Seated at the cafe, I feel like trying to go through the first part of the summer and use the internet as little as possible.

Except I just discovered that every concert ever (250 of them) from NPR's All Songs Considered are available still from iTunes podcasts!

And somehow, today my internet is blazing.

So I try to give up my addiction to being online, and the darn thing doubles down on me. And I may change this out for wireless in my room.

When what I really need to do is connect to my people, to really be here and to connect fully with it. Or else go home...

This past weekend I thought that I'd accomplish more if I went home. It'd be a repeat of last summer, I'd divide my time between cooking good food at home, babysitting Mae and staying with my grandparents. Cycling with Sara, visiting Beth at the library. Daddy in Franklin.

But like my mom wrote me, now is the time to do this. I don't get anything from running away. The hardest parts are over, barring some catastrophe (which is totally possible, but which is both possible here or there). And I really don't feel to far from home. In Bolivia, I was remote. It'd have taken several days to get home. Here, I can be home tomorrow afternoon if I have to.

So what am I trying to do? I can give up before I begin any of that, and I'll have great memories but little to show other than a half formed experience here. I dont have roots, no outstanding projects, which is something that allows me greater ease to go home.

Or if I remain I'd have the chance to :

-The first ever national Spelling bee in Morocco in English

-Hopping easily to Europe (after reading Proust vol 1, I desire so strongly to start my bike in Portugal, cross Spain and then head towards Normandy, Lille, Bruges, Lille, and further north toward St Petersburg and the wild North.

-Finding a few corporate sponsors and running the Marathon des Sables, ideally for St. Jude Children's Hospital.

- Being the first Peace Corps volunteer to run the hardest Ironman in the world (or try to) in Lanzarote. Same thing with the Ultra Trail de Mont Blanc

-Score Advanced on Moroccan Arabic and Intermediate High in Tashleheet

-Get Lahcen to really understand Spanish before I leave

-Share my love of guitar with Larbie, Mhmed and Ilhem

-share my first concert ever with The Sultans of Sefrou in Ourzazate at Mikhael's restaurant the Mogador

-Make Peace Corps Modor t-shirts

-I want to see Serena at her graduation

-home there's the expected--here, nothing

-I dont want to go home before I share this place with everybody I know and love!

The question for me is : stability, but not much comfort here vs. stability and a lot of comfort at home. Risk of the new and amazing, vs. the trustworthy and the sure. If that was all, then being here would not be too demanding. But when you start talking about life and death and forever.... damn.

Though, the biggest thing I've ever offered myself, advice that I found 4 years ago when I first heard of professor Tal Ben-Shahar, the Harvard positive-psych man that changed nearly everything for me: 'you've got to give yourself permission to be human'.

More than that, what I found on my own--maybe, a consequence of that--is that you have to try and live on a human scale.

Easy to say, harder to do...