11/24/2009

I mailed in my application for the JET program today. It’s due tomorrow by 5:30 PM so I paid a lot of money to UPS to make sure it gets there by 10:30 AM. i was just kind of applying in order to be able to tell people that i had been looking at a “next step” for my life but to be honest now that i’ve gone through the whole process i’d be pretty fucking excited to actually be selected. although i think teaching in japan would be really hard and scary. but there would be other people over there who were scared like me and we could get together and talk about how scared we were and bond over sake and sushi about the weird things they serve us for school lunch and the ludicrous things they request us to do in order to highlight our american-ness or something. so anyways, if they like my application i have an interview in february which i have no idea at all how to do well at because in general i’m bad at interviews and i am not sure of how to answer the question: If a male, japanese coworker expects you to make him coffee every morning based solely on the fact that you are not only a foreigner, but a woman, how will you react?

how would i react? i have no idea. i guess i’d try to laugh it off. i guess this is something to think about in the coming months.

so i guess i’ve come to a point in my life where i’ve realized it’s pretty much OK to be in a relationship with a man who you aren’t in love with, as long as you are building more than breaking each other and the sex is good.

i’m in montana and i have been here for ages. and by ages i mean like two weeks. i have been studying relentlessly for the GRE because i score like a stupid head on that thing and if i am going to apply to grad schools i would like if it they did not find me stupidheadish according to all of the little boxes that make up the application. i don’t fit very well into little boxes and so hopefully by studying things that encourage me to color in little circles the information that i can cram into those little boxes will be more pleasing to the anonymous men and women who will be deciding on my future.

i am going to mexico on december 7th with ted, the man who i am not in love with but have been dating since january (almost an entire year, holy shit!) and i am really excited. although we encountered a lot of problems when we were traveling together in new zealand, we had a lot of really good times, too, and i think that mexico could very well be the perfect fit for the two of us right now. he loves to swim so much and i like to swim down there because there are no sharks and the house is literally right on the beach and there is a little reef about half a mile out from shore that breaks all the waves and the bottom is mostly sea-weedy but also sandy in some places and it’s really, really beautiful. i am also excited about snorkeling because really what is cooler than hovering over a watery world and watching all the fish come out and do their fishy things dressed in flashy fishy colors eating fleshy fishy meals. and also there are tons of flyrods and fishing poles and there is a little rubber boat with a motor on it so we can boogie around and fish! and use that to get to better places to snorkel! so that’s really exciting. and also it will be warm every day and the stars are so amazing there. and there are freshwater cenotes to swim in that are like hundreds of feet deep but so clear you can see all the way to the bottom of them which to be honest kind of freaks me the fuck out but god one day or another i will have to get over my massive fear of sharks/water.

my dad quit drinking and i guess that’s good but he seems really sad and lonely and angry but i guess he always seemed like that but now he’s no longer able to mask it with alcohol which is different but i don’t think he’s doing much/anything to actually process those feelings so i am wondering if he is a ticking time bomb which is pretty scary. also i thought that if he quit drinking he would quit telling the same stories over and over in a span of thirty minutes but apparently the damage to his brain that makes him do that is permanent. thus perhaps i should get used to this unending repetition of tales and try to find some part of me that thinks it’s endearing and run with it. because feeling disgust for your father is a really uncomfortable feeling and i don’t want to ever get used to it because i love my father so much because he’s quite wise and funny and charismatic and all this other stuff that makes him my dad and makes me love him.

i am going to spend thanksgiving with two of my best friends and none of us have really seen each other in a really long time and i hope we all manage to get along. my mom made both of them these really beautiful necklaces and i’m so happy for her because she’s found herself this beading project that really enjoys and it keeps her busy and she is creating really amazing things. i’m so proud to be able to give my best friends something really beautiful that i helped pick out and create but that is really the brain child of a woman i find so inspiring and ethical. ethical might not be the word you were really expecting to see in that sentence but i was running through a list of words to come upon a really good one to describe my mother and ethical made a “ding” noise in my head as i ran past it so i went back and grabbed it and stuck it into that sentence because she really is ethical maybe to a fault but who can fault someone that? the woman is a saint, the kind who quit the catholic church because 1) they shut down the catholic school so they could build a shinier new version of the just-fine-as-it-was church and 2) because she didn’t want to stop using birth control when the pope told her to and she didn’t think it was right to just keep using it and still consider herself a catholic so she removed herself from the church in order to solve that ethical dilemma.

i have a lot of curiosity and excitement in me regarding what my future is going to be like. there are just so many variable and i am so far from stuck on any one path in fact there are so many paths ahead of me right now that it’s pretty daunting but i haven’t really regretted any decisions i’ve made except for the one where i decided to not pay very close attention while i was driving and smash into a giant construction truck but i am glad i applied for the JET program, glad i am applying for a master’s program in International Disaster Psychology, glad i bought a one-way ticket to mexico, glad i’ve spent these two weeks at home, glad (usually) that i’m still with ted.

well you get eight gold stars for reading this sentence because it’s a LONG WAY from where these thoughts started and i’m not even sure i’ll be able to read through all of this, myself.

<3clea