I sort of feel I should be writing a follow-up entry to the one I posted last week but I don’t know what to write. Maybe I should just write that, that I don’t know what to say. I appreciate all the emails people have sent me, full of love and support and questions and ideas and stories…you all have made huge changes in your lives that make this thing I’m thinking about seem very small and simple, which is really cool and inspiring. There’s a lot to do in the world, have you ever noticed that? There are a lot of places to go and deep breaths to take and eyes to open. It’s interesting to feel completely ordinary as I try to think about the direction I want my life to go in; everyone does this, everyone thinks these exhilarating and terrifying thoughts, for a little or a long time. This is very reassuring.
I’ve been emailing various people and places the last couple of days, trying to understand what going forward with the Not Secret Plans will look like with all the new information that has come to light. I might have to get an extensive FBI background check. I might have to get some more documents from my various family members. I might take a smaller(but still awesome!) trip in 2006 and wait until 2007 to try to live abroad. I might have to just decide how much risk I can handle and quit my job and go over there and just hope for the best and thank my lucky stars that I can always come home if it doesn’t work out, that I have friends and family and community on both coasts (and even a couple places in the middle) that will help me.
It’s weird, I really want to write some sort of dramatic This Is It! entry here, like tell you that over the weekend I looked my destiny straight in the eye and made an irrevocable choice about my future. I want to make distinct and detailed plans. Man, I love making plans. Instead I am doing a lot of thinking about stuff, emailing and researching as ideas pop up, basically the way I have been for the last year. There’s nothing really to do at this point, I don’t think, except to keep thinking, keep trying, keep following through. The consulate appointment is in July. I have to get a bunch of documents translated into Italian before then and make some more calls. Meanwhile I also have to live here, in this city, in this house, in this body, and make sure that my mind and heart aren’t so focused on what may potentially happen in a couple of months or years that I completely ignore what’s going on right here and now. 2005 hasn’t been a wasted year just because I haven’t been able to go through with the plans. 2006 won’t be either, regardless of what happens.
Which is all good and fine but I’ll tell you what, it sure makes writing journal entries hard because…I don’t know. Do you want to know about my Halloween costume shopping I need to do (hint:octopus)? About the awesome dinner party I’m going to tonight or about the pumpkin bread pudding I’m planning to make to take to my old housemate J’s pumpkin carving this weekend? Would you like me to tell you about some new friends I’ve made lately or about some old friends I’ll be seeing over Thanksgiving? I should definitely mention that I went to the roller derby again on Saturday (The DLF won even though I forgot my DLF placard at home!) and that I bought a very expensive but very awesome shirt there and I plan to rock that hardcore as often as possible even if I am myself too delicate of a flower to actually participate in roller derby. Ooh, and I saw Sundry and Peachy and she who is now going by Rag Hag Diva, I think, and their attendant babies on Saturday and we ate doughnuts and drank cider and had an extremely yummy and delicious time. And I went for a walk in Seward Park Sunday in the cold and the wind and I ate some delicious South Indian food with some of these aforementioned new friends and that was fun too, especially since they were all really smart and pretty and awesome and I just love people like that.
I’m doing all those things plus making the switch to the purple flannel sheets as well as some excellent vegetable soup that involves a delicate squash this week. I’m going to the farmers’ market (even in the cold and the rain and the wind) and thinking pretty seriously about my Halloween plans. I’m going home for Thanksgiving for the first time since 1994 and I’m going to meet my sister’s fantastic boyfriend. I’m still trying to learn how to use my new camera, still trying to learn how to left lead at bellydance, still working on getting up to Light Level on DDR. Normal, ordinary, awesome, all of it.
In the back of my mind, though, is always the little current running: how will I make this happen, how will I change my life. The most normal thing I do, maybe.