Me whining about stuff

With good reason, all I can thinking about is the trip. I am trying to keep the anxiety down but it's tough when I know I only have two weeks left in DC. How the heck am I going to get all of this stuff to Ohio to store while I'm gone? I have a Chevy Cavalier with a sizable but not that sizable trunk. Like I said before, I will be getting rid of a lot of it, but there are some sentimental things I can't part with.

Why Ohio? Well, that is where my parents live, where I grew up. I'm willing to bet that if you gave a blank map of the world to every resident of Ohio, 98% wouldn't be able to figure out where Bulgaria is. Not much of America could, I'm sure. I wonder how much of the rest of the world could? We Americans are often called stupid - but I imagine that most of India, China, and Africa, to name a few places, wouldn't know where Bulgaria is.

Sounds exactly like the place I want to go, a little isolated but in the world enough to matter. I suppose it's the appropriate place for me to go, being the first country one enters when leaving the Muslim world. I've always been stuck between the two worlds, or at least I have since 2000, the last year I set foot on European soil and the first year I began working in the Middle East field, albeit by force.

See, I didn't know what I wanted to do when I graduated university. (I still don't, so little has changed since then!) I had spent a lot of time in Europe and had studied the European Union back then, but I was about three decades too late, for no job could be had by a recent graduate in the European field. I was a substitute teacher for a bit while I tried to decide what to do next. I needed to delay the decision, so I looked at entering one of two organizations - the Peace Corps or the Army. I know, I know, it sounds contradictory, but you have to remember this was during the last Clinton years when the Army's stated mission was to act as a global peacekeeping force. Who knew the whole world was about to explode? I weighed my options and chose the War Corps based on the benefits - a $20K signing bonus, which would pay off my student loans, $50K for grad school, the chance to get paid to learn another language (I wanted to learn Russian so I could read Dostoevsky in his native tongue), and a chance to travel (pretty sure the recruiter told me I could be stationed in Germany, pretty sure he was lying.)

Well, that didn't work out too well. I tested too high for Russian, was put into Arabic, finished the course, and got out of there without the money. It had nothing very little to do with the war and everything to do with how badly soldiers are treated. But the language skills gave me something that not a lot of people have in this country, and I got a job in the Middle East field, just picking up and moving to DC. I've been here four and a half years, and now I find myself picking up and moving again.

All I can say is this better give me the inspiration to finish the novel I have been working on for two years. It is in its fourth or fifth revision phase. I just have to get that one out of the way - it's my ticket to pursuing what I really want to do - write. Believe me, I understand how tough it is to make a living by writing. I have two things going for me, however. 1. I am uninterested in material possessions, and as long as I can pay the rent, eat, and have beer and baseball money, I can be happy. 2. When I'm not bogged down by the drear of office life, I can be a prolific writer. Problem is, I just don't have the time to do it and do it well when all of my time and energy is spent on quotidien office ritual. I have a pretty disorganized mind and it takes me a really long time to put even the simplest essays together with a quality that makes me comfortable. You can see it in my blog posts, how I post too soon and some things aren't coherent. That is why I need more time in the day, more time in the week, in life.

And another thing - boredom kills creativity.

There just doesn't seem to be a place in the capitalist world for creative people unless it's in advertising. I feel bad enough posting the AdSense links on my blogs. I could never sell my soul to the Lust for Profit industry. And so I'll keep running, trying to find a place in this world for me, a person who doesn't want to waste life away in an office or who doesn't care about money when that's all the rest of the world seems to think about.