the hardest to learn was the least complicated*

What to say... what to say...

It's not that I can't think of anything to talk to. Nope, that's not it. I'm just puzzled and indecisive.

My life is filled to overflowing with impressions and stimuli. Still now, after three weeks here, everything old is new again. Every once in a while I can switch off the incessant comparisons that my brain insists upon making, but then I do something banal like go grocery shopping and find myself standing in front of the bread aisle paralyzed with indecision, searching desperately for something I won't have to complain about later, or reading the small print on the egg cartons to figure out whether these come from Bodenhaltung or Kaefighaltung chickens, and coming to the conclusion that perhaps American egg companies are just not required to report on the relative living conditions of their chickens, and then feeling foolish. I guess here they just sort them by size. Equally valid system, I guess... but like everything else, Not What I'm Used To.

One thing about having no life (as I did(n't) in Wittenberg) is that life tends to simplify itself down to the lowest common denominator: walk to work, work, walk home from work, walk to the bakery to buy amazing bread, walk to the grocery store, walk home with groceries. As soon as I got home I was confronted with endless grocery aisles and 4,000 types of toothpaste and laundry soap that doesn't smell like laundry soap anymore and buying a car and paying for the car and getting insurance for the car and license tabs for the car and a license to drive the car and renter's insurance and life insurance and health insurance and taxes and grocery baggers who scoff at my canvas bags and trying to get a bank account without a phone number and trying to purchase a phone that I don't know how to use because technology has advanced 4 generations since I bought stuff last.

Don't get me wrong. I am absolutely thrilled to be home and I wouldn't go back if you paid me or tortured me with thumbscrews, but sometimes I feel utterly unequipped to live this life. There are just so many details and a paralyzing row of choices. And it seems like everything is just a little harder than it used to be.

I've grown up significantly and learned a whole bunch since I lived here last, and with that comes a certain amount of opinionatedness (is there an actual English word for that?) and I find I am no longer content with a dictatorial pastor or genetically modified hothouse produce or simply the nearest mega-department store. Now I find myself thinking, "Is it more ethical to purchase my household supplies at the closer Megopolis that treats its employees badly and cultivates sweatshop culture and insists on building affiliates in internationally sacred places, or the other, farther away place that at least pretends to give back to its community yet also exists within the mega-mall that has put so many mom-and-pop operations out of business?" And you can go around and around on that one for hours.

How do you make ethical decisions when there are so many variables?

*Least Complicated, Indigo Girls