I was busy hitting the other spots on the saloon before I pulled up a "barstool."
Here I am, an American by nationailty, but suspect I was Martian at birth. 34, though past injuries lead me to wonder if some bones in my body are 65. I've travelled a lot in my life. Mostly in Asia. I finished paying off thirty thousand US bucks in student loans last year. For the first time in my adult life I
will be am liberated from the endentured servitude many Americans have to enter into just to receive a university education.
I have a disease. It's called
travelitis. I caught it years ago when I started teaching English on the little island that China has a lot of interest in, and some loose cultural ties to. I enjoy living and working abroad. I actually enjoy teaching English.
I never wanted to be a teacher and never thought my life would take this turn. It started out as a curiosity and has become an affliction (one I'm all too happy to embrace). Since I returned home it's as if the volume of life is turned down, and the suck factor is amped up. Dead end jobs. No fundimental human right to basic medical insurance. Potential theocratic storms brewing in Washington...
I'll spare you those details.
Only recently did I realize (through profoundly soul-breaking trial and error) that about the only thing I can do well without dirving myself mad and feeling like I've sold myself out - and survive doing it - is teaching.
I'm none to fond of my country of birth and have felt like the country I loved started dying in 1980 and finally died sometime around 2000; and that the deceptively-similar version of it that I'm currently biding my time in is like the bizarro world version of it.
Stop the ship. I want to get off it.
So, I'm going to renew my recently-expired pasport this week and have started seriously looking into living and working in China while I slowly get the graduate degree on track. I'm not sure how long I'll end up working in China. I've been there a few times but only as a visitor.
One year. Maybe more? I'm happy to go in, do my best and let the chips fall where they may. I take things day by day. Such an outlook has been hammered into me after three decades of trying to plan way too far ahead.
Currently, I produce and direct a local television program. I have a love for what I'm doing but not for the system I have to do it in. Aesthetically it's rewarding, but emotionally it just reminds me that I'd rather be doing something that doesn't have me getting up each and every day wondering why I put up with a constant feeling of uncertainty, since every other television outlet has reduced local origination programming to the nightly
propagandacast,
newscast. So, every bit of aesthetic joy I receive from my work feels like it could be the last fix, and once the "ride" is done I don't want to work in commercial television ever again: local or otherwise.
Good people. Good food. Good drink. Good entertainment. A constant state of learning: that's what I enjoy.
Next round's on me!