I fear my future, for all the best reasons.

A few observations upon concluding a long and not particularly point-ful day:

I was presented this morning with a t-shirt upon which was printed in Turkish "This is what a feminist looks like." One of my more amazing students, (I have had quite a few, and this one is indeed a gem,) approached me yesterday after class and prefaced her speech with, "As you may know, tomorrow is international women's day," and as it turns out, I am a sucker for any request coming from an English language learner that begins with the phrase, "As you may know."

That aside, though, I would have agreed anyway, simply because I am convinced that women's issues are one of the biggest issues of our time, and a number of other issues that we spend a lot of our time whinging about would be best approached by addressing the issue of gender inequity first.

In any case, I was happy to wear the t-shirt, and it did indeed cause at least one or two comments from male students, and it did promote a small bit of dialogue, which I imagine was the intent.

If anyone cares, below are the links to the article and video which we covered in class today, which basically reflects my point of view on this subject, which I think, despite all the noise made about it, is still a secondary issue even in the west, and is REALLY a nearly non-issue in the rest of the world, where it ought to be a front-burner issue.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/sheryl_wudunn_our_century_s_greatest_injustice.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/magazine/23Women-t.html?pagewanted=all

Enjoy!

This evening, then, I was scheduled to shoot some pool with one of the professors in the International Relations department. He and I, (his name is Mike, by the way,) have a rare resonance of thought that seems to occur (at least for me,) once in every 5 years. He is one of those rare people who not only happens to spend about 97% of his time talking about topics that are extremely interesting to me simply because that is what is deeply interesting to him, but spends the other 2% of his time apologizing for possibly boring me with his meandering stories backpacking across Africa and motorcycling across India. (The missing 1% is spent ordering beer, for those of you who are anal about math.)

The stories about trying to get across the border of Georgia on the night of the attempted coup against Gorbachev are, of course, interesting, but the fact that all these stories are set in the frame of his relating how he came upon a theory that may utterly upset the current accepted paradigms of International Relations lends it a whole extra dimension.

Incidentally, I may or may not have touched upon the current lady-friend in previous posts - but in any case, when I mentioned Mike's name to her one evening, she did a double-take and said - "Really? You know that guy? He's famous, you know. We all had to read his stuff in grad school." I had no inkling of this, previously. I just thought he was an awfully nice and self-effacing guy who was pretty good at playing pool and had a lot of interesting stories to tell. Just goes to show - you never know who the hell you might be talking to.

So moving on half a step from there - I confided in Mike a year or so ago that I was thinking of changing fields - that English had been great, but I wanted to get into history or IR, and since then he has periodically enquired, and been encouraging me to make the jump, which leaves me asking myself what it is I am waiting for.

I have known for some time that teaching English was not for me. Teaching literature, maybe, but that's not what I am currently doing. I'm teaching the language itself, and while that has been an experience, I am getting somewhat tired of it. And of all the things that call to me, international relations is, depending on the day, in the top 3.

Yet I find myself crippled by a past of (relative) poverty, and a pathetic addiction to the still new creature comforts with which I find myself now surrounded. I spent a number of years with rather little money, and feeling as though my entire future would continue to consist of a constant sense of continual constriction occurring around the area of my metaphorical financial neck. I worried, (and to some extent, out of habit, still do,) about every hamburger and every coffee and every small luxury I for myself purchase.

I saw in front of me a brief chance at a predictable life of growing career security in the US, which I insensibly turned my back on in order to go overseas and pursue learning foreign languages and gaining a broader, more worldly perspective, at which point the financial future question was again brought into sharp relief, as I struggled from month to month to make the stateside payments on time to the student loan behemoth that from a lofty financial perch looked down upon my small, piddling, profit-less life, demanding monthly tribute.

All of which means I am reluctant to now make the pivot to a new stage in my life, because it means deserting the newly attained relative security and financial comfort (I did use the word relative!) that my current job entails, and returning to the grind of being a poor, (though scholarshipped and stipended,) student. I mean, it is only now, for the first time in . . . EVER . . . I finally find myself within sight of the end of my burden of long-term debt - the finish line. If all goes well, within 5 months from today, give or take a week or two, I will be debt free. For the first time in 14 years I will need pay no debt incurred prior to the last 30 days. I will be, again, at ZERO - but not really.

Financially I will, at long last, be back to ZERO. But in every other way, it is true, my pockets are now full. I have, over the past 14 years, got my first masters degree. It may not be much, or from a great school, but I have used it exactly as I had planned to - as a stepping stone to a better career, and perhaps a second masters degree. I have, at long last, possibly met my first real friend since university. In fact, I may have met two of them. It is strange for me to say - strange for me to confess - I don't bond with many people - in fact, if I had to list the drawbacks of being so fabulously me, inability to meet people I like would be number 1 - and yet, I suspect that I may have in this city met 2 people, two male friends, I like very much. Also, in the past 14 years I have had the experiences that have allowed me to begin a novel - and I now, for all my relative poverty, feel rich with experiences, and vitality, and interest in life. I can honestly say, despite a FUCKING WRENCING couple of years there, I feel as though for the first time in my life, I am more completely ME than I have been or could have been, at any time in past 20 years - fuckit - my whole life.

My conflict over what to do in the future stems from the fact that I have had, all my life, two competing visions to pursue - two competing ideals of self-creation. (WARNING: NO APOLOGIES WILL BE MADE FOR OVER-ROMANTICIZED BULLSHIT IN THE FOLLOWING PARAGRAPH. THE WORD "IDEAL" WAS INTENTIONALLY EMPLOYED TO CAUSE THE READER TO NOT BE OVERLY RELIANT ON A REALISTIC FRAME OF REFERENCE WHEN READING THE FOLLOWING DESCRIPTION.) I have had, throughout most of my life, at least two competing visions of what I should pursue. One was, as they put it in Pulp Fiction, to be "like Cain, in kung-fu. I will simply walk the earth." I recall expressing this sentiment to Stephen, my best friend from high school, as a desire to be leathered from the sun, having only enough possessions to get by, and live humbly, travelling the earth, learning everything I could. The second, other, contradictory ideal I had once was to be a wealthy man, who has the ability, the option, to taste of the best in life, wear the best suits, travel to the best places, stay at the best resorts, dive at the best spots, drink the most liquor, eat the choicest foods, fuck the finest ladies, and converse with the most scintillating intelligentsia. I assume you see the conflict, there.

I nearly joined the merchant marine once. I wanted to travel, and experience life at its most raw.

I currently have a drawer of nothing but scarves. I match them artfully with my shoes and belts. I really have a splendid variety of fashionable shoes these days. I have two different pairs of two-toned wingtips. They are so gorgeous I think I may have inspired an orgasm in girl just by walking past her. Ok - totally fantastically hyperboling - there's not a shred of truth in that - I have yet to even get a single unsolicited comment on my shoes from anyone other than my girlfriend - but that's just cuz they are utter philistines. But even utter philistines can't help commenting on the incredibly sexy coats I wear.

I worked in construction periodically for years - my hands turned into crabby calloused claws - I kept returning to it because it was the best paying job that was hassle-free to come by, and because it kept me fit, and because . . . it suited my fantasy of learning of the roots of life by studying the ways of the down and out and drug-addicted people who populate that particular field.

I go shopping now days for antiques. In particular I favor brass and copperware, and I occasionally pick up the odd bit of ephemera for fun - an old accounting ledger to use as a journal - I'm currently looking for an interesting head of an antique cane to substitute for the boring umbrella handle I currently suffer with.

A couple of times a week, and every Friday, I practice or teach the techniques of physically damaging another person's body, and leaving them in a broken pulp. Common questions involve the advisability of head-butting, and the legality of eye-gouging. In case you were wondering, most of my answers tend to end with utilizing knees to the midsection - not that you asked.

And so I recognize that what began when I was a small child, and first caught my attention as an adolescent, which is to say the dual urge to a life of grit and humility or a life of style and refinement, have thus far compromised, and produced the life I have now - a life of silly, superficial concerns mixed with blood-in-the-teeth immediacy. Yet no matter how much I stare at what has come before, I cannot rid myself of my apprehension of the stages that are yet to come.