spinning: John Mayer - ClarityIt finally clicked for me last night. Up until this point, I had been thinking about what to tell the friends and family about having just a decent time in Europe - not the time of my life, not an amazing experience, not having a trip worth some $5,000 of my own money. But last night, the real moral of the story caught up with me.It was in the nightclub with Maria Jose and Mei Lan. All the pieces were fitting just right that night - it was effortless to dance with two women and not look or feel stupid, effortless to move through a club where the guys don't obsess about how tough they think they are or how rich they dress, effortless to make my two new friends laugh. A night like that never happens so easily for me in the States. And when I realized how easy it was for me to fit in here, that's when the trip suddenly became worth the five grand, worth the airsickness, worth the month away from my technological creature comforts. It's always been virtually effortless when it all came down to it. Sure, the language barrier and shyness probably kept me away from a few valuable experiences, but those things are temporal and (relatively) easily conquered - definitely more easily than a stomach flu. And as of last night, I had conquered them - there I was, singing along to Coti with a club full of people I'll definitely never see again. There I was, building relationships with people I've been separated from by half a globe all my life. The moral of the story is that I had taken everything for granted - the ease of making people laugh, the cool car racing on TV, people who are well-preserved because they take good care of themselves - all things that I'll end up telling people about for years. What I had taken for granted was how easily I could fit in if I had lived here permanently. It's like some of the best things in my life, like gaming, driving and writing, they all just came to me naturally when I started. It all goes back to the numbness I felt in the weeks leading up to the trip. And now that I'm over the hill, now that I get it, I still feel numb, but in a different sense. I just saw a 50-year-old dude sunbathing in a thong - and I really wasn't surprised.