Sunday 16 December 2012

Constantly Shifting Sands

I've only written one blog entry in all of 2012. (One half of one entry, really.) The year is now nearly over. It's been a busy year in which I've achieved and experienced so much, but somehow, I've only made that one entry. I earned a master's degree. I completed a dissertation and a massive development project. I maintained a great social life with amazing friends. I traveled with my parents. I spent time in the UK, US, Uganda, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, and Finland. I found love again. I applied for jobs and internships and the Peace Corps. I planned for and fretted about the future. I got older. And yet. One entry.

I'm growing increasingly aware of the fact that my life is changing, and that my attitude toward life is changing. I looked at this blog today for the first time in months and realized just how inappropriate the title felt to me now. Eternal Nomad? No. Not eternal. This year has marked the first time where my 'gypsy lifestyle' has left me feeling worn down. Exhausted. Tired of restarting my life every year or so. I don't necessarily feel that it's fully out of my system. I might travel for a few more years yet. But I find myself gradually drawn more and more to the allure of security and stability. I don't want to be a nomad forever. I want to be able to put down roots and build a career and have a family someday. I've grown up a lot and I understand now that I can want these things, that I in fact deserve these things. It's a nice feeling. My main concern, however, has developed into putting down roots where I want to put them down and overcoming the barriers that arise to prevent me from doing so. 

I've never felt more uncertain about the direction of my life and my path toward the future as I do in this moment. I thought finishing my master's degree and graduating would be one more fixed point in time and space, a stepping stone to the next event of my life. Instead, I find myself standing on rapidly and constantly shifting sands (hence the new blog title). Every couple of weeks seems to offer another blow dashing the hopes I have for what comes next. Every new day, every new conversation, serves to present some new option or possibility for what the future might hold for me. Life has never felt so unstable and while I'd love to say that it's a thrilling feeling, in reality it just leaves me unsettled. In what is hopefully another sign of personal growth though, I don't find myself overly stressed or anxious about it. Instead, I have this odd sense of resignation that this is just the way life is going to be for a while and I have to keep every possibility in play for as long as possible until the best solution presents itself. I have no doubt it will, I just wish that the universe would come to a decision according to my own preferred timeline and not leave me floundering in the dark so much. But wishes aren't horses, and beggars can't ride. Life isn't meant to be easy.

As of this afternoon, I am evaluating and running with all of my options at once. A few months in Mexico. A year in Australia. A couple of years with the Peace Corps. A few years in Manchester doing a PhD. Or some combination of the above. I'm not quite ready yet to return to the US, full-time and forever. I still have some opportunities to burn through before that time comes, and I've never been one to pass up an interesting opportunity or two. But the sands are shifting and I'll admit, it's very confusing. My hope is that I can return to this blog more frequently to write about and reflect upon the path I end up choosing, whichever one that might be. 

I suppose I'll have to make a little bit more of an effort.  :)

Friday 6 April 2012

T.I.A., Part 1

I'm not really sure where to start with this one.
The last two weeks have flown by at the speed of light, with barely a pause to take a breath, let alone take time to reflect. Finding Internet access long enough to write a blog entry has also been difficult. But now I'm gonna go ahead and give it a shot. This could take a while.

Thursday, 22 March
It started at 3.45 on a Thursday morning in Manchester, in the cold and dark, with our group of staff and students meeting outside the Arthur Lewis building to head to the airport together, prepared for a long day of travel. Nearly 20 hours or so, in fact. Flights from Manchester to Brussels, then Brussels to Kigali, then Kigali to Entebbe, and then one final hour on the bus to Kampala. Kigali in the darkness of 9 PM was the most I got to see of Rwanda (which means, basically nothing) but the fact that all I could see were lights across rolling hill after rolling hill makes me determined to return someday and see if it's as beautiful as I think it might be.

Wednesday 21 September 2011

Changes and Reflections

Well, reading back over all of those old e-mails from my undergraduate days certainly was enlightening, in a bizarre way. What struck me the most as I typed them all in to this blog was just how young and immature I really was, and I didn't even realize it. So much of my writing was about how much I partied and how many times I went out on the town, with apparently very little cultural insight or appreciation of all the travel I was so unbelievably fortunate to undertake. I noticed that by the second time I studied abroad, during my semester in Hong Kong, I had already begun to pay more attention to cultural differences and the really fascinating things about traveling, but I was still quite the party animal and that definitely continued to dominate the narrative. It wasn't until my sojourn to South Africa that it seems I really grasped the idea that travel was about more than just drinking and going out. There are valuable things to be learned and experienced everywhere we go. It can probably be attributed more to the fact that my South Africa journals were meant to be read by my professor (as opposed to the earlier e-mails sent to friends back in the US) rather than to some sudden leap in maturity. Still though, it's interesting.

Tuesday 30 August 2011

China - April 2004

Tuesday, April 13
It's that point in the semester where every possible big presentation and term paper is coming up all at the same time, so lots of work to catch up on. Last week was our spring break, during which I intended to do enormous volumes of work, but that didn't happen bcuz literally 24 hours before a small group of friends was scheduled to leave for Beijing for the week, I found out that my China visa had gone through and that I could just barely financially pull off one more trip, so I went.

We took a 26-hour train to Beijing in sleeper cars and were trying to decide what to do when we got there bcuz our friend David wasn't meeting us till Monday evening and it was only Saturday and his girlfriend wanted to avoid doing too many touristy things in Beijing without him. So as soon as we got to Beijing, we bought train tickets for that night for an overnight train to Hohhot, which is the capital of Inner Mongolia. It's still technically China, so you don't need an extra visa, but the culture and everything is still Mongolian, and they're considered like an autonomous region or something. Unfortunately, we forgot to get sleeper car tickets (probably cuz we can't speak any damn Mandarin) so we were in the insanely crowded regular car for the whole night and were thoroughly miserable. Honestly, we had the worst night! I ended up sleeping on the floor underneath the seats for 3 hours and I'm sure that is one hilarious photograph. But it was completely made up for by the fact that our day in Inner Mongolia was freaking amazing. We took a tour of the grasslands and rode the furriest horses you've ever seen on the Mongolian plain. I tell you, there is nothing there. It is the most desolate, barren place. I can't imagine it in winter, it must be a frickin wasteland.

Thailand - March 2004

Tuesday, March 9
A crazy week with 2 hot ladies... Kari and Christine came to visit Thursday before last, and we had the best time for their spring break. We just hung out in Hong Kong for the first few days, went up to Victoria Peak, went to a few malls (since Hong Kong is basically just one huge shopping mall anyway) and got trashed at night. But then on Saturday we left for Thailand and had the best trip ever. We stayed on Khao San Road in Bangkok the first night with nine other international students from my school and it is just one huge dirty street with all the backpackers' hostels located on it and tons of clothes, CDs, and bars for really cheap. The baht is my new favorite money, it goes so far! On Sunday I sat for 4+ hours in the middle of Khao San Road in the extreme heat and humidity so that these 12-year-old Thai girls could pull at my hair. I got dreads and they kinda looked like crap but I kinda liked em too. I don't know, I was torn. I know Kari liked em and Teeny didn't, and honestly I'm not sure who I agreed with.

Hong Kong - January 2004

Monday, January 5
Ok, whoa... I'm just a *little* overwhelmed right now. Ok, how about a lot. And I've only been at school for less than 4 hours! Which seems impossible, considering I feel like I've been here for days already. Our plane left LAX at 10:30 on Saturday night, and we landed this morning (Monday) at 6:00. I only got 3 hours of sleep on the entire 15-hour plane ride, so right now I feel like the walking dead, kinda tired and cranky and shit. For me (and all of you in CA) it's 9:00 Sunday night but in reality it's 1:00 Monday afternoon. I have never had my concept of time screwed up this badly, I feel like it's just been one hellishly long day that isn't even close to being finished yet, and NOBODY here seems to speak English even though everyone and their mother told me that everybody in Hong Kong speaks English. Plus, the mattresses are like ROCKS (you have to feel it to believe it... I can't believe I have to sleep on it for 4 1/2 months). And Pepperdine in its typical fashion told us that there were all these things that would be taken care of for us when we got here, and we arrive to find that NOTHING has been done. We can't get food money, we don't have bed linens, and the Hong Kong Baptist University people told us we have to pay HK$550 which is like $80-85 as a damn room deposit. Does Dean Phillips sit with his thumb up his ass all day??? Honestly. Plus, I'm almost out of money in my bank account already. ???? How? I'm not sure.

Saturday 27 August 2011

London - March / April 2003

Monday, March 10
Today is the first day in a long time where I've felt like I don't have anything to do, and it's GREAT. I love it! Haven't really done much in the past week beyond homework (yes, believe it or not). Saw "Rent" on Thursday, and really liked it. It was a mediocre production, but it was OK since I'd never seen it before. Went to a hookah bar on Friday night and out drinking, but otherwise I've done shit! :) I've read 500 some pages of a Russian novel though. Wow, my life sounds kinda crap. Haha!