Goal Update: Monies

This time two years ago, after I had moved to Thailand, I was feeling a lack of money.  Putting deposits on a place and money into moving after two years in America was quite rough.  Plus, circumstances had left me in some dire straights.  These issues were quickly resolved, but it was a hard time.

Moving to Moscow, I was a bit worried that the lifestyle that I had in Thailand would be at risk, that the city would be so much more expensive and that I would be unable to save anything.  I've been pleasantly surprised at how I'm doing, though.

One recent goal was getting out of debt.

During my time in Cambodia, I was able to save enough money to pay off all of my undergraduate loans before I started my graduate degree.  This was a huge boon to my financial situation, even if I did come back to America and struggle with the lack of credit history.

But, then I went back to school, and I took out loans to pay for it.  This is 2012/2013, for my Master's Degree in Library Science.

Here's what I took out:
$20,500 - Interest Rate: 6.7%
$8,000 - Interest Rate: 7.9%
$10,250 - Interest Rate: 5.5%
$4,000 - Interest Rate: 7.9%

School is fucking expensive.

But, I am happy to say that by the end of this year, this debt will be gone.  In less than 5 years, it will be completely finished, and my life will be debt free once again.  I had hoped that I would be debt free by the age of 30, but I will end up missing it by a few months.

It's taken a lot of work to get here, and many incentives for myself.  Plus, I had help in the form of family for a sizeable chunk of this.  I live a relatively frugal life, and this is one step for my next financial goals.  With the cooking that I've been doing, more frugality is happening.  Plus, I track my expenses quite religiously, to make sure that I know where my money is going.

I've been doing some things to provide me with incentives to reach this goal.

1. The Bees

I started this in Thailand, after I read something on a blog about a woman coloring in circles whenever she was able to put a few hundred dollars into her loan.  I liked the idea of putting in whatever you can and celebrating that amount.  If I was in Thailand still, it may be more pertinent, but I came into some money when I left the school, and moving wasn't nearly as expensive as it has been in the past, given the school that I'm coming to.

Each little honeycomb represents just $100.  This picture is currently accurate, so when I've finished paying off my loans, I will have a fully colored picture.  I'm very excited about this.  My net worth is getting higher by the minute!

2. The socks.

In order for me to get more of my money invested in paying off these loans, Pierre and I thought of an incentive in the form of something I love: socks.  I wanted to buy many socks before I came, but he dissuaded me of the notion that that was a good use of money.

However, now I get a pair of socks whenever I pay $1000 dollars to my loans.  This is a very useful incentive for me.  Many of them are in the wash, but here are two of my recent success stories.

3. Net Worth.

A softer incentive is the net worth that is calculated on my Mint.com account.  It counts up all my assets, subtracts all my debts, and gives me a number.  Just a few years ago, it was negative.  My debts far surpassed my assets, which I found very upsetting.  But now, I'm not only up to a positive number, but every day gets a little bit better.

School is super expensive, and this moment in time will see me working on the newest years of my 30s to make some good money and put it in useful places.  I will be an adult yet.

A Clean Sweep

This week, the library is working on inventory and weeding.  It’s fairly tedious library work, scanning every single book and double checking its place in the collection, but also somewhat rewarding.  The library that I’m working in hasn’t had a book removed from it for years, since 2008 I believe.  Librarians know that things get accumulated during those times.  Librarians may also know that without any oversight on purchasing or selection, the library ends up as a repository for all the things that will never be checked out.

I find the process immensely satisfying.  To remove the dusty, underused books from the collection to be able to see the fresher, newer, better books provides me with such mental clarity and peace.  Perhaps that’s nerdy.  I don’t mind.  I need a bit of nerdy since my librarian glasses are permanently removed.

It’s amazing to me what the people around us begin to care about when it may not be available anymore.  A book, left unused and unloved for years, suddenly becomes the best, most special book in all the land.  I doubted Mary Kay Biagini when she talked about this in library school, but I’m beginning to see just how crushing it is to lose these sentimental things called books.

I’m sitting here, thinking about the week, and the discussions I’ve had.  I’m ruminating about the massive amount of time my colleagues and I have spent pouring over texts and deciding their fate.  The dusty, the unused, the graphic (lots of boobs), all will need to find a new home.

There was this show that used to be on TLC before that channel became reality show nonsense, and I loved it.  It was called Clean Sweep.  Their goal was to take one of those spare rooms that houses had, ones that were full of… whatever… and turn it into a usable space.  In order to accomplish this gorgeous new room, the staff took all the belongings in the room, put it on a big tarp in the front yard, and gave them an equally large tarp for “garage sale” as well as a tiny tarp for “keep”. The counselors, or hosts, or whatever, would talk them through this, and I remember some of the phrases at play…

What have you used this for in the past couple of years?

Does this really add value to your life?

Why are you keeping this thing in this room if it really is so important to you?

I found myself thinking about this show because it’s what we’re doing with the library… giving it a clean sweep.  I also find myself thinking about it in terms of my own personal belongings and possessions.  I came to Thailand with a couple suitcases.  Before that, I destroyed my mom’s basement getting rid of stuff that I hadn’t touched for years.  With my photos, my music, I’ve done the same. 

In this age of overload,  I want to clean up my spaces and make sure that the only things in there are things that I can pick up and enjoy and love with a moment’s notice.  I don’t want to sift through 15 albums I feel neutral about before I find one song I love.  I don’t want to have to pick through 30 versions of the same photo before I find one that I like.  I want all the best, right now.

This is my goal at the moment, finding the simple life and enjoying what I have.  And the library is my current show of that goal.

Conflict

Today, I re-realized that I am not skilled in dealing with and managing conflict.  In fact, I would consider it one of my weaker (if not my weakest) skill.

The conflict I'm dealing with today isn't even that serious.  Someone asked me to do something that isn't possible given my situation.  I don't want to go into great deal given my fear of things ending up in the wrong hands.  I was being asked to do something, and it isn't going to happen.  I feel slightly bad at the circumstances, but I was also put into an unpleasant situation.

Either way, I psyched myself up to tell this person I wasn't able to do it.  I got a pep talk from my friend, and walked over to deliver the news in person since I got an email about it in the morning.  It stresses me out in a very serious way to have these kinds of conversations.  Well, to have these conversations with certain people.  The person in question is typically passive aggressive, and I've been visiting with many more loud and boisterous people recently.  I told her, and she didn't say a word back to me.

It takes me back, to the day that I told my former roommates I was leaving their house.  That was a considerably more stressful situation, with a similar reaction.  The girl roommate sat, looked at her computer, and only spoke one time, angrily, nastily.  I was upset for weeks at the things that she said to me, the way she treated me.  I chose to live there because of the friendship that we had, and it bothered me to find out how little I was valued as a person.  Honestly, that's a tiny percentage of the strife I felt in that house.

Today, this person stared at the computer and didn't look at me when I told her that I couldn't comply with her request.  I do feel bad, but I will not feel that bad.  The request is not unreasonable, and normally I would be happy to help, but my denial is also not unreasonable given the situation at hand.  The trouble that I have is in the delivery.  I am upset at this passive aggressive treatment.

The problem is that I, too, am sometimes passive aggressive, or at least I avoid conflict at every turn.  I would have preferred to email this response, but I felt unsure about documenting it.  I would have preferred a different ending with the roommates, but that also didn't happen.  It is hard for me to approach an issue and I want to improve in this.

At this point, my goal is to ask her politely what I've done to warrant this type of treatment.  Politely, of course, approaching it as something that I'd like to resolve professionally.  I have such an opportunity in this school to do things very well and go very far, and I don't want to have anything standing in my path as I work here.  It is a phenomenal school, with great support.  I'm incredibly grateful to Kim at this point, for the advice that he's imparted on me.

We figured out that I've some trauma associated with this active ignoring.  I'd like to heal myself of this with time.  One step at a time, I will.

Sing Sing (Sing?)

Moi over near the famous Quay

It is my first week settled into Bangkok, so of course I get set on a Professional Development Workshop in Singapore.  Honestly, I can't complain... All the details were settled for me and I just had to show up and be awake!

It was extremely beneficial; I feel more settled and more adventurous, in a much more appropriate headspace.  But, allow me to begin from the beginning.

I've really been struggling to stay asleep the whole night.  The stresses of daily life have been getting to me, I think, and it's been quite a challenge to get a full night's rest.  The night before I left (Wednesday) was no different.  I didn't really pack anything that night, and ended up wide awake around 4:30, putting together my very small case.  I headed over to Kim's on the borrowed bicycle with my big backpack (computer included) and little duffel, and went off to school to waste a few hours before noon.  We checked in, got reentry stamps at the airport, and had a quick snack before finding our way to the terminal.

View from dinner: Boats on the river taking tourists around.

The flight was ... beautiful.  Two glasses of wine and a full meal with my movie (The Grand Budapest Hotel) on a two hour flight.  Americans... you don't understand what you're missing here.  And there was a sign at the airport for us, because we're classy.  And the hotel?  Beautiful in the hotel way.  I almost wrote a blog post about how weird I think hotels are, but I lost the time for it and I'm no longer interested.  It was all about how I nearly killed myself getting out of the shower and how shiny tile is dangerous for clumsy chicks like myself.  Plus.  Do I really require 6 toothbrushes over the course of my stay?  And.  Jacuzzis shouldn't be cold.  Oh.  And despite being free, I was a bit disappointed in breakfast.

PSA: Sing Sing's a bit pricey.

Friday morning was a full day.  Session after session after tea after session after lunch and before coffee and snack.  It was packed, absolutely packed.  In fact, all the days were.  There were rivers of coffee and hot water for tea, piles of snacks and fruit, and an absolutely delightful lunch of Indian fare.  And sessions, lots of sessions.  I got tips about IB, about the lingo, about teaching in the contexts, and just got a clear picture of the types of things that I can (and will) do with this opportunity.  After all, I have this brand new position, and it will be what I make of it.  I'm the MYP and DP librarian, and there has never been one before.  I'm relatively intelligent, and I can do some good things.  The conference really helped me figure out some sort of plan that I may have in the next few years as well.  I have a mentor at school that could help me access a positive role within IB as an organization, so I'm thinking about the types of things that could happen here.  Things are happening.  Quickly!

Forgive the terrible shot, but a guy like this was on my
favorite web site.   Source Here.

We luckily had a little bit of time to enjoy the city beyond the walls of the school.  On Friday night, Erin and I went down to Clarke Quay, which is this huge open air market and food district.  There must have been every single type of cuisine there; we walked past restaurants of every kind before we settled on a Vietnamese place that had a pretty overlook of the river.  It was very nice, with cool weather and delicious food and lots of people to view.  I had this delicious spicy pho bo, a huge bowl of noodles and thick brown broth.  I also picked up a neat pair of earrings (because anyone who knows me knows my inability to resist such a treasure).

It's pretty in Chinatown!

On Saturday, we found our way to Chinatown, which, actually was where we were heading the night before when the river distracted us and took us off course.  When we found it, we found it.  It is unmistakable in its culture.  I admired that immediately.  Singapore has a very interesting feel to it; it's very clean, and almost sterile in its lack of things bold and daring.  Chinatown was bustling from the minute we crossed the street into it.  There were people everywhere, a ton of life, and smells and things to see for streets and streets.  There were tons of vendors, people selling souvenirs and Chinese medicine and name writing supplies, plus more and more.  There was a whole street of food, and we stopped for Chinese, drinking some Chinese tea, and having bok choi and sweet and sour pork.  It reminded me of the Chinese place in Phnom Penh that we used to go to as PCVs.

Chinatown is super lively.  This barely captures it.

There was more walking around Chinatown before we collapsed into the sauna at the hotel and finally found our way to bed.  I bought a magnet as a souvenir.  Also some post cards.

On our final day, there were more connections, more foods, more sessions, before we caught a taxi to the airport (like true jetsetters) and got onto the plane.  I found a post office to mail the things I had been carrying around for almost two weeks (stressor revealed) and it was incredibly cheap.  So, off went a care package for Aaron and his house and my mom (though hers was less thrilling).  On the plane, more wine, more food, more TV.

The blur works for me.  Chinatown.

I felt a difference in myself as well.  I learned all weekend.  I stretched my mind and asked questions about my career and the ways that I can be better in every aspect of my job.  I explored Singapore to the fullest I could.  I need to go back as soon as I have some funds to enjoy it.  It was an interesting place and I left plenty unseen.

But today, today I rocked it.  There were two meetings, a lesson plan, an observation, and a host of emails to teachers.  I've got a plan.  I'm incredibly exhausted, but it is such a blessedly good tired.  It's the kind of tired you get when you're proud of yourself.  And, you know what?

I'm pretty fucking proud of my exhaustion at this moment.

I also bought this cat in Chinatown.  I figured
it would make me giggle.  It has.

Other details.
I got both an atm card and internet banking today.
I found a place that has deep fried broccoli, like a Thai pakora thing.
I have been setting up my office at work and it's starting to look awesome.
I successfully distracted Rizza from geckos with seaweed.

I'm already incredibly more calm because of this trip.  It settled so many of my concerns.

More to come, as per always.  This is a journey without end.

Rough Seas

Preface:  This is not a blog entry meant to make you feel sorry for me, or to incite some sort of feelings for me and my situation.  I just wanted to explore the feelings that I was having and "be real" as Aaron would say.  I feel the need to be honest about switching my country and changing my work and the types of struggles that it comes with.

Moving is hard.  Moving across continents is hard.  Moving with a dependent is hard (in this, I'm making my cat count).  I've been putting on a face and trying to find my place here in Bangkok, but I'm stressed.

I'm stressed about money.  I've purchased my ticket and moved myself and paid the deposit on a new house.  I'm now in Singapore, on the same pay upfront and get reimbursed system.  And, honestly, I'm just plain broke right now.  These different expenses of getting set up in a house have added up and I won't get paid until the end of the month, for everything.  Even though I know that the first of September, I will be completely free and financially sound, I can't prevent myself from worrying and being stressed about the money that will get me through the next few weeks.  I've very few expenses, but I'm worried about the present and worried about the future.  I've taxes to pay every month for Thailand, taxes to pay for America, and I'm worried about that as well.  Will it be fine?  Yes.  It will.  Does that prevent me from worrying and wondering if I'll be able to save enough to pay off my loans?  Not in the least.

I'm hoping that this blog entry helps me feel more calm about it all.

I'm stressed about transport.  I moved into a house near Kim, which is beautiful and quiet.  He's asked me, rightfully so, to help pay for the commute costs, and they are going to take a small chunk of change.  Transport and money both.  I need to buy a bicycle to get around the village, which I've little money for at the moment, maybe eventually a moto as well.  I worry about making it to school on time given I'm riding to school with a European.  I worry about getting my things to and from the village.  It's a year, and I can live anywhere for a year.  I've lived in a dorm with odd ladies, in a huge theatre house, and with some pretty miserable humans last year.  I can do it.  But, I'm worried.

It's just rough for the moment.

I'm stressed about school.  The first days of school are always stressful, particularly in a new school.  There are new relationships, new children, new vocabulary, a new everything.  It is remarkably fresh and new, and it's very fun, but there's already this stress in other parts of my life, and sometimes I have a hard time focusing on what I'm doing at school.  It really helps that I'm in this conference in Singapore; I feel amazingly more confident about IB and the things that I'm doing in the library, the things I'm meant to do.  There's things that I can find more confidence on and work with.  It's always a bit rough to get beginning.

I miss Aaron.  Really, really, really miss him.  That may be remedied in short order, though.

Without these rough seas, I wouldn't understand how incredible life is, so while they stress me out, I'm incredibly grateful for them.  They remind me to be humble, that sometimes struggle is for the best.  I'll be sorted out in short order.

IB, an intro.

Concordian is an IB school, and I realized today that I've been saying that but not explaining it.  So, here's my quick intro to the world of IB.

IB, or the International Baccalaureate Program, is a challenging one.  It focuses on inquiry, on the whole child, on morals and academic honesty, and it is above all driven by student motivation.  It is incredibly rigorous, with culminating projects in MYP and DP.

Ah, the acronyms.  Let me break it down a bit.
EYP - Early Years Programme - nursery grades, preschool, kindergarten.
PYP - Primary Years Programme - Grades 1-5
MYP - Middle Years Programme - Grades 6-10
DP - Diploma Programme - Grades 11 and 12.

I'll be working mostly with MYP and DP, focusing on research skills for the age group.  I envision myself helping students with their projects and teaching classes on research skills and academic honesty.  My position is brand new to the school; they've gone before having just one librarian focusing on PYP and the younger years, and I know that my presence is helpful to Erin, the current PYP librarian.

MYP and DP both have very intense projects associated with their level.  MYP has a personal project that involves inquiry, research, community service and presentation.  The year before they work on this project, there is an exhibition, which I imagine as similar to a science fair with other subjects involved.  This personal project, with all its work, really strives to be student centered and directed.  Teachers are not allowed to be too involved, just to give support as necessary.

In fact, in the DP final project, teachers need to calculate the number of hours they work on a project with a student in order to ensure that they are not giving too much support to students or doing their work.  DP's final project is an extended essay.  It is a 4,000 word, very detailed work, answering a very specific question with a body of research.  It is incredibly detailed, and gets sent out to DP examiners across the world to be assessed.

I like IB for the rigor.  I like that it focuses not on standardized knowledge, but making connections between the world.  All of the curriculum is linked, so skills and concepts talked about in science have a place in humanities as well.  That way, a student has a well rounded bit of knowledge and awareness of how everything is connected and their behavior can impact another's.  It is challenging, and pushes kids to be better people.  It also utilizes critical thinking and inquiry, or searching for your own knowledge, to create lifelong learners and stimulate curiosity.  It's a good system, one I think I'd have flourished in if I'd had the opportunity.

My high school was trying a similar thing, though, with Senior Project.  While nowhere as rigorous, it did the same thing.  There was a paper, a project element, community service, and a presentation.  I wonder if that is still being implemented.  It was useful for me, though like I saw at my last school, it can be done quite poorly.  I'm such it frustrates teachers when they see such behavior, as it frustrated me.  Some schools would make a choice to take it away.

I'm eager to see the students and how they react to these sort of challenges.  I suppose I'll find out soon.  The first day of school is Wednesday.

I Know You Are Curious....

.... About the Library.

Side note. I've tried to format this better and it isn't working.  So.

Fish Tank at the entry.

There are actually two libraries.  One is more for the younger kids, and one for the DP programme, grades 11 and 12.

This is a trilingual area, so every section of the library has three colors.  White for English, Yellow for Chinese, and Green for Thai.  There are picture books in these three language, easy readers, regular fiction, and just a large selection of works to choose from.

From the entry way.

It's a pretty large library space, about 14,000 volumes, which is pretty normal for its size and the size of the student population.  It's unfortunate that there isn't really a space for the MYP / middle school kids.  This is a very primary centered library.

There is a ton of support, though, which is great.

There are two full time librarians, myself and Erin.  She's getting her degree in Library Science at the moment and is very in tune with the needs of the school.  She's a huge resource for all the teachers and I hope to follow her example for the other teachers as well.

The little person area, full of picture books.

There is a cataloger, a wonderful Thai woman, and she sits and processes new books all day long.  I'm glad that she likes that, because cataloging isn't really my favorite activity.

Her new husband, who sits right next to her, does a lot of the physical processing of the books, and also helps out with the circulation and reshelving.

Ms. Neng, who is the first person I met, is a Thai Chinese superstar.  She does a lot of translation in Chinese for the books, helping put traditional Chinese into simplified Chinese for the picture books.

Looking towards the older students area.  The upper lever
is all theirs.

There are people in all the time, in fact, helping wrap the books in plastic and just working as they can.

I'm greatly impressed with all this support.  There are some libraries in the states that have just one person, the librarian, trying to get all of these things and all of the work accomplished single-handedly.  Even more, there are librarians who are working on their own in several schools, sometimes a different one each day.  That is absolutely insane, and does nothing to help the children.

View from the back. 

In this school, Erin and I have the freedom to teach classes and work with teachers without having to worry about  whether or not a book is catalogued properly.  Especially in a multi-lingual library like ours, we need competent people to process the books.

Neither Erin nor I speak or write Chinese or Thai, so in this we are not the experts.  The library assistants are able to process the books and give us a few words on Destiny (the library system) to help us understand and search the catalog for more information.  Unfortunately, Destiny does not allow searching in other languages as we may hope.  So, our people are extremely valuable.

Plus side.  There is hot water for tea and coffee at all times.

The DP library for grades 11-12.

The DP library is in a whole different building, just for the older kids.  There are very few things in there too, just some magazines, college searching materials, and a few reference type books for students to browse.  A very nice Filipina woman runs this library and helps out the students.

Our main goal this year in school is to make ourselves a resource for the students, someone to ask for research and reference help at any given moment.  It will be a challenge, but it will be great.

A School Recess

The entryway, first thing you see as you walk
in the school.  There is currently a picture of
HM the queen in celebration of her birthday
this upcoming Tuesday.

Let's take a brief moment to talk about this school for which I work.

This school is positively amazing.

I've gone through the orientation and training here and feel like I grasp the beginnings of the school culture and the main focus of the school.  It was enlightening to listen to Khun Varnnee talk on Monday morning; she is the founder and director of the school, the main person in charge.  She's such an incredible human, and my first impression of her was how put together she was in every way.

She started the school a few years ago, in 2001, because she wanted to create in the next generation a group of students who were intelligent, global, compassionate, and courageous.  She talked about her history.  She was an investment banker, someone who worked with large sums of money on a daily basis.  She was working in this field about the time that bankers made some decisions for themselves and not their customers.  I watched a documentary about this recently, about the housing market and the collapse of everything.  It wasn't a collapse created with just a single decision; it was compounded with a multitude of selfish decisions and bankers thinking about their bottom line before they thought of the customers.  Khun Varnnee worked in this and saw the things taking place, and recognized a need for morality in the schools.  Perhaps if there would have been moral education in the schools of these bankers, after all, this crisis wouldn't have destroyed so much of the economic market.

The gap between one of the old buildings and the newer
wing for the high school students.

And so, Concordian was borne.  It's been quite the journey from what I understand as well, but here are a few fun facts about the school.

It is the only English, Thai, and Chinese IB school in the world, and from what I understand, it is also one of the very few that provides immersion in two languages beyond the native language.

Our school provides more money for professional development than any school in the Asia Pacific region.

We serve about 700 kids with about 150 teachers.

One of the main things we focused on throughout the orientation was the mission statement:

Concordian International School promotes academic excellence while nurturing young people to become moral and intellectual leaders, people of dignity, integrity and compassion, who want to make a difference in the world.

We work with an affluent population, children of men and women in Bangkok that have substantial funds at their disposal.  The moral and intellectual leaders is meant to transform these children into people who won't misuse or abuse power and who will treat others with respect.  There is a huge push in the school to work with service and offer activities that help the students grow as humans.

It's really incredible.

Overlooking the play area and the courtyard between all the
buildings.

What I've gathered as I've worked with the teachers this first week is that the school is incredibly supportive of everything that they do.  The admin mentioned more than a few times how they want to take care of things that are within their control: schedules and the like, so that it doesn't stress out the teachers.  They want teachers to feel confident in their subject area and take every measure to make that happen.  They ensure that teachers are supported in as many ways as possible.  It's been somewhat shocking to feel this much support.  I've felt supported in some schools, sure, but this takes it to a whole new level.  Especially compared to my last school, this is night and day, and it really shows in the faculty.

They work very hard because they feel so valued.

We had a really wonderful welcome party on Wednesday evening, the first night for the returning teachers.  It was a blast, and included many a bottle of Prosecco, wine, sushi, hor d'oeuvres, and a great little slideshow.  I met a ton of cool people.

The guy teaching drama is hilarious, and I think we will get on quite well.  There's a 76-year-old teacher from Spain who has stories from every minute of her life.  I'm eager to know her more.  My fellow librarian is very nice, and I sense that we will work together with maximum efficiency.

All in all, I'm very excited.  This is going to be an excellent place to work.

In Transit

The past couple days have been rough.  It is veritably impossible to think that moving across the world would not have some stresses involved, and I’m feeling some stresses indeed.

The biggest struggle I’ve been encountering is the thought of “what if?”  I’m in this limbo right now, not fully in Bangkok and not in Pittsburgh and not in Iowa and not anywhere.  I have some things planned, some ideas, but I also am considering and worrying over what I’m leaving in Pittsburgh.  I have a sneaking suspicion that there was a job lined up for me, a good job, a job that would have been fun.  I even got an email today reminding me of this job that still hasn’t been filled for whatever reason.  I’m leaving Aaron, leaving a few great friends, leaving things that I was really enjoying, for a possibility.  I’ll miss a wedding in November that I was so thrilled about.  I’ll miss Christmas, possibly more.  All these thoughts are hard right now considering my lack of housing, lack of space, lack of a solid foundation. 

And yet, I’m reminding myself of a few key points.

This school in Bangkok will be a challenge.  It will be hard, challenging work, and it will make me a better librarian, a better teacher, and hopefully a better human.  I may have encountered some challenges in Pittsburgh, at this school I’m thinking about, but they wouldn’t have been anything like this.  After my work the last semester of school in Pittsburgh, my subbing work, I am more than ready for a challenge. 

While I’m tired of moving, I’m not tired of travel.  Living in Bangkok with the resources and the access will grant me more opportunities to see the world.  I’m thinking of visiting India, Egypt, maybe New Zealand.  Grandpa recommended that I see Japan, so I may go there as well.  I have a nice selection of short holidays throughout the year that should be conducive to travelling, and a wide variety of friends in various locations to go visit.  The guy who helped me get this job, Kim, is Belgian, and his wife is Italian, and perhaps those would be on the agenda as well. 

I am reminding myself that this job falls in line with the majority of the other jobs that I’ve had; it’s fallen into my lap as if by magic.  From college this has happened, and I’m learning to listen to the way that life is directing me.  The job I had in college…. fell in my lap after a chance meeting.  Peace Corps…. one professor’s story became my goal, and I was fortunate enough to be the second group of volunteers in Cambodia.  This, incidentally, gave me the work at JPA, which helped me discover the work that I loved so much.  I met my Pittsburgh friend, and that connection gave me the springboard to work from as I attended graduate school.  Falk, then USC, all of these were a combination of my hard work and connections and blessed chance. 

This job fell into my lap in a similar way.  I have to wonder at the timing, at the fact that my friend from JPA was working in Bangkok, in a school he loved, and that they were looking for a librarian at the exact same time that I was looking for a job.  I believe they had already hired someone, but that plans and life changed in a certain way and the job became available.  What are the chances?  It could have happened for a very specific reason that has yet to avail itself to me.  Perhaps it is the money that I will save, the experiences that I’ll accrue.  Perhaps it is the impact on Aaron, which I already have seen.  Perhaps it is the change to our relationship and the improvement that we will both feel as a result. 

So here I am, contemplating in the airport, waiting for the long flight to begin, hoping for the best.  I’m struggling, but I know that things will work out.  They have before.  They will again.

T Minus Three Days

It's getting closer and closer by the minute.  Last Monday I drove with Aaron, the boyfriend, back to Iowa.  We happened upon the world's largest candle, the world's largest truck stop, and a very disappointing large chair, and I was able to finish a few more rows of my cross stitch and enjoy a couple more hours with the best man I've ever known.  After visits to both sides of my family, a bunch of sweet corn consumption, and a trip in the sail boat, I dropped him off at the airport.  It was a rough day, and solidified the need to move back to Pittsburgh to see him, or to reconnect in another way.  I miss him already, and his absence is forcing me to focus on the upcoming trip and my goals and plans for it.  There are many things I want to do, things that will put me in a good place for my upcoming 30th birthday.  Bangkok will hopefully provide me with the time, money, and quiet to do these things.

I'm always shifting and changing my goals, but a couple of them are already set.

1.  Save as much money as possible in order to travel, pay off loans, and pad the emergency fund and IRA.
2.  Organize a lifetime of photographs to be able to search easily and securely.
3.  Increase my mindfulness and shift bad habits by creating good habits.
4.  Find the enjoyment and pleasures of cooking by cooking often.
5.  Further my career in as many ways as possible and continue to work on my lifelong learning.

To that end, this blog will begin.  It will be a catalogue of successes, or life changes, of accountability for my goals.  Hopefully, I will encounter some entertaining people in order to provide some funny stories.  It will be a blog that will have a different vibe than the previous; instead of focusing on just the stories that effected me, I will also be discussing the effects that I have on myself.  I want to change certain aspects of my life so that I can be mindful of the gratitude that surges through me with every passing moment.  I want to find joy in everything and share that with the world at large.

Three days til liftoff.