A close friend once confessed to me that this blog was ‘too depressing to read’. It was probably one of the best compliments I have ever received. That’s a little tongue-in-cheek, and I don’t think that friend really gets what I am trying to do here (if you’re reading this, love you buddy). Life is hard. It isn’t just hard for me, its hard for everyone. I spent a few too many years of my life just laying on my bed and looking at the ceiling of my bedroom when I felt sad. I don’t want to do that anymore. I would much rather process the information in this way and then move the fuck on. Make it a joke, take the piss, move the fuck on.

So that being said, I might have been kind of ‘happy’ two months ago.

I was doing my boring little ESL job for 4 hours a day, then going home to an empty house (my father had fucked off to Europe for a bit). My class was eating out of my hand, and I was no longer resentful of my life as an ESL teacher. Sure, there were day to day irritations, but who cares. I was still broke, but my costs were pretty low. As a consequence, I had no real social life to speak of, but hey! Youtube is free, right?

Happy? Nope. That’s a fucking lie. I had become complacent. I had a shitty life, but if you life a shitty life long enough you just start to cost on through. It was easy, and it was even easier to just keep sailing on by with it. The job hunt was going nowhere, and I had pretty much accepted that. I was applying to jobs when I found them, but the fact that I never heard back from any of these jobs was such an accepted fact that I was gearing up to just say fuck it, I am going to be an ESL teacher for life, I might as well get my ass back to Asia and get it over with. I had even gotten my FBI background check started, the necessary first step to getting a job in Korea.

So a year after I left an ESL life  in China, I was pretty much gearing up to restart it with a minor upgrade.

This didn’t strike me like a great plan.

Thankfully,  life has a way of kick starting, whether you are ready or not. The period of contentment I mentioned above was started because my father, who I was living with at the time, was supposed to be out of the country at the time. Largely, me and him do not get along, and my life prior to him leaving was a lot of me looking for excuse to be out of the house. I won’t  go to much into the why, but I frequently found myself driving from coffee shop to coffee shop looking for a quiet place to hang out away from him. The contentment I reached in November was largely due to the simple fact that he wasn’t around.

So when he emailed me to say that he was coming back home by month’s end, I lost my shit. I also quit my job, packed my bags, and moved to Richmond Virginia.

Just like that.

Why Richmond? I’ve been told its cheap, and that life is a little easier. We shall see to what extent that is true.

You might be wondering ‘how is that working out for you?’ To which the answer is: ‘idunno’. It’s a bit early to tell. But I will keep you posted.

As regards this silly little blog, I now find myself with a pretty long backlog of posts about ESL teaching and my life before the hasty fleeing of the DC metro area. I am currently posting to this blog about twice a month, and until I burn through that backlog of posts, one post a month will be that nonsense, and the other will be about what is going on currently in Richmond.