Why I Haven't Been Writing

Dramatic reenactment of me finding my computer

Well, all, if you follow this blog regularly, you'll notice that lately I haven't been writing. There's a couple reasons for that. The main one is that my computer is dead. I woke up one day and it wouldn't turn on. I thought perhaps it was just the adapter, which had been blinking and acting weird over the last few days. I took it to the computer store to test a new adapter, and it wouldn't turn on. Then I brought it to a repair shop. After several visits and phone calls, they finally told me that it was unrepairable. That there was a short circuit on the mother board, and if you know anything about computer hardware, you know that is like certain death for a computer. Finito. Nothing's bringing poor Kwami back. I can only imagine what his last moments could have been like. Gasping for breath, feeling a throbbing in his processor, thinking "this can't just be heartburn" before he closed his eyes for good. He's up in the sky now, with Alan Turig and Ada Lovelace.

My computer being dead also means that I can't travel or do much of anything except stay home and study languages and watch South Park on my cell phone. I have to save what's left of my last month a stipend to buy a computer for job searching when I get back to the US. Oh, and also those translations of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer's poems that keep getting shelved for one reason or another. That's kind of an important goal for Indiana too. On the bright side, I'm getting a lot of Japanese practice in, and my Coursera courses are getting a lot of attention.

Bonjour, mes petits. Je suis venu pour vous enseigner anglais.
Hello, little ones. I've come to teach you English.

But suffice it to say, if I can't go out into the world, I don't really have too much of interest to write about, and truth be told, I'm pretty sure I'm over Colombia and more excited for things to come anyway. I found out a few weeks back that I was accepted into the Teaching Assistant Program in France, and so sometime in mid- to late September, I'll be going to France. I don't have too many details yet, but I know I will be in the académie of Nantes and that I'll be teaching in a primary school (or potentially schools, plural, despite only working an official 12 hours a week). And I'm pretty excited about that. Word's still out on whether I'll blog about France or in the Midwestern interim. It really just depends on how well I can balance commitments that I should start putting first, like making money so I can travel while I'm in France since TAPIF is not quite as generous as Fulbright with their stipends and paying off credit cards so I don't have to worry about transferring money between banks to pay off US bills. Oh, and finishing those damn Bécquer translations. I'm really disappointed with myself for letting it take so long because there's some other writing projects I'd like to move on to. Particularly the novel that's been haunting me for the last two years, begging to be written. You know, the one that I originally wanted to make as a musical set to the music of English rock band Muse but abandoned that idea when I realized: 1) I would never get the rights to Muse's music to actually produce the thing and 2) It started to get too dark to be a musical. It was originally, as a musical, supposed to have a Buffy the Vampire Slayer kind of sensibility. A bit of horror, a bit of soap opera, a bit of humor. But as a book, I'm not sure if that would work as well. Oh, it's about the apocalypse. That's all you get for free, bitches.

But as for now, things are good, even though I think my tolerance for all the things I've found annoying in Colombia has dropped pretty low in these last thirty-ish days that remain. I think maybe I'm just anxious to get back to the US and then on to France. But although I look at the three or four months in the great state of Indiana as a bit of a waiting period, I am actually excited to be back home int he place I'd never thought I'd call home again. It feels nice to know that I'm going to a place where a bunch of people are excited to see me; it feels good to be welcome someplace, to be liked for who I am instead being seen as a free chance to practice English or as some kind of bizarre, otherworldly creature. As much as I'm in a period of my life where I want to travel and see the world, these little breaks are necessary because one of the best things about traveling abroad, especially as a disgruntled expatriate, is that you appreciate things about your own culture just a little bit more.