“Your friend has a birthday,” Facebook tells me as I check in on the world at large early in the morning, eyes bleary and trained now to read the bad news du jour. After fifteen months of living in the future, I’ve still yet to adjust to the fact that for said friend, the day of their birth is still some 8 hours in the future. It’s like living in a pulp science fiction novel but without all the fun gadgets – wait, I have an Apple Watch now – and illicit drugs & sex1that part, I assure you, both government censors and family alike is true. The illicit part. You know what, never mind.. So I do what comes naturally to me, humor and the running of a joke well past its shelf life, and I wish someone a happy birthday. From the future.
So, in that fine tradition, Happy Birthday, America. From the future. May you have many pleasant returns.
Here’s the thing about being an expat where nobody but your fellow countrymen give a rat’s ass about July the Fourth – you lose sight of it too. While I’m never so jingoistic to state that the Fourth is something sacrosanct, Independence Day looms large in our minds and plans State-side. The long weekend almost always has something to do with it, especially in the midst of summer. But here, to be perfectly honest, I nearly forgot about the whole thing.
I’ve started the whole “looking for a job” process, mindful that I’m needed to rejoin the rat race not long after my feet touch Northwest soil. In my early contacts, I’ve proven my lack of mindfulness of the Fourth by suggesting a late-Monday phone call, early Tuesday for me. Oops.
In my defense, I can hardly believe it’s July already. June whisked by with unholy speed, as I’m sure the remainder of our days here in the Lion City will. There’s now suddenly never enough time. It brings to mind the sudden departure of my good friend Paul, whose work pulled him back to the UK a month or two before when was expected. Such is expat life, and the feeling that I’m likely headed towards a similar “We have to be back in Portland in two weeks” thing presses on my mind. I’ve made such good friends here that I want to use up as much time as possible with them before we depart.
Which lends me to having less to write about here come Monday – our weeks have moved to the mundane. Bev works, she comes home, works out, we have dinner, rinse repeat. I’ll go out every now and then with the writers group, do our meetup thing, or just get silly and possibly a bit inebriated2sorry, Jean-Luc, rinse repeat. Focus group testing suggested that writing about inside jokes and Ouija boards whilst wearing makeup wasn’t a big hit with this blog’s readership, so there goes that topic.
So, instead, let’s, keeping with theme, speak of the future.
This blog has an expiration date, doesn’t it? After repatriation, the frequency of posts will die down as I settle back into life in the Great Pacific Northwest. You all don’t need regular updates on the Blazers, hiking in the Gorge and my illustrious career explaining to someone for the tenth time that yes, the monitor does need to be turned on to see stuff on your computer3Yes, that happened. No, it was not fun..
Ooooor do you?
Let’s be honest – I’ve enjoyed our time here, my readers and I. Forcing myself on a regular schedule has done quite a bit for my writing ability4Just ask my cousin and brother-from-another-mother Jeff who complimented me with “early on you were shit, but…” Love you, cuz.. I’d like to keep it up, and I hope there’s a few folks who’d like to keep reading. But once this whole transplant process is complete, I don’t suspect that I’ll keep updating this blog. The focus of it has been on being an expat, and there’s a lot more that I’d like to write about. Perhaps you may have suspected this over the last few months as updates have been shorter, as Bev & I travel less, as the New Normal becomes just “normal”.
Many of you know that I am also working on a fiction novel. Many of the posts here can double as medium-length articles or narrative non-fiction. I’d love this whole “writing words” thing turn into a “writing words and getting paid for them” thing, and one of ways that can happen is if I have a portfolio of my writing. So, I’m combining my varied tastes in word making into a single site, which I’ll be sharing Any Day Now™. This site will remain up, and I’ll continue posting here about our experiences in Asia and repatriating, but I’ll have another site where I’ll be posting blog updates and hopefully samples of fiction and non-fiction alike. And I’ll maintain the whole Facebook/Twitter post thing too, so you needn’t go out of your way to find me.
I am nothing if not magnanimous.
Add comment