I don’t know if no news really is good news, but I, in fact, have no news–at least no news on the job front.  I am becoming more and more anxious the longer it takes to hear from S’s NGO.  However, S. seems to think that our not having heard yet indicates that the Bangkok office would indeed like S. to return and the delay actually involves the US headquarters attempting to get her employment approved.  The truth is that we actually know nothing.  We are still waiting.

In the mean time I had to go into the office again today for a meeting the associate director of the Writing Progam organized to begin planning an April event that will highlight ways in which writers engage with their communities, specifically around the issue of mountain top removal in Appalachia.  I’m not overly enthused about taking on another project during our current transition, but I want to do what I can while I can.

A bit of good news involves the fact that we may have found someone interested in living in our house over the next year.  I won’t say anything about who that might be quite yet.  But it is great to have a responsible person reasonably enthusiastic about the prospect of caring for our home and animals.

I wish I had something of substance to share, but besides the fact that it’s cold and rainy in Lexington this afternoon and besides the regrettable reality that I have been battling a head ache since early this morning, I indeed have no news–not that either the rain or my headache actually qualifies as news to begin with.  Let’s just hope that my newslessness IS a good omen, that it does bode well for employment opportunities in Bangkok.

This morning S. resigned the executive directorship she currently holds with the Kentucky  non-profit  that advocates for the homeless in our state–effective January 23rd–if the pending position in global disaster response needs her that soon.  This stresses me considerably.  It makes me anxious for her to submit a resignation without the other job being firmly secured.  It puts us in a vulnerable position financially, and I dislike vulnerability of almost any kind, but economic vulnerability especially.  But she insists this timing is necessary.  I just pray that the new job becomes available soon and that S’s salary and housing stipulations are acceptable to the employing organization. 

I find all of this stressful.  And I’m not looking forward to the upcoming semester.  As a matter of fact, I don’t feel like teaching at all.  I want us to hurry and move on with our lives.  I don’t want to be stuck back here in Kentucky until May, while S. gets to go abroad in search of more exciting and meaningful work.  My attitude may be bad, but I can’t help it.

Also this morning, I purchased my university parking pass for the semester and stopped by my office to turn in hard copies of my final grades from the fall.   With that accomplished I feel more prepared to take down and put away our Christmas decorations, neither of which I really want to do.  I don’t know what it is I actually want.  I don’t know why I feel so unmotivated and uninspired.

I DO know that I enjoy this blog.  It makes me want to write a memoir.  And though I dare not go into any details of my story prematurely, let it suffice to say I DO have a remarkably dramatic tale to tell–the particulars of which most people currently in my life might find difficult to believe, but all of which is easily substantiated, documented, etc.  I wish I could find a publisher willing to offer me a book contract and an advance, so I could put aside teaching for while and focus on the telling of my tale.  Probably I should pursue such a contract, but I have no idea where to begin or even whom to ask for advice.

I guess I’m realizing writing this that I do feel ready to tell the story, as difficult and painful as that may prove.  I think that blogging every day now for almost a week, I realize that I DO have the discipline to sit down and write every day, whether I feel like it or not, whether I even feel like I have anything much to say on a given day.  The details come with the doing of the deed–the act of writing almost accomplishes itself in some ways, if you sit down at a computer every morning and make yourself hammer out the words.

By the way, I still am being quite faithful to the demands of my diet and exercise regimen.  I don’t like not eating what I want.  It’s hell in some regards.  But, God, I have to do this.  I keep telling myself that next January will come, and when it does I can be 50 pounds thinner and happier with my body or the same size I am now or bigger and more miserable than ever.  I choose the former.  I don’t believe I really have any other option.  The other remains a non-option.  I simply can not remain the same.

It’s the same thing with the book and blog.  I must continue pounding away at these keys, as the literal pounds are dieted and exercised away.  I will exchange one kind of poundage for another and be the better for it.

Okay, I got on the scales this morning–big mistake!  It may be that we are about to embark on a grand and exotic Asian adventure, but, God knows, I can’t do it fat!  I simply can not walk the streets of Bangkok like this–all 173 bulging pounds of me.

This is how it all went down.  S. and I had agreed we would weigh on Sunday.  I had begun dieting a week ago but was too afraid to step on the scales.  S. is to start watching what she eats on Monday.  Sunday then seemed a reasonable day to determine what we weighed.  While I may be a chicken shit when it comes to actually quantifying my size, once the decision is made to put a number on the situation, I want to get the pain over with as quickly as possible.  So when we woke up at 2 this morning to take the dogs out for their middle of the night pee, I brought the scales into our bedroom, as the floor in the bathroom slants too badly to weigh accurately in there, and proceeded to strip naked, because God forbid I weigh even an ounce more than necessary.  I even removed my glasses and seriously considered doing without a barrette but decided it unwise to try reading the numbers both blind and with hair falling in my face.  Then, stepping on the scales like the most over-sized contestant on the Biggest Loser, I was told I weighed a mere 75 somethings or other.  Now I may not have a completely realistic sense of what I weigh, but I did feel fairly certain I hadn’t been 75 pounds since I was seven.  And, of course, being without glasses I was unable to get the stupid scales to stop reading in kilograms and begin weighing in pounds, as I stood shivering and blind in a drafty 100 year old house–not able to weigh having made the big decision to do so.  This did not sit well wiith me.  So S., who knows my inclination for thowing fits and was herself sitting warm and fully PJ-ed under the covers of our bed–decided to intervene.  After playing with the thing for a few long and chilly minutes and asking me where I had put the manual–when in fact she is the manual keeping half of this relationship–got the apparatus reading in pounds again.  You know something is not right with the universe when a book of directions is necessary for figuring out scales.

To make a long blog a little shorter, let it suffice to say I weighed a good many pounds more than I wished.  So I am an Asian bound woman on a mission.  I will not walk the streets of a Thai city like this.  I may be willing to wear my glasses the next time I weigh, but I will not make a big fat spectacle of myself on the sidewalks of Bangkok.

We are currently waiting to hear from S’s NGO as to whether or not the organization will be able to rehire her at the salary we need to make this project work. Its end of the year hiring freeze interferes with S’s ability to resign from her present position and prevents us from making practical plans about an apartment in Bangkok, maintenance of our Lexington home while we are overseas, and care of our pets who are unable to travel. One of our dogs, a one year old Maltese named Lucy, will probably make the trip back and forth with me, while the other dog, a five year old terrier mix named Ralph, and our four cats with remain behind. We need someone to live in our house and love these precious pets. Any volunteers?

Today S. is in her Frankfort office organizing files and having AAA tow her truck to a garage in Lexington for repairs. The ’96 Nissan refuses to start. S. drove my Toyota to work, so I am home bound, cleaning up trash in our basement, talking to my mother on the phone, and composing this blog from under the covers of our bed. It is difficult to heat our 100 year old hulk of a house, so I dive under the duvet, huddling with my laptop while dogs doze all around. The spring semester doesn’t begin for another week and a half. So while I probably should be taking down Christmas decorations and stowing them in the attic till next year, I lounge around in bed with books and blog to keep me company and canine body heat to keep me warm. At least in Bangkok cold won’t be an issue, but from there I will probably bitch about the heat. My uncle used to say my body’s thermostat was broken. Surely the approach of menopause and a Lexington home without adequate heat or insulation only worsen that condition. Drop me in the tropics in a few months, and I’m sure to be climactically challenged!

Stories of epic proportion always begin in the middle of things, and our adventure, though less than epic in scope, did get going as a kind of midlife vocational crisis for S.–one that is taking me along on an odyssey to what some might consider the edge of the world–or almost–

This is how it all got started.  S. and I  have been together for going on three years.  I teach college English.  S.  is the executive director of a non profit in Kentucky that advocates for the homeless in our state.  Before that S. directed an international NGO’S tsunami rebuilding project in southeast Asia.  I am essentially  a self-taught visual artist and writing teacher–a current bore with a dramatic past (story to be told later).  S. lives for new challenges.  I prefer the ordinary and predictable.  I am the off brand to S’s high end adventure.

But, perhaps, all of that is about to change.  S.  has tried for the last 2 years to settle down and live what most might consider an ordinary life.  Her efforts in the work-a-day world have been considerable.  We currently live a comfortable life  in a nearly comfortable 100 year old house–2 dogs, 4 cats, a basement that needs cleaning, an attic that needs straightening,  a way of life that needs (according to S.) a bit more challenge and adventure– a little less Lexington and bit more Bangkok–perhaps–

So it stands, that S. is considering returning to the NGO she left 2 years ago to assume a position in global disaster response that we hope will allow us to maintain a home of sorts in Kentucky while living a large part of our lives in a Thai apartment as an alternative base of operation.  While S. attempts to save the world, quite literally,  I try to anchor our adventure in words.