What To Do...

A little over a year ago I decided I wanted to move. It didn't matter how I would get there, what I would do there, or where I would be, as long as I wouldn't be here. Quite frankly, here has gotten rather boring. The people are great (sometimes), but the culture is lacking. To be honest, I grew up a pretty cultured child and have been traveling all my life, but something about suburbia has always been a bit blah. Bland, boring, humdrum, monotonous, lifeless: these are all good synonyms for suburbia.

I needed to make a decision about where to live. I considered Europe. I thought about Central or South America. I pondered Asia and Africa, too. I don't think the notion of moving to Antarctica ever quite crossed my mind, but in retrospect it was silly to rule it out. After all, penguins deserve companionship just as much as lions, elephants, panda bears and German people. I suppose at the time I realized I was a people person, hence the ruling out of Antarctica... and Germany.

So, I decided to pick a country completely based on chance and set out to find a globe. I would spin the globe, cover my eyes with my hands and stop the globe with my pointer finger. A few classroom break-ins at the Geography department later, I found a globe and gave it a whirl. Round and round went the topographical surface of a mostly blue sphere: the Andes merged with the Himalayas, the Pacific became the Indian and Antarctica still sat at the bottom, all alone, singled out from the fun. Continents shifted toward each other, Pangea re-emerged as the dominant earthly landmass and I closed my eyes.

Three times I spun the globe, and three times I landed on Sub-Saharan Africa. I had ruled out another place I did not want to live. The fourth time I tried to spin the globe the poles flipped and the Earth came crashing down onto the floor of a classroom I was not supposed to be in. So, before CSI came into the room to draw white chalk lines around the second Big Bang, I decided it would be a good time to leave. Disgruntled and unsatisfied, I went home and got drunk.

The next day, I found myself killing time in a computer lab after American Lit 2 . I thought that perhaps instead of deciding where to go, it would be a better idea to figure out what I would do once I got to where I was going before I got there. I debated which of my skills were most valuable on an international market. Lifeguarding had always proved to be a lucrative industry for most of my working years, however, the number of jobs available for international lifeguards are few and far between. You see, most countries believe in accountability for its peoples own actions, and let you swim at your own risk. Selling toys had been a forte in my earlier working years, but that would only lead me back toward the materialism I was so desperately trying to escape. I had always been fairly good at taking care of goldfish and I am a halfway decent basketball player but neither of these 'skills' would serve me well in my overseas endeavors (or at least they won't be very profitable). The idea of actually using my major, English, had fluttered past my eyes in only the briefest of moments. I had always been told, and assumed myself, that it was a rather useless major. So, at another brick wall, disgruntled and unsatisfied, I went home and got drunk.

However, this particular evening of debauchery led to a great discovery. My longtime friend and roommate, Jason, had been thinking the same thoughts as me. He wanted to leave just as much as I did. So, excited and inebriated, we began to explore the internet. A few Google searches later, we were destined to teach English abroad. How hard could it be? First and foremost, it's something I consider myself to be fairly good at. I speak English good and write good too. I've been doing it for practically all of my life. I think it came quite naturally around age 1 and just a few short years later I stumbled upon the skill of reading. So really, how hard could it be to teach it?