Holding Pattern in Things That I'm Grateful For

For a few weeks, I was toying with moving down to the main area of town. I quickly came to my senses when I realized that I am finally stabilized financially after abruptly switching jobs and it wouldn’t be a good thing to suddenly throw that back into chaos.

It was completely out of character for me.

Usually I just make a decision and deal with the consequences later… There’s nothing wrong with my current place. It suits my needs for living, is close to work (I can walk to work in 15 minutes) but because I’m near the University, I’m so far away from everything else. My previous place, which was much more expensive, was halfway between the two. I suppose it’s smarter to stay since I don’t really have any idea of what my workload is going to be because they intentionally gave me a lighter workload for my first semester.

Today was the last day of summer school. I have to give the final exam on Monday and then I will have approximately 3 weeks off, which is more than I used to have and much less than any of the other teachers. They all had nearly 3 months off, but I decided in my infinite wisdom to work during the summer.

As I’ve mentioned that I have 3 weeks off, people keep asking me where I’m going… I’m not good at that kind of stuff. I know I should go somewhere. I’ve been in Thailand almost 3 years and have yet to take a real vacation that I want. I’m always being dragged somewhere, either by a guy that I’m fucking, work obligations and visa-runs or that time Cameron visited and dragged me to Phuket. I don’t know where I’d want to go.

The teachers from my previous school had a barbecue last week and it was an interesting situation. I miss a lot of things about my old job and it allowed me to take stock of the things that I said good-bye to in the promise of something I thought would be better. In some ways, it is better. I have much more time to myself (but again, that was with the intentionally lighter workload), have more freedom to arrange my schedule and lots more control of what I do in my classroom. However, I also work almost entirely independently. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but being around my old co-workers, I realized how much I kind of miss being around people at work.

It was the only social interaction I was guaranteed. Being out here, working this job, I am completely isolated.

Hence the idea of moving downtown. But my contract still has a year-and-a-half left. Plenty of time.