Optimistic

Ooof, girl, it’s been a very busy week. I’ve been to two dinner parties (I brought pita and hummus to one, Samoan koko rice to another) and went to bed too late on school nights, and then I had Sylvia and Michael over on Wednesday (I made the very best pasta in the history of the world, with broccoli and sundried tomatoes and olive and feta cheese) and went to bed too late again and okay, yesterday I went to bed early, but then Saturday I am hosting another dinner party at my house (making spinach salad with roast pumpkin and blue cheese and then the other best pasta in the history of the world, which involves all my favorite condiments and is making me hungry just to think about). And then Sunday I have to clean the house and pack all day—I am living in fear of the cleaning but the packing should be easy as I have not completely unpacked from the South Island trip yet—and then! I leave for Melbourne at THE BREAK OF DAWN, y’all, and intellectually I know it’s all going to happen and I’m going to be fine and have a fantastic holiday and cuddle some baby wallabies and also, if the tides wash my way, maybe some baby octopuses as well (I hear the ones with pretty blue rings are especially amenable to cuddling) but right now I am more than a bit overwhelmed.

It really is going to be a fantastic trip, though, ridiculously early flight aside. Have I told you about my itinerary? Have I? Well, I’m spending a week in Melbourne, where I plan to eat my way from one end of the city to the next, and then I’ll have a a couple of days in Sydney, where apparently there is some sort of opera house or something, and then going up to Queensland where I’ll have the two wallaby weeks, and then to Cairns (pronounced, for my non-Antipodean readers, as “Keens,” if you can believe it) to spend five days on a boat in the Great Barrier Reef learning how to scuba dive. After that I hope to spend a couple of days in the rainforest up—only place in the world where a rainforest meets a reef!—and go sea kayaking, and then I’ll fly back home to Welly from there. It’s going to be a cool mix of being with people and being alone, of animals and trees and flowers and plants, of city and country, strange and familiar, of everything in the world I like to do. I can’t wait, man.

When I get back to Wellington in the beginning of September I’ll be staying in the flat while A. is in Europe for a month, during which time I’ll have to get a job and its attendant visa if I want to stay here for another year, which, I don’t know if I’ve mentioned, I very much do. At the moment I am feeling pretty good about the job thing; I would have liked to have sorted something out before I went, just because I enjoy stability and structure and all those things, but I’m surprised to find that I am okay with just quitting the J.O.B. today and not knowing what’s going to happen next. I’m still flirting with that one job that I can’t link to right now because I don’t know how my new archives work yet–in fact on Tuesday I’d go so far as to say that me and that job kissed, with tongue, and that I may have felt it up a little. I’m all set to keep the home fires burning while A. is away and there might even be another bellydance gig happening that month.You’ll be happy to know have another dinner party pencilled in for the week I get back (may just bring pita and hummus again).

This all goes a long way towards explaining why I can’t seem to bring myself to write a I Have Been In New Zealand For Nigh Onto A Year Now And Lo, What Changes It Hath Wrough Upon My Soul. In case you’re wondering, this year has wrought changes upon my soul—some very awesome, very needed changes. And it is still hard to believe it’s been eleven months; I still feel like I got here two Thursdays ago. But I am not leaving yet. I’m not done here yet. I am feeling excellently optimistic lately—I think Australia is going to be ten kilos of fun in a five kilo bag, and I think there’s some good work waiting for me to find it in Welly. My life now is so different from when I first got here, let alone from when I first conceived the Top Secret Plans, that I have every reason to expect that staying here for another year is going to be even more amazing.

I can’t tell you how good it feels to believe that. Think of me with a big silly grin underneath the anarchy of my hair, eating a mandarin orange and sipping some tea with sugar and honey, surrounded by chaos and checking off boxes on my to-do list, packing up my bikini and flip-flops (or, as they say in Oz: “thongs”), looking forward to an excellent weekend her in town and the start of some new adventures abroad.