Let the countdown begin

Happy pre-anniversary! In exactly one month (and it’s February, so it’s a tidy 4 weeks, no less) I will be flying east towards Belgium.

I’m celebrating with a bowl of ice cream and a brownie. Only since life has to be weird, the ice cream is oddly chewy (who knew that brand that starts with D- and ends with -reyers was so crappy?) and the brownie tastes like curry. At least I understand the second part: it tastes like curry because there is curry in it. Yeah, curry brownies. And I’m enjoying it.

That is actually kind of an apt metaphor for how this 4 month phase of life has been: delicious, but kinda weird. I have been living in Portland, Oregon, with a pair of newlyweds, one obese cat, one nearly feral cat, one Chihuahua, three periodically-dying snails, and a couple of basement trolls. (I say trolls with all due respect, but there is something inherently cave trollish about basement studios. Although the current guy is more lanky, so he’s maybe more of a Gollum, only extremely likeable. Nothing against Gollum or anything…okay, I’m getting sidetracked again.)

The other obvious comparison for my last 4 months (besides curry brownies) is hibernation. I have found no work beyond a day here and there, don’t socialize a particularly huge amount, and deliberately do my grocery shopping in small amounts so that it can continue to provide a reason for leaving the house (especially since the rain has set in).

Sounds like both the ideal life of freedom and the nightmarish life of usefulness, doesn’t it? Who knew losers and winners could cohabit the same reality?

Now, to be fair, I have been pretty busy. I have been studying Dutch, taking an online TEFL course (Teaching English as a Foreign Language), writing a book (I know, I know), and studying for the Foreign Service Officer test for the State Department. Oh and I made a blanket. (More on that later. If I remember.)

Basically, I am doing nothing tangible in the moment in order to prepare for possible futures. All of those activities are hopefully laying the groundwork for a future reality, I just have no idea which one(s) are actually possible.

The Foreign Service Officer test is an easy one: it’s hard. I am more unprepared for that test than I have ever been for any test or evaluation of any kind that I have ever taken. It feels kind of…disturbing? My high school government teacher was a great guy, but he belonged at a tailgate party more than in a classroom. In his class I learned how to shuffle properly and got much better at Rummy.

For the FSO test, I basically realized that I have only a tiny chance of getting the job without an advanced degree, and I am honestly not sure I want one anyway, so I relegated that one to a distant fourth place priority.

The book. Yeah. Everyone’s doing it. But it would be so cool! I could do it wherever, whenever, however I wanted! Right? It’s just that easy, right? Well, you are presumably reading this on a blog (if I ever make one and anyone ever reads it) so that may indicate the current status of the book. If you think I should write one, just send me a check for $40,000 and I’ll get right to it. (Would it make you more or less generous if I’d said “I’ll get write to it”? Hopefully less…but be forewarned, these things occur to me and I can‘t always control them.)

The teaching English thing. Another widely-applicable career option that utilizes the one specialty I have to offer an employer: I am a native English speaker. I know, that puts me in a very elite group of millions of people, but hey, I am not going to waste the fact that my Mother Tongue has become the lingua franca for international relations (sorry France, go back and watch some more Olympics. And forgive me China, I was just kidding.).

So I am taking this online course to get a TEFL certificate. It is an entire syllabus dedicated to teaching people how to teach…and they are downright shitty teachers. Most of the stuff is utterly useless (says me with my complete lack of experience I know, but you should see this crap) and the basic structure seems to be to introduce arbitrary language to describe subjective topics, then quiz me on it as though it were inarguable fact. And they make hella typos too. It is so upsetting I just said “hella.” I need to go lie down. (Or is it “lay down”? Crap.)

Then there’s the Dutch. Ah…the Dutch! It bears mentioning that the fundamental cause for all of this activity is a trip I took last year through Europe. Over 9 months and a couple dozen countries I lost a travel towel and gained a girlfriend. Pretty good trade, if I do say so myself. (The towel kinda smelled like rubber and felt like insulation anyway. While the girl’s smell and feel are a substantial improvement. She‘ll blush if she ever reads that. Sorry, honey.)

She lives in Belgium, in the northern, Flemish-speaking region of Flanders. Flemish is basically Dutch, and I live across the street from a library, so I have the majority of the Multnomah County Library system’s materials on the Dutch language.

This seems like the most useful of my endeavors…but it also has the least accountability, so over the last month I have peeped at the book a handful of times. Usually for the duration of my pot of oatmeal.

So that is my life right now. Preparations for various possible life paths, all marinating in a thick sauce of anxiety and nervousness, but I’ll leave that for another time (because I can’t imagine anyone would really want to read that much blog at once, and besides, I want more ice cream.)

Oh! But the blanket thing. I guess I can get that little blurb on here too. (Can I still call it a “blurb” on a blog or have they invented some new term for that too? Blurg?) My initial time in this house had a particular characteristic. It seemed like whenever I did anything, it would go generally well but I’d screw up one detail that would largely invalidate the entire thing. I made a big batch of chili, great fresh vegetables perfectly cooked…but with so much chili powder you couldn’t taste anything but Hades. My bike was all tuned up and ready to go…but I didn’t have enough lights to ride in this most responsible of bicycling towns. And then the blanket. The f-ing blanket.

Now, I normally don’t tell people this until we’ve known each other for awhile…but I’m…not like other guys…no, I don’t turn into fancy-dancing werewolves in red leather, no I don’t have ovaries, and no, I don’t like to dress up like the Philadelphia Phanatic in the bedroom. Much worse. I crochet.

I know, I know, your grandma crochets. I should hang out with her.

But hey man, that shit was invented by pirates! (Seriously, that’s the story I heard, they couldn’t get their nets fixed in normal ports or shops, so they developed crocheting so they could do it themselves in between bouts of pillaging and looting. So maybe there’s something about your grandma you didn’t know, isn’t there Mr. Smartypants. Yeah, that’s right, me and your grandma are going pillaging on Friday night. Jealous much?)

So I decided to make a blanket. I was watching a lot of The Office and 30 Rock, and wanted something relatively “productive” to do in order to justify it. So I bought a bunch of yarn and started a blanket. I made the first row, measured it out to the length of a full sized comforter, and spent hours and hours making it.

I was a good three weeks in before anyone asked to see the whole thing spread out, and you can imagine my consternation when I unfurled the damn thing to find that I had screwed something up, and it was TWICE as long as I had intended. So I am now the confused possessor of the world’s largest blanket. The thing must weigh 25 pounds. Entire farms of sheep are naked and shivering to feed my busywork. And the rub (aye, there’s the Hamlet) is that it is so large as to be basically useless. You have to be willing to wrestle for 5 minutes to get it all sorted out, after which time you are warm enough that you don’t want it anymore.

I am thinking about doubling it over and making it into a peculiar sleeping bag. That might work.

The point is, I was doing stuff, but nothing was working out quite right. I still have that feeling, although thanks to the reliability of cooking lasagnas, it has lessened somewhat.

So anyway, that’s my first blog post. Thank you, it was an absolutely delightful way to procrastinate from my stupid internet course. I’m going to go back to reading endless paragraphs about reconciling main aims, subordinate aims, personal aims, procedures, structures, themes, and all sorts of other blah-blahing about lesson plans now.

Or maybe I should make another cup of tea first….