Game on

I started this blog prematurely about three weeks ago or so, with two rapid entries that I thought would portend some particular movement. They didn’t, in any way, and so I stopped the blog, since the only thing that I could have written about would have been the fact that I had no idea when we were going, that I was finding it rather frustrating, that as the time grew closer to moving out of our house and soon being uninsured that was changing to a quiet sense that this whole thing might actually fall through, that I was finding the uncertainty a little overwhelming.

            There’s a story here that I’m not telling, because it’s a little long and kind of intricate and because I told somebody I would keep it to myself. The short of it is: I got my work permit a week ago, and I am in the process of getting the visas for our family, which includes a nerve-wracking Fed Ex of passports and other documents to the Indonesian Consulate in Los Angeles. We are set to depart on August 14, one week from today. We have moved out of our house, which is now rented, have lived for the past week in my mother-in-law’s apartment, which is small, and will move tomorrow into a friend’s house while he goes to Europe. We have everything one has to do before a major expedition like this, I guess, most of which means we will fly around next week packing, buying, and being shorter with each other than usual.

            I am very excited, to be sure, more than a little nervous. I’m suddenly cramming about Indonesian history, and doing a little more with the language than I had done.  It’s a strange psychological space: out of our house, still with many jobs to do, the departure not certain until the visas come through on time, no clear sense of what anything will look like or be like next year, flurries of emails and details and corrections.  Both boys are anxious, G especially, who seems prone to melancholy lately, extremely confused about the transitions and the goodbyes and everything else that is happening.  I’m a little like that too, if I am honest. From particular angles the whole process seems more absurd than anything else. But it is happening.

            I am not sure how much I will write before we leave. It probably depends on whether I start to panic or not, or whether there are more interminable delays. Everyone here is so excited for us, wishing us so well, and then having to well-wish several times more because they keep running into us. Sweet Pea, Bozeman’s big summer arts festival, starts tonight, so we’ll go through the whole story several more times in the next three days, when people say “aren’t you gone yet?” One person I saw even asked me how going to Indonesia was, since it didn’t make sense to him that we hadn’t gone yet.

            I haven’t traveled much, especially internationally, since my 20s; then, I prided myself on my openness to experience, on my flexibility. I hope I still have that and can sustain it under completely different circumstances. My reactions during this build-up suggest to me that this is going to take some relearning, and my Indonesian experiences thus far make me think that I am going to have plenty of practice.

            Last week, after my work permit came through, I got a call from another grantee who is headed to Indonesia too. When I told him that I had gotten assigned three classes to teach, and that I had told them I could teach two of them, he laughed and told me that his teaching assignment for the fall semester had been 6 classes. After he started explaining why he couldn’t do six classes, he figured out that they meant deliver six lectures! I have a suspicion that they might have meant something like that when they gave me my initial assignment, in which case my suggestion that I teach two classes instead of three I’m sure gives people a wonderful impression about the kind of person I am.

            Of course these are the reasons we do these sorts of things, because we are creatures of habit, committed irrationally to certain routines that seem normal, comfortable that our vision of the world is the one best one, because we believe we know more than we do, because it’s too easy to hide behind all that. We also get to do this, of course, because we are incredibly privileged and lucky people.  As the experience moves from idea to reality, that privilege and luck become clearer and clearer – I assume they will only get clearer when we arrive.