Why I've Stopped Writing

It's hard for me to write in English now--tiring--and I'd rather just speak French.
Life is normal for me, now. I still LOVE it here but reporting on things has gotten a lot less interesting.

Those are my excuses. They're true, but they're nothing I couldn't overcome if I wanted to. After a lot of reflection (too much...), what I've come up with, as far as a real reason, is the following:

I think I started blogging in the first place as a way to be sure I still existed. At first (pretty normal for an exchange student, I think) I felt fairly un-connected to the people around me. I didn't know them yet, really, so how could I love them?

But that's different now. It's been a gradual process, the whole connecting-with-people thing, and you can see it in the way the frequency of my posts diminishes. Now I have people here who love me and who look out for me--my host family, in particular, and my two closest friends at school. So I'm connected to them, and I have no desire to publish my life. The people who are HERE, NOW, are more important at the moment than the people on the other end of the fiberoptic cables or whatever it is that carries the internet. Real life is more fulfilling.

To my family and friends in Murka: All my apologies. I still love you, and I'll tell you everything when I get back.

PS I'll write one more time, at the end of the year, to sum everything up.