2:30 in the morning, drinking tea whilst listening to
wind chimes & French violins. The room is dark, my neighbours have stopped screaming at their children, the angels above have stopped stomping on my ceiling & the denizens below have stopped complaining about flooding coming from my bathroom tearing up their world, yet there is a man dragging metal on the ground outside because he hasn't heard of a wheelbarrow & the walls are made of paper-thin styrofoam. I am 24 days away from quitting my job for good and will leave poorer & in poorer health. I'm worried the praying mantis I found was stepped on by someone two hours after I picked her up and put her on a branch. I've got work in the morning where my manager will say "good morning gentleman" and establish emotional rapport with a combined handshake-high-five-shoulder bump, the kind they teach you at an MBA with Cambridge or Harvard. My students will make the job so worthwhile, and they will ask me why I'm going even as I do my best to help them prepare for their exams & job interviews. The new teammember will try their best to tell me how erotic my voice is despite my best efforts to politely indicate the meaning has been lost in translation, while my older colleagues will talk about the rugby, and my instructor will scream at the sales staff for failing to act like normal human beings. I will make no less than 9 cups of tea where I will do my best to show my gratitude to the staff in the supermarket nearby despite the language barrier, they in turn will do the same as they always have done. Someone will be playing redbone by Carl Wheezer in the office, and the ever present ears of the dear state will loom over all references to baskball sports or suspicious southern cities. I will come home at 9 or 10 and take off my trousers & shirt, waking up at 11 P.M. to cook before my roommate goes to sleep. The food will be much the same as it has been for the year, discount lamb from the friendliest butcher in the world, mixed with an assortment of spices, veg & cheese procured at premium. I will ignore my lack of money for now, but making it month to month is worrying when the debtors do their best to overcharge me because I didn't update my employment details, despite all evidence to the contrary. I feel a deep sense of happiness & resigned acceptance that everything has gotten better. This should've been placed in the happy thread based on how I'm feeling, but the post itself felt a slight bit negative. I have entered a month of curious limbo, where I cannot leave, I cannot wait to leave, and even after I quit my job I have to wait two weeks before I can go home because they can't let me stay with a work visa - might go to a competitor! When you have a conga line of people taking their pound of flesh you know who your friends are, I couldn't be happier to have found mine. Now I just need to find where I am... I have always been working, this will be the first time I have been forced to do nothing.
One of my students told me that in their life, you studied in childhood to pass the exam to get into the good Uni, so that you could study to get a good accounting job, so you could work hard and then have a child and then help them study hard to pass the exams before planning your funeral. I asked them what they wanted in life - they said lots of money, of course. I asked them, how much? They answered at least 10 billion dollars. I asked them again, what for?
They answered: A house, a car, a good husband and whatever else they wanted! I asked them to imagine - if they had all of those things and they had all the money in the world, what would they really do? They said they'd move to Canada. I asked them what's stopping them? They said they didn't know. A year prior I had the same conversation in an interview with the director of a company who specialised in headhunting for banking executives, a role I had zero experience with whatsoever and had only ended up there because I was getting pushed by a headhunter headhunting headhunters, and ended up in Beijing. Now I think I'm done, so what am I to do next?
I know what I want. Some sleep and some more tea.
Yet once I have done that, what next? I know what my next ambitions are, but I do wonder - if tomorrow I completed every one of my ambitions, what then would I do? I have always though I have known myself well because I always know what I want. Yet it seems knowing what you want in life is not the same as knowing yourself. I walk too many paths at once and end up terribly lost.