I realize that I am not always the best human being walking the globe. I don’t expect to be. Frankly, I done alright with my mediocrity. But there are at times moments when I realize that everyone is reacting to something and I seem to be reacting in a very different way. My first dose of this was during the death of princess Diana, when my mother woke at who knows what our to a watch the funeral and I had to sit there puzzled as to why she gave a damn. I certainly didn’t. I get to feeling this way at pretty much every celebrity death.

But I am not sure I was really in the majority camp when it came to the events that unfolded in 2020. I am course talking about our lovely year of global pandemic. I am not sure how other people took it, but I was pretty calm about it all, thinking that if we all just stayed put a little bit and exercised caution, we would all be ok.

Well, I was wrong. Look at me, wrongest man in town.

When the lock-down hit, I took it in stride. Let’s all shelter in place, focus on self-improvement, and soon enough if all goes well this will alll be over.

I won’t repeat myself again.

I don’t think I was the only one that had this outlook. On the first days of lock-down, apparently Amazon sold out of podcast microphones. I would love to have the numbers of how many novels were started and unfinished over the course of quarantine. And largely that time was miserable for me to.

Until my job ended and I entered the period of glorious self-employment. I reached out a former boss, mostly to tell him that the company I was working for was going under, and he informed me that because of lock-down they were doing their classes remotely, so why didn’t I pick up a few hours?

It was heaven sent. It was a 400% pay increase from my previous job. A salary that could barely make ends meet in the DC metro area at full time was living like a king in a small city in Greece, even at part time. And the work was light. Part of this was by my own design – at this point I have been working in the ESL sector so long that I have a whole lot of what I need to prepare for lessons good to go. The other part was that I had worked for this school specifically long enough to have large swaths of their curriculum memorized. My planning time war reduced to zero. The stress of the work was almost entirely gone. Truly a heaven sent situation.

And then, the lock-down ended. We were still under quarantine of sorts, but we had a little more freedom of movement. And the virus had not hit this country particularly hard. However, from all the information I was getting, despite that there were low numbers of coronavirus cases in Greece, tourists weren’t coming in their usual numbers. So I took this to mean that it was my neo-liberal duty to get out into the country and do some real hard tourism.

If you’ve been following the blog you likely have already seen the pictures that I posted on here.

And that’s been my life for the past few months. I have been traveling around Greece, pulling out my laptop when I needed to and getting my work done, and seeing the country in the other moments.

I hate to say it, but this pandemic has actually been a bit of a God send for me. I know we aren’t supposed to say things like, but it has created a set of circumstances that are actually pretty convenient.

Tune in next month to hear me talk about the bad aspects of self-employment.

Speaking of which, had anyone announced last February that according to the Chinese Horoscope it was going to be the year of the global pandemic, I would have been a believer.