Things are looking up. Job hunting right now (looking to maybe become a teller) and that's going pretty slow given I have no car of my own and whatnot. School is looking rather upbeat, actually. Looked into USM (University of Southern Mississippi) and they have a lot of good language, theater, film, and secondary teaching licensing courses.
As for family, well, I picked a helluva time to come back. Lot of internal conflict over different forms of Catholocism, so they're not as tight-knit as they had been before I left and it always feels really tense and weird when I'm around them as a group.