6/18/08

I found out a few days ago that I was approved to leave for Bucuresti on February 8th. It's a crazy thing, so instead I've decide to post a blog that I wrote over two and a half years ago before I left the country for the first time. You should know I cut out four paragraphs (preceding what you'll read) about alligators and crazy submarine-boat-car drivers. Just for context ;)

6/18/08
voy a ir a colombia

So now it’s Colombia. My actual flight is in around nine hours, but we’re leaving here in six. And I can’t believe it at all. Four weeks in South America. Here’s to making it, to learning Spanish, to becoming adopted Colombian. To flying for the first time, to not getting eaten in the rain forest or contracting Yellow Fever. To seeing the Caribbean, and being higher in altitude than I’ve ever been in my life (currently, I live at ten or so feet above sea level). This is for my story about fathers, it’s for language and how if I had my way, I’d say drop me in a country, drop me in another language, let me live there and be immersed in all of it, the people, the words, the life.

I’ll say this: I’m nervous for all kinds of reasons, and even now I don’t quite believe any of it. It’s sort of like you’re growing up, and all the while you’re looking toward the moments where you’ll be living, where you’ll be doing what you wanted to do when you had grown up or got to the point where you could, and that’s the thing. Getting there isn’t something you realize. I’m here. I’m at that point now, the one that’s only existed before in the things I’ve written. I imagine marriage will feel something like this. Suddenly I’ll be standing at the altar and I won’t realize when I got there, when a whole part of my life began. And I’m not sure now when I got halfway through undergrad, when I got to leaving the States for something bigger than the things I’ve done so far. I feel like I’ll wake up sometime later and I’ll have already published and I’ll have children and it just all seems so fast. Not too fast, and I’m not at any of those places yet. I only mean I can’t believe I’m already where I am now, and it’s only quickening, and maybe when you cross over lines in your life you don’t know it, you don’t have time to ask yourself whether you’re ready, it’s only suddenly you’re doing it and when did it ever happen, but you must have been ready because you got put there and you didn’t sink.

This is what that is, I think. I’ve flown past the starting point because it’s all now, happening is now, Colombia and writing and living are now and if all those waited for me to realize I was ready, now would be a perpetual holding, a waiting. But here I am, and next time that will be South America. And who knows after that, only that I began toward there longer ago than I know. So see you guys on the other side of the Caribbean.

here comes the snow!

This never, never happens here. And it is beautiful!

guess they're not interchangeable...

This morning at work I was answering the phone and a woman called and asked for a coworker who was on the other line. I told the woman on the phone that I could put her on hold and transfer her once the line was available. After two or three minutes, my coworker was still on the other line, so I picked the phone back up and explained to the woman waiting that I could transfer her to her voicemail, to which she responded: I had already said I wanted that. (If you've ever answered phones, you know rude people just come with the territory. And there's some universal law that states that if you call someone and they can't see you, you can say you said whatever you want and it's always true.) In all the fluster, my immediate reaction:

I'm sorry, I thought you wanted to be held.

And then transferred her as quickly as I could, realizing what I said. Points for early morning, tongue-tied creepiness. Lesson learned: being held is not equal to holding is not equal to being on hold.