And... We're back

Ok, so just yesterday I had to get a facebook post bemoaning me for not putting up a new blog in three months. I’ll totally concede that I have been lazy (busy, bored, unmotivated, unimaginative, etc.) over the last several weeks; strangely enough even, I even started an entry yesterday with the intention of putting it up by evening. However, with the kick to my butt swiftly delivered, I shall now give a quick taste of these past three months in a nutshell.

The biggest and most relevant news is already known to a few, so I may as well enlighten the rest so we’re all on even playing field. I’ve decided not to renew my contract with JET and thus I will be returning home to the True North, strong and free this coming summer. I’d like to say that it was an easy decision, but I can’t. Instead, I’ll say it was a simple decision (If you didn’t know by now, I’m an English teacher). It happened when I was talking to someone and they became the 9,000th person to ask me, “So are you going to stay another year?” Before I had the chance to give my detailed outline of an answer that indicated that I hadn’t, my brain shut down. Every thought evaporated, every image flickered out. I think I may even have forgotten to breathe for a few moments. During all of that, a single sentence remained both audible and visible in my mind’s eye, alone in the darkness: “You are going home next year.” Returning from my cosmic trip to the Astral Plane, I dwelled on the ramifications of such a vision, and every cell in my body lifted a pint to chime its miniscule approval to the course of action.

When I got the forms on which to indicate my choice, it was a very quick and painless thing to mark an x in the corresponding box. That was that, and for many weeks I didn’t even give it a simple thought. It was only January or February that a number of reasons for staying hit me like the wave that flipped the Poseidon. Salary, fun and excitement, studying Japanese… I suddenly found myself searching for the ctrl+z combination that would bring me back to October in a frantic panic and mini-breakdown. A few good talks and/or pints later, I came to realize – and still do – I think – that I have made the right choice in deciding to come home.

NOW the question has changed from “So are you going to stay another year?” to “So what will you do next year when you’re back?” For the first time in my life, I have no plan for the future, and I have no shame in saying that it scares the hell out of me. My only inkling into what I’ll get accomplished is that I’ll take a few weeks to get re-acclimatized to Canada again. This includes spending time with my family, looking up old friends, visiting places I haven’t seen in years, and eating tons of bad-for-me foods. Once all that’s done, I’ve got choice aplenty before me, and no compass to point me to the quote-unquote right choice. Now, there are a great number of people who seem to take delight in telling me that I’m young and have all kinds of time and nothing to tie me down to anything and that the world is basically my oyster. That’s all well and good to say, but I’d much prefer to not be ignorant as to my future, thank you very much. Now, I’m not saying that I’d like to know it all and be led by the hand by fate, but to have SOME idea, not matter how vague, would help to assuage some of this trepidation. Oh, by the way, giving some thought to becoming a teacher. Ha, there ya go.