Culture Shock
Back in the States, I’m feeling an odd kind of culture shock. Not “reverse culture shock” of the usual kind — the U.S. seemed pretty strange to me before I left. Rather, I’m feeling a certain shock at my personal culture, at the way I was living before I left on the trip. I see myself starting to do something, and I realize it’s because I used to do it all the time (small things, like patterns of web surfing I haven’t been able to indulge while sporadically connected), and then that behavior is suddenly defamiliarized by my act of observation.