I think this is one of the "ghosts" that our program director, Maricarmen, was describing. These "ghosts" are aspects of your personality and value system that you take for granted at home but when you're in a new culture, they come swooping down on you and gobble you up in ways you least expect. For me, I'm realizing more and more that my constant need to plan and control is hindering my full appreciation and enjoyment of certain aspects of my time here.
Don't get me wrong, I'm truly learning a lot about the culture, meeting new people, seeing new things, and in general having a blast. But there are always those days where I feel like a hermit and don't want to venture outside my room because I feel to need to plan trips by the hour and keep track of my budget to the peso (which has the worth of about 1/5 of a penny. You can see how pointless I'm viewing the time I've spent calculating my budget). The best comparison I can think of for the way I'm feeling is when Sheldon needs to create an algorithm for making friends:
I promise I'm definitely not THAT desperate. :) But I have to realize that I feel myself connecting with Sheldon's algorithm in other aspects of my life here. On the surface, I feel like all this meticulous planning and all the figuring out of sudoku-set-on-evil-schedules will help me have a better experience in Chile for the long run. It's the same mentality I have for the way I live my life in the States: get good grades and try to get involved with things that will help you prepare for the future. It's kind of like a reaction in ochem: control all the reactants, set the conditions, put in the right catalyst, wait, and you might get the product you want.
Under the surface, I'm now questioning myself. With too much planning and too much control, I have a feeling I'll get stuck in Sheldon's infinite loop; unable to just "go with the flow" and see where fate takes me. My host mother has talked to me a fair amount about fate and how there is a reason (outside my control) why I was meant to come here and live with her family. In the beginning, I would internally scrunch my eyebrows and make my brain hurt trying to think from that perspective. Before it was impossible. Now, with this new conscious knowledge that I might fall into an infinite loop, I'm going to try to loosen the reigns a little and become a flexible control freak.
After all, doesn't God have a say in my life as well? I'm sure she/he/ze's yelling at me from up there. I'm starting to listen, don't worry. :)