what the hell am i doing?
ok, so i haven't written in ages. eventually, when i have unrestricted access to my email account, i'll go back and pull up old emails and backpost them here to update everyone of what's been going on my crazy life. for right now, i'll start with where i am. it probably won't make sense to anyone but me, but i'm writing more for me anyway.
Not much news here since the weekend. Yesterday at work I read/replied/wrote emails until 2:00, then read a friend of Laura’s blog about teaching English in Thailand. He’s pretty funny, and when you get past all the stuff about having sex with Thai girls / wanting to have sex with Thai girls / talking about how stupid Thai people are, it’s pretty interesting. So that took up the whole day. I’ve been reading more of his blog this morning, but decided to take an email break in hopes of stretching this out at least until lunchtime.
Well, don’t remember if it was in the email yesterday, but turns out, according to Johan, that I can just go to Sweden and find a job and apply for a visa once I get there. So that’s the plan. Ideally, I’d like to stay here until august or so, hopefully working a cash job. But it all depends on whether Michaela gets this position in Amsterdam. If she does, then I need to get on to Sweden before she leaves so she can help me get set up. As much as the boys have good intentions, they can’t help me like she can. And then Clinton will stay here until our lease runs out, then he and his friend mark are going to travel around North Africa for several weeks. Then he’ll come to Sweden in October-ish.
So at some point soon I’m going to have to tell the olds about him / us / going to Sweden together. I’ll be happy to get it out there, but at the same time I am really apprehensive about how my mum (i'm getting all british on you) will take it.
I’m kind of at a confusing crossroads at the moment, because I’m excited about going to Sweden, I’ve wanted to go there for ages, but I’m nervous and scared about another move, and I’m not as secure financially as I was for my previous two moves. I have to pay rent today, and that will take care of the last of my savings from Ireland, so what I have is most of my earnings from here. I haven’t spent much of what I’ve earned here, but I’m going to need to find a job as soon as the plane hits the ground in Sweden if I’m going to be able to get started there. I know I can stay with Richard, but I’d like to stay in a hostel so I can meet other travelers and make some of my own friends. I just don’t know if I can afford it - I’ve checked some hostels online and they’re pretty expensive. I’m getting really stressed about it.
On top of it all, I’m really happy with Clinton. I don’t want us not to be together. But since we’re starting to make set plans about going to Sweden together, I’m having mild panic attacks about it. It’s a bit ridiculous, since he’s my best friend and we care about each other so much, we have so much fun together and I think we’re really good for each other. But then all these nagging little questions pop into my head - what if he doesn’t like it there and resents me for it, what if I leave here and he realizes he doesn’t want to go, what if I get there and am not sure I want him to come…
Everything gets so much harder when you have to include another person in your decisions! I’m stressed enough wondering if I’m going to have enough money to make this move and not be destitute for months until I get on my feet. I wanted to do some more traveling while I am in England, like go to Scotland, Wales, and France since they’re all so close. But I can’t do that in good conscience. I guess I get panicky if I don’t have a sizeable cushion in the bank, which isn’t a bad thing in the scheme of things. But it took me so long to get work here… and I speak the language. I still have some (limited) savings from home (though ideally I’d like to keep those where they are for when I come home), and most of the people that I know moved here or to Ireland with a lot less than I had when I got here, but I don’t like having to scrape by, and I don’t want to have to panic about where my next paycheck is going to come from, wondering if I’ll be able to pay rent AND eat.
Clinton’s on a day shift today, so he finishes at 6 and I’ll go meet him at Sports café. I’ll have an hour to kill so I’m going to go by the bookstore and see if I can get a Swedish language CD that we can listen to at home. He’s pretty serious about learning some of the language before he gets there, so hopefully that can help him out in finding a job. My Swedish friends assure me that there are plenty of jobs that don’t require you to speak Swedish. Like a lot of corporations run entirely in English, and a lot of the big hotels will hire people that don’t speak Swedish. And we figure, if Aussies and kiwis can so easily get working holiday visas there, then there’s got to be jobs for them.
So now it’s just all about waiting to hear if Michaela got this job with Cisco, and then I’ll sort out my timeline. And then I get really kind of nervous about those two worlds colliding. I’ve been really excited about Clinton getting to meet Michaela, but then I wonder if he and the boys will get along. They’re all so metro, well except Richard, who’s just a troll, and Clinton’s such a hippy. And they aren’t good about trying to speak English a lot, I worry if he’ll get really frustrated with them for that. It’s going to be hard enough for me and I already have friends there and have some, albeit limited, knowledge of the language and the area. I worry that it will be hard for us to meet our own group of friends so that we aren’t relying solely on each other or Richard and all his friends. Although Pelle, Jimi and Magne all spent a year in Australia and New Zealand, so they are much more willing to speak English and will hopefully see that as some sort of bond with Clinton. And who are we kidding, I already have more friends in Sweden than Clinton and I have in England, combined.
And then we’re back to being stressed about the rents' reaction. It’s been such a struggle to speak to them on the phone lately, because I feel really limited in what I can say without letting on about Clinton and I being together, I just want to tell them, but I’m scared. And I want to tell them about getting my nose pierced because I like it and I think it’s pretty and I have a really cute picture of me and Clinton from Brighton and its really blingin’ in there and I want to be able to send that home. But dropping those bombs all at once maybe isn’t a good idea. (Last night I accidentally pulled it almost all the way out changing clothes, it hurt like hell, otherwise it hasn’t hurt in ages). But I feel like it’s putting a distance between us, and apparently mum's been emailing Michaela about how she’s worried about me, and I don’t’ mind that they email back and forth that’s fine, because I think it’s actually pretty good. It gives my mom one of my friends to keep up with and feel more in touch, and it gives Michaela a kind of mother figure that she hasn’t had in a long time.
Anyway, not having anything to do at work doesn’t help, when I just sit here and think about this all day long every day, and then go home and think about it some more. Regardless, I want to come home whenever my mum has her surgery. It would be nice if I could know somewhat soon around when it will be so I can look for a ticket. Last she wrote about it, she wanted to put it off until fall or winter.
And I suppose my general feeling of unease is made even worse by reading this guy in Thailand’s journal. He’s incredibly vulgar and seems kind of like a jerk, but a lot of what he writes about really hits home with me. In the entries that I’ve been reading today he’s been pretty unhappy, and the general theme is, “what the fuck am I doing with my life?” I kind of feel the same. I’m happy traveling and getting the experience of working and living abroad, but I pretty much hate my job, and it’s not like I’m really even doing that much travelling. What am I doing, other than avoiding the kind of life that everyone else seems content to be living? Granted, I have no direction and don’t know what I want to do, but I’m not going to figure that out by working some crap job that I hate. All I’ve figured out so far is that I really don’t want to work in an office. Which I suppose is a step, though not an overly helpful one.
In Brighton we saw this photo exhibit of photos from around Brighton, and it really made me want to invest in a really good digital SLR camera and go for photography - the only thing I’ve studied that I actually still like. But I don’t want to ruin it; maybe it’s better as a hobby. And who am I kidding, photography is a really tough business, and I’m not all that sure that I’m talented enough to make it. Ok yeah I took some pretty pictures here and there, but it’s easy to take pretty pictures. Everyone can take pretty pictures. If you take enough pictures, at least one or two of them will turn out well. But I feel like any success I’ve had with photography is kind of the same as anything I ever did with graphics - something I just kind of stumbled upon by accident of dumb luck.
I have this really strong desire to do something creative, to find something I actually enjoy doing, which I can feel good about doing, and that keeps me interested and that makes me proud. But in all honesty, I can’t think of anything I’d be good enough at to actually justify the effort of trying to get into it… because I feel like trying to get into the creative industry will put me in financial ruin at the moment.
It’s such a catch-22, because i feel like I need to work and save up and then try my hand at some more creative endeavors, but I’m never going to be able to save up if I’m just working crappy jobs and hating life because I’m just some mindless cube monkey sitting in front of a computer.
There are millions of possibilities out there. There has to be something out there that I actually want to do, and am somewhat good at doing.
This really hit me this morning, a phrase I copied out of this guy’s blog: “I have consistently settled for mediocrity in my life, which is awful. I have so much natural intelligence that I should fucking use it; but of course, this is falling on my own deaf ears.”
I feel like those two sentences sum up my whole existence. All I’ve ever done is settle for mediocrity, doing just enough to get by. Of course it takes courage and wherewithal to move to a foreign country where you know no one and have no job, twice (ok approaching 3 times), but I don’t feel like it really counts when it’s possible that all you’re doing is running away from responsibility, life, career, what have you.
And for what? It’s not like I’m getting loads of great experience for my CV, or making heaps of friends and having the time of my life. Ok, I have a handful of good friends with whom I really enjoy spending time, and I am having a really good time; I’m pretty sure I’m having a better time here than I would be having at home. And also I feel like I needed to leave to really know that I can handle myself completely on my own. Being at home it would be easy to go over to M&D’s for dinner if I didn’t feel like cooking or didn’t have a lot of money to spend on food, or to rely on family or school contacts to get work or things like that. Not like that’s bad, I’ve just spent my whole life relying on other people to do things for me, and it feels really good to know that not only am I completely self reliant, but I’m doing it in a foreign country for the second time over.
That’s all well and good, but then it brings me back to the question of, “ok I know I can do it now, so what’s left, what am I doing here, I want to travel but I can’t be transient for my whole life, what about my family, what about my friends, what about having the opportunity to get settled and invest in a life and a job and a home that I can actually buy things for…”
And then again on the flip side of the coin, we have in our apartment only what we need for day to day life, with a few added extras like my computer and some posters. We have plates and cutlery and pots and pans, and heaps of glassware that we’ve taken from pubs (we got 3 more really cool pint glasses in Brighton)… and that’s really all we need. While it would be nice to have some art to hang on the wall, maybe a few plants, some bookshelves and random items to decorate, it’s kind of freeing not being tied down by all those things. Ok, stupid fight club reference, but it’s true how they say the things you own end up owning you.
It’s not like we need to own books, there are libraries. We don’t need vases and candles and end tables and tvs and a little tree in a pot and lamps and trinkets… those things just end up being things we look to for some sort of fulfillment that maybe should come from somewhere else, somewhere more productive.
I say this knowing I’ve been here for 4 months and I’ve already got way too much stuff, more than twice what I really need or want. I don’t even know where it all comes from. I’ve bought one jumper and one pair of jeans here, and my mum got me a jacket. Where the hell did the rest of it come from? Books, magazines, random clutter. For two people that have so few belongings, our place sure can get messy enough.
Today I’m going to talk to Clinton about finding someone to live with us starting in July. If I can’t find a cash job I can’t be paying rent, and he can’t afford all the rent just working that shitty bar job. Sometimes I question why I’m even staying here through June, because I’d only really be staying for him and he’ll be working like 45 million hours a week for the world cup. But then there’s the fact that I’ve committed to staying in my job until the end of June. Neither of us want another roommate, but we’re going to have to suck it up and do it. It’s really going to suck not having the place to ourselves anymore and having some stranger invading our lives.
Great, it’s not even noon and I’ve successfully put myself in a pretty shitty mood. At least it’s Wednesday, which means only 2 more days and then it’s the weekend again. Which makes me question, yet again, what the hell I’m doing with my life if all I do is wish away each week to get to the weekend.
Not much news here since the weekend. Yesterday at work I read/replied/wrote emails until 2:00, then read a friend of Laura’s blog about teaching English in Thailand. He’s pretty funny, and when you get past all the stuff about having sex with Thai girls / wanting to have sex with Thai girls / talking about how stupid Thai people are, it’s pretty interesting. So that took up the whole day. I’ve been reading more of his blog this morning, but decided to take an email break in hopes of stretching this out at least until lunchtime.
Well, don’t remember if it was in the email yesterday, but turns out, according to Johan, that I can just go to Sweden and find a job and apply for a visa once I get there. So that’s the plan. Ideally, I’d like to stay here until august or so, hopefully working a cash job. But it all depends on whether Michaela gets this position in Amsterdam. If she does, then I need to get on to Sweden before she leaves so she can help me get set up. As much as the boys have good intentions, they can’t help me like she can. And then Clinton will stay here until our lease runs out, then he and his friend mark are going to travel around North Africa for several weeks. Then he’ll come to Sweden in October-ish.
So at some point soon I’m going to have to tell the olds about him / us / going to Sweden together. I’ll be happy to get it out there, but at the same time I am really apprehensive about how my mum (i'm getting all british on you) will take it.
I’m kind of at a confusing crossroads at the moment, because I’m excited about going to Sweden, I’ve wanted to go there for ages, but I’m nervous and scared about another move, and I’m not as secure financially as I was for my previous two moves. I have to pay rent today, and that will take care of the last of my savings from Ireland, so what I have is most of my earnings from here. I haven’t spent much of what I’ve earned here, but I’m going to need to find a job as soon as the plane hits the ground in Sweden if I’m going to be able to get started there. I know I can stay with Richard, but I’d like to stay in a hostel so I can meet other travelers and make some of my own friends. I just don’t know if I can afford it - I’ve checked some hostels online and they’re pretty expensive. I’m getting really stressed about it.
On top of it all, I’m really happy with Clinton. I don’t want us not to be together. But since we’re starting to make set plans about going to Sweden together, I’m having mild panic attacks about it. It’s a bit ridiculous, since he’s my best friend and we care about each other so much, we have so much fun together and I think we’re really good for each other. But then all these nagging little questions pop into my head - what if he doesn’t like it there and resents me for it, what if I leave here and he realizes he doesn’t want to go, what if I get there and am not sure I want him to come…
Everything gets so much harder when you have to include another person in your decisions! I’m stressed enough wondering if I’m going to have enough money to make this move and not be destitute for months until I get on my feet. I wanted to do some more traveling while I am in England, like go to Scotland, Wales, and France since they’re all so close. But I can’t do that in good conscience. I guess I get panicky if I don’t have a sizeable cushion in the bank, which isn’t a bad thing in the scheme of things. But it took me so long to get work here… and I speak the language. I still have some (limited) savings from home (though ideally I’d like to keep those where they are for when I come home), and most of the people that I know moved here or to Ireland with a lot less than I had when I got here, but I don’t like having to scrape by, and I don’t want to have to panic about where my next paycheck is going to come from, wondering if I’ll be able to pay rent AND eat.
Clinton’s on a day shift today, so he finishes at 6 and I’ll go meet him at Sports café. I’ll have an hour to kill so I’m going to go by the bookstore and see if I can get a Swedish language CD that we can listen to at home. He’s pretty serious about learning some of the language before he gets there, so hopefully that can help him out in finding a job. My Swedish friends assure me that there are plenty of jobs that don’t require you to speak Swedish. Like a lot of corporations run entirely in English, and a lot of the big hotels will hire people that don’t speak Swedish. And we figure, if Aussies and kiwis can so easily get working holiday visas there, then there’s got to be jobs for them.
So now it’s just all about waiting to hear if Michaela got this job with Cisco, and then I’ll sort out my timeline. And then I get really kind of nervous about those two worlds colliding. I’ve been really excited about Clinton getting to meet Michaela, but then I wonder if he and the boys will get along. They’re all so metro, well except Richard, who’s just a troll, and Clinton’s such a hippy. And they aren’t good about trying to speak English a lot, I worry if he’ll get really frustrated with them for that. It’s going to be hard enough for me and I already have friends there and have some, albeit limited, knowledge of the language and the area. I worry that it will be hard for us to meet our own group of friends so that we aren’t relying solely on each other or Richard and all his friends. Although Pelle, Jimi and Magne all spent a year in Australia and New Zealand, so they are much more willing to speak English and will hopefully see that as some sort of bond with Clinton. And who are we kidding, I already have more friends in Sweden than Clinton and I have in England, combined.
And then we’re back to being stressed about the rents' reaction. It’s been such a struggle to speak to them on the phone lately, because I feel really limited in what I can say without letting on about Clinton and I being together, I just want to tell them, but I’m scared. And I want to tell them about getting my nose pierced because I like it and I think it’s pretty and I have a really cute picture of me and Clinton from Brighton and its really blingin’ in there and I want to be able to send that home. But dropping those bombs all at once maybe isn’t a good idea. (Last night I accidentally pulled it almost all the way out changing clothes, it hurt like hell, otherwise it hasn’t hurt in ages). But I feel like it’s putting a distance between us, and apparently mum's been emailing Michaela about how she’s worried about me, and I don’t’ mind that they email back and forth that’s fine, because I think it’s actually pretty good. It gives my mom one of my friends to keep up with and feel more in touch, and it gives Michaela a kind of mother figure that she hasn’t had in a long time.
Anyway, not having anything to do at work doesn’t help, when I just sit here and think about this all day long every day, and then go home and think about it some more. Regardless, I want to come home whenever my mum has her surgery. It would be nice if I could know somewhat soon around when it will be so I can look for a ticket. Last she wrote about it, she wanted to put it off until fall or winter.
And I suppose my general feeling of unease is made even worse by reading this guy in Thailand’s journal. He’s incredibly vulgar and seems kind of like a jerk, but a lot of what he writes about really hits home with me. In the entries that I’ve been reading today he’s been pretty unhappy, and the general theme is, “what the fuck am I doing with my life?” I kind of feel the same. I’m happy traveling and getting the experience of working and living abroad, but I pretty much hate my job, and it’s not like I’m really even doing that much travelling. What am I doing, other than avoiding the kind of life that everyone else seems content to be living? Granted, I have no direction and don’t know what I want to do, but I’m not going to figure that out by working some crap job that I hate. All I’ve figured out so far is that I really don’t want to work in an office. Which I suppose is a step, though not an overly helpful one.
In Brighton we saw this photo exhibit of photos from around Brighton, and it really made me want to invest in a really good digital SLR camera and go for photography - the only thing I’ve studied that I actually still like. But I don’t want to ruin it; maybe it’s better as a hobby. And who am I kidding, photography is a really tough business, and I’m not all that sure that I’m talented enough to make it. Ok yeah I took some pretty pictures here and there, but it’s easy to take pretty pictures. Everyone can take pretty pictures. If you take enough pictures, at least one or two of them will turn out well. But I feel like any success I’ve had with photography is kind of the same as anything I ever did with graphics - something I just kind of stumbled upon by accident of dumb luck.
I have this really strong desire to do something creative, to find something I actually enjoy doing, which I can feel good about doing, and that keeps me interested and that makes me proud. But in all honesty, I can’t think of anything I’d be good enough at to actually justify the effort of trying to get into it… because I feel like trying to get into the creative industry will put me in financial ruin at the moment.
It’s such a catch-22, because i feel like I need to work and save up and then try my hand at some more creative endeavors, but I’m never going to be able to save up if I’m just working crappy jobs and hating life because I’m just some mindless cube monkey sitting in front of a computer.
There are millions of possibilities out there. There has to be something out there that I actually want to do, and am somewhat good at doing.
This really hit me this morning, a phrase I copied out of this guy’s blog: “I have consistently settled for mediocrity in my life, which is awful. I have so much natural intelligence that I should fucking use it; but of course, this is falling on my own deaf ears.”
I feel like those two sentences sum up my whole existence. All I’ve ever done is settle for mediocrity, doing just enough to get by. Of course it takes courage and wherewithal to move to a foreign country where you know no one and have no job, twice (ok approaching 3 times), but I don’t feel like it really counts when it’s possible that all you’re doing is running away from responsibility, life, career, what have you.
And for what? It’s not like I’m getting loads of great experience for my CV, or making heaps of friends and having the time of my life. Ok, I have a handful of good friends with whom I really enjoy spending time, and I am having a really good time; I’m pretty sure I’m having a better time here than I would be having at home. And also I feel like I needed to leave to really know that I can handle myself completely on my own. Being at home it would be easy to go over to M&D’s for dinner if I didn’t feel like cooking or didn’t have a lot of money to spend on food, or to rely on family or school contacts to get work or things like that. Not like that’s bad, I’ve just spent my whole life relying on other people to do things for me, and it feels really good to know that not only am I completely self reliant, but I’m doing it in a foreign country for the second time over.
That’s all well and good, but then it brings me back to the question of, “ok I know I can do it now, so what’s left, what am I doing here, I want to travel but I can’t be transient for my whole life, what about my family, what about my friends, what about having the opportunity to get settled and invest in a life and a job and a home that I can actually buy things for…”
And then again on the flip side of the coin, we have in our apartment only what we need for day to day life, with a few added extras like my computer and some posters. We have plates and cutlery and pots and pans, and heaps of glassware that we’ve taken from pubs (we got 3 more really cool pint glasses in Brighton)… and that’s really all we need. While it would be nice to have some art to hang on the wall, maybe a few plants, some bookshelves and random items to decorate, it’s kind of freeing not being tied down by all those things. Ok, stupid fight club reference, but it’s true how they say the things you own end up owning you.
It’s not like we need to own books, there are libraries. We don’t need vases and candles and end tables and tvs and a little tree in a pot and lamps and trinkets… those things just end up being things we look to for some sort of fulfillment that maybe should come from somewhere else, somewhere more productive.
I say this knowing I’ve been here for 4 months and I’ve already got way too much stuff, more than twice what I really need or want. I don’t even know where it all comes from. I’ve bought one jumper and one pair of jeans here, and my mum got me a jacket. Where the hell did the rest of it come from? Books, magazines, random clutter. For two people that have so few belongings, our place sure can get messy enough.
Today I’m going to talk to Clinton about finding someone to live with us starting in July. If I can’t find a cash job I can’t be paying rent, and he can’t afford all the rent just working that shitty bar job. Sometimes I question why I’m even staying here through June, because I’d only really be staying for him and he’ll be working like 45 million hours a week for the world cup. But then there’s the fact that I’ve committed to staying in my job until the end of June. Neither of us want another roommate, but we’re going to have to suck it up and do it. It’s really going to suck not having the place to ourselves anymore and having some stranger invading our lives.
Great, it’s not even noon and I’ve successfully put myself in a pretty shitty mood. At least it’s Wednesday, which means only 2 more days and then it’s the weekend again. Which makes me question, yet again, what the hell I’m doing with my life if all I do is wish away each week to get to the weekend.