It’s all moving along on schedule, or what passes for a schedule in my case. I got a job last week, unbelievably, and I start tomorrow and so today is my last day of doing what I do every day. Tomorrow starts again with passwords and staff meetings and grant applications. If you’d told me the day I left that I would be back in an academic job within the month I don’t know if I would have believed you, but it’s true, I am, and the next thing to do is to find another living situation. And then the next thing to do after that is to find some sort of regular dance class to go to and there I’ll be, I guess, actually ensconced in this tiny windy city, with a commute and a kitchen and a library card, just like a regular person.
This past week has involved my coming down with strep throat, my ingesting a lot of antibiotics, a fruitless search for a semi-cute shirt to wear out on Saturday, and of course Saturday night itself, where I wore a slightly-less-than-semi-cute-shirt out to bars and clubs and things like that. Hilarious on all levels. I can always tell when I’m with a new group of people when a) they laugh at my jokes, not having had had all joy beaten out of them by my constant re-telling of my grammar joke (“But not in the pluperfect subjunctive HA HA!”) and that one time I went to Burning Man and that one time I had a stripper and b) when I have to explain that no, I don’t really drink, and that half a glass of champagne I just drank over the course of three hours is making me feel a little dizzy. And then, if there has been dancing involved, as there certainly was on Saturday, also c) I have to explain that yes, I was actually sober on the dance floor, why do you ask?
Being here is not like what I expected it to be when I was thinking about it all those months ago because I had no idea what to expect. There was just a New Zealand-shaped hole in my brain and I read everything I could find and tried to form some sort of picture of what being here would be like, but there was no way to know, however, what I would be like when I got here and not to get too personal here on my online journal or anything, but babies, I feel really weird and unlike myself lately now that I am on the other side of the world.
I keep telling myself Just Describe It. Just notice it, just write it down, just think about it every day in a different cafe with a chai tea latte (which you have purposefully not ordered rapid-fire Starbucks-style to avoid ridicule). Just look at the water and the mountains every day, begin to recognize the stores and restaurants on Courtenay Place and Cuba Mall, decipher the bus system, abandon hope for a good hair day and settle for one wherein the follicles have not been physically blown off your head by the wind. Wrap your mind around what they mean by long black and flat white and start saying “yeah” (pronouncing it “yih”) at the beginning of every sentence and “yup” (pronouncing it “yep”) at the end.
And I do do that, I guess. A little. I think about the people I have met here and about the people I will continue to meet, and I sometimes wish very devoutly not only for any type of privacy at all but also for my beloved santoku knife. I sit around talking a lot with various people about various interesting but impersonal things, because I can’t give everyone the backstory to the things Ireally want to talk about and the people I would normally talk about those things are all very far away and I can’t, somehow, understand what it would be like to talk to them about those things from here. I don’t know that it’s because I’m a completely different person or that because my friends from home wouldn’t understand what it’s like to be here…because it’s not that hard to understand, frankly.
The thing that’s difficult is making enough room in my head to fit it all in. Apparently I am a person who lives out of a bag in a shoddily-carpeted room with two Germans and a Brit who goes to the fruit market on Sundays and no real friends yet but lots of people she likes anyway. I’m someone who has traveled to the other side of the world, ostensibly for change and adventure, and has managed to talk herself into a job that is almost exactly like her old one and will probably be moving into a familiar living situation, too. I’m someone who can’t think of anything to write about in my online journal and who only wants to read and go dancing and wear cute shirts and have a chai latte, and who can’t think of any words to describe how she’s feeling except “separate” and “far away,” who loves her friends but all of a sudden hates email, who wakes up and walks around every day and who has not yet learned to give up overanalysis. It’s all familiar, all the basic components, anyway. Nothing has really changed but I still don’t recognize myself very well.