Blog #124: Osage City

Truth be told, life in Osage City can be pretty slow. Although it didn't feel this way when I was in high school, and I would spend over 12 hours a day at the school for various activities, sports, clubs, rehearsals, etc., now that I'm only ever here for short periods of time, (and with relatively little to do), life feels pretty slow.

This is accentuated by the fact that I've only just returned from India, a place which could almost not be more opposite from Osage City.

I remarked to Sarah a few weeks ago when we were still together (miss you bunches dude) that India is a place where everything is slow, but it feels very fast, and I still think this is one of the most accurate descriptions of the place. There's no such thing as just 'grabbing a quick coffee' or 'running some errands really quick'. Everything, and I mean everything, takes a decent amount of time in India.

And yet, because of the chaos, the constant motorcycles and autos zooming by, the incessant streams of people hustling in every direction, and the noises that accompany all of these things, everything feels very fast. There are trillions of moving parts, none of which ever seem to stop, which can make it hard to mentally keep up, leaving you feeling like everything is moving a million miles a minute. This is true despite the reality that things tend to take time to get done in India.

So, coming from that environment of constant chaos, Osage City and the life that accompanies it feels incomprehensibly slow.

I wake up late and take my mornings slow- coffee and breakfast and games with my mom. I hang around the house for a couple hours deciding what I want to do with my day. I fill my time with bike rides and board games and sleeping and little else. Even when I do things like run errands, they are actually done fairly quickly (today I renewed my driver's license and stopped by the bank in under an hour, two tasks that I imagine would have taken me over half the day in India), leaving me more free time to take it slow. Seriously- small town Kansas life is not well acquainted in a lot of ways with the concept of high-speed.

Part of me hates this. I'm usually a 'goer,' a person who is flitting around and taking things quickly. Spending so much time not doing or accomplishing a whole lot makes me feel a little uneasy, a bit dissatisfied, and a decent amount anxious. I don't want to be wasting my precious time!

On the other hand, I kind of relish in this time. My family calls me a "back-home baller" (from a hilarious SNL sketch which is worth a Google if you're not familiar) because I often sleep in so late at home, and just lounge around the house not really working on anything. (Which I like to counter with the fact that I can't really have a job or any obligations here since I'm never here for more than a couple weeks at a time.) Anyway, doing nothing for a while, especially after a long while of doing so many things, can be really nice. Plus, before I know it I'll be living in Chicago with a full-time job, and I won't have the time anymore to take things slow, to just do nothing.

So, for now, I will relish in the slowness that Osage City provides. Although it's not a permanent lifestyle choice for me, it's kind of nice to have a place where I can just come and do nothing, where things happen pretty slowly.

One thing I have been filling my time with is sorting through old SD cards from old cameras, which has resulted in some pictures that are true gold. Here's a young me at home with my cousin, looking like a dork (which is something that never changed).