I just popped my blog cherry

I’m not a blogger by any stretch of the imagination. Well, despite all current evidence to the contrary. To be honest, blogging has never much appealed to me, mostly because there are absolutely no requirements to be a quote unquote blogger. Anyone’s propaganda can be posted on the internet for the general public to read. A little stomach churning if you think about it for too long. In a way, bloggers are comparable to home school parents. Any parent from butt fuck Egypt with a college degree or an 8th grade education can decide public education is no longer worthy of their children. So while I still think that both bloggers and home school parents should have to pass a minimum sanity and intelligence prerequisite course, I am going to take advantage of the free pass and put my thoughts out for all to read. Well let’s be honest here, most likely my mom and a handful of faithful friends.
So why the sudden abandon of my blogging prejudice? Because for the first time in a while, I might have something worth writing about. In three weeks, I’m leaving the comforts of Portland, Oregon and teaching high school English in order to move across the world and teach English to Chinese undergrads. The next year of my life will be spent in the Hubei province in a town I can’t pronounce; Shijiazjhuang, a quaint town of only 10,000,000 people. The decision to relocate wasn’t an easy one, and I wish I could say the kick in my ass came from something profound and meaningful, but the truth is, it was the combination of a trip to the movies and a rerun of a sitcom that gave me the final push. Pretty sad, right?
I guess I can trace it back to the semester I spent abroad the spring I turned twenty. In college I studied in Siena for a few months and learned Italian from a fantastic professor who made the language accessible and could make the phrase “taking a shit” sound sexy. It was there I fell in love with learning languages and the entire worlds that opened up as a result. I came back to college my junior year, promptly changed my major to English and ESL and didn’t look back. I declared to myself and anyone that would listen that the second I graduated I would travel the world making English accessible to others all the while soaking up everyone else’s culture. It would be perfect.
And then I met Barrett. The guy I didn’t want to meet because I just knew that if I ever met him I’d never want to leave. And I didn’t want to. Fuck me, this sounds like a Nicholas Sparks novel, but it’s true. I found myself moving to Portland to be closer to him and finding a job teaching high school. For a while, I thought this was giving up on my aspirations, but it took me a while to figure out that all I’d done was post pone them. These dreams got put on hiatus and I went in a direction I hadn’t anticipated, but ended up loving. Then, on an unbelievably dull Thursday, my girlfriend invited me to see the movie Revolutionary Road. I walked out of that movie shaken up with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, that wouldn’t go away. So I won’t spoil the movie for you if you haven’t seen it, but the basic premise is that unfulfilled dreams will dissolve your self-worth and then you’ll want to die, and yada yada yada. On a side note, Kate Winslet is bloody fantastic in this movie; two thumbs up, highly recommended. Just when the nauseous pit began to subside, I watched an episode of How I met your Mother. This episode coincidentally dealt with the same theme of, surprise, dreams and ambitions that went by the wayside. Now I tend to be a smidge skeptic on the concept of fate, particularly when fate comes to me through the boob tube, but it felt too purposeful to be a random coincidence. I spent an entire weekend sulking and contemplating whether I had given up on what I always wanted. Christ I am going on and on, but if you really want to know why I will be eating with chopsticks for an entire year, bare with me. The long and the short of it was, I feared that if I didn’t make a move now, I would get too comfortable to ever make it. So I talked to friends and I searched on the internet, and eventually a job offer from China came. When I pictured myself teaching in other countries, I saw myself in South America, or Eastern Europe, but when the offer came from China, I thought to myself, “Why the fuck not?” So here I am.