Tomorrow or the next day

I am a JET alternate, and my fiance is In, which means she leaves for Nippon on July 31, and I don’t!  That is, unless I am upgraded from alternate status to In status, which could happen technically any time between now and December.  Based on the examination of anecdotal Internet evidence, it happens most often (1) after the response deadline to accept alternate or In positions, when several usually decide either not to wait and see or have gotten some other job since their JET interview, and (2) after placements are issued some time in May, when Joe Fuck learns he’ll be in the countryside and ain’t down with The Real Japan Experience.  Either situation would result in a Brandon upgrade and departure on the same day as said fiance, taking into account my theoretical position on the alternate list, denoted by a secret number we mere alternates are not privy to, and believing that my number is near the ones that are selected.

I intend to take precautionary measures by way of applying to other private schools who perform similar functions as JET but do not operate governmentally.  Among them: Peppy Kids Club, a school that works with younger kids and which I’d love to work for merely so I can put Peppy Kids Club on my resume.  My life is a hailstorm, and the pelting is only tempered by the fact that I’ve become so used to it over the last what, eighteen months?  All I want to do is put my feet on some ground.

All of that failing I’m homeless at the end of July, with loans leaving forebearance a few months after that!  It is a situation I try not to acknowledge is very real, because as they tell me, I need to have some confidence and optimism for a change.  I would laugh heartily if the one time I chose to toss it to the wind I ended up real fucked.

Meanwhile, I currently struggle with what I believe to be a variant of the common cold, certainly common to me as I seem to come down with it every year or two.  It is not THE SWINE FLU, I don’t think, though everyone is quick to point out that It Could Be Swine Flu, and as the saying goes if I had one dollar for every time someone’s mentioned it, I could probably buy several pounds of delicious pork chops, which I would happily eat.  Between my involuntary croop frenzies, I catch a glimpse of what it must be like to be a societal outcast on a scale far grander than could be shoehorned onto my own small-town upbringing.  My roommate still shares a pipe with me, maybe because whatever I’ve got he’s gonna get if he’s gonna get it, and why leave the green a solo sport?  Ironically smoking it alleviates the agonizing pain of my surely ripped throat, but is difficult to do by virtue of it being smoke, which is something burnt, which has a tendency to irritate ripped throats.  I have been mitigating it with dextromethorphan, a cough suppresant that enables me to function on an hour-to-hour basis and actually get some Goddamned Sleep.

Thursdays are my Fridays, because I work ten hour days from Monday until Thursday.  That means I have a three-day weekend to make up for all the free time I lost out on during the week.  This week, I hope and intend to use it by finally washing my dishes, using the vacuum on my floor, and cooking some of the food I bought last weekend and have been too sick/rushed/lazy to use.

Sometimes I consider the fact that my life has really begun to bore me, and I can’t quite place a finger on the precise reason, but during times like these I occasionally suspect it’s because I have nothing that I can feel comfortable looking forward to.  I have become a creature of immediacy, of the present, exactly what I never could understand before and always longed to experience.  In ways it’s not about being thankful or disappointed but merely aware.  This is how things are, all their peculiarities and joys and discomforts, coasting along.