to go? It’s not like I live a horrible life here. I live in one of the most beautiful towns on Earth. But I gotta get out!

Maybe I feel this way because I currently live with my parents and live in the house I grew up in, in the town I grew up in, hanging out with the people I grew up with.

Maybe I feel this way because my boyfriend dumped me, and I’m gonna Eat, Pray Love my way back to happiness (if only I could travel and live with Florence and the Machine as my soundtrack).

Or maybe it’s something more…

Maybe I’m acting on some deep-rooted human desire to leave home and explore and not come until the cows do. I’ve always wanted to move away and do something wild, but I grew up in Colorado, this is the place where literally millions of people move to do that very thing. I’ve tried to be satisfied with all the biking, hiking, snowboarding, scenery, 300-days-of-sunshine, and home brew that Colorado has to offer, but it’s not cutting it.

I want to get away from every one I know. I want to start my own life, instead of continuing my parents’. I embrace the idea of horrible loneliness and homesickness, if only for the fact that those will be new feelings instead of the boredom of monotony I’ve got here. Is this the plight of middle-class America? To want something more than a comfortable home with people who love me? Probably. Yes. I am so grateful for the comforts I’ve had this far in my life. But like I said, I want something more.

So next Sunday, I’m out (Audi, if you will… yes I still watch the movie Clueless on a regular basis and employ its many magical lines).

I will miss you friends, family and Elephants. But I’ll be in touch. After all, Elephant Journal needs some foreign correspondence, no?