Life is hard. It´s true.
I´ve lamented before of how moving on every couple of days can be tiresome lonely difficult, yet I´m sure that if I were to return back to the U.S. (as I wished for an hour or more today) I would be back in my small Amarillo town with little more clarity on my post-college ambitions and more stress than I create for myself in Argentina.

But today has been a difficult day.
I´ve been in Bariloche, the town where I spent Christmas for almost a week, waiting, preparing, fretting.

I´ve filled the time over this week: I went to a vista on a mountain, I went to the water-worn rock beach on the lake, I made a hommos dinner accompanied by fresh baked pita bread. I took a 2 day trek to a lake surrounded by jagged granite spires that´s popular with rock climbers, I´ve eaten disgusting amounts (around 2 pounds) of red meat in one sitting, I took 2 hours of one on one spanish school, walked to what I realized was a drive in movie and met an Estonian girl who did the same thing and has hitchhiked throughout Patagonia. I´ve filled the days more or less, but daily and sometimes more than daily I become overwhelmed by deep regret.

Regret of:
1) staying in Bariloche for a week waiting for friends of a guy I met in Ushuaia (the end of the world) to go trekking when I could be seeing other parts of south America.
2) not travelling together with a sweet German girl whom I met in my hostel, who I should have taken the effort to get to know, but instead did nothing, who I should have asked if I could travel with, but then never did and never saw again
3) Not working upon my 2 main goals of travelling in Latin America, improving my Spanish, improving my Salsa dancing.

So today I told the guys I´ve been waiting for that I didn´t want to go trekking anymore, that I´ve been waiting too long, just like they say in economics
my time waiting is a sunk cost, so why should it affect my current decision? It´s logical, isn´t it?

But then I didn´t know where to go, I haven´t researched Chili, I didn´t book a bus, I had already bought food and a bus ticket for 5 days for the hike, I flipped coins and thought, weighed, decided, wavered decided again and here I am finally resigned to an amazing trek through the mountains.

Well, I said life is hard.
It´s like Teach said in psychology, there´s a set-point of happiness that you vacillate around, so maybe you´re normally at mildly amused, but can fall into despair or rush up to ecstatic depending on your environment and body chemicals.

My ethos since high school has been to ¨swallow the world¨. Do and be as much as I can, try everything take in as many experiences as possible, but it´s not working. Trying to avail myself of every opportunity, learn be and do everything leaves me wanting and sad: I always think about what I´m missing, what I should be doing, how I could be improving (and competing with everybody around me).

Today I layed in my shitty hostel bed for more than an hour without the motivation to so much as take off my shoes or get headphones to listen to music thinking that I didn´t know where I was going next, what I wanted to do, that I hated my life all I wanted to do was go back to the U.S. but then there would be nothing for me there either, feeling hopeless and angry at myself for staying in this damn city for too long, thinking that I could still wiggle my way out of the trek but then where would I go anyways - uncertain and unhappy.

And then, I fell asleep, got up, got my headphones, put on LP3 by Ratatat, went out to get the few last things I needed for my trek and bought trout for dinner. And a smile appeared upon my face, I regained a much needed spring in my step. But it´s been like this for days, hopes rise and crash depending on my mood and the people i´m around and in the end i´m left feeling confused and rather hopeless.

Not to mention full of self-pity