Preparing to Change Dimensions
Today I bought a new backpack, boots, a few plain t-shirts, a jacket and a Wi-Fi speaker. ‘How was the total almost 200 dollars?’ is a question I will not ask myself because this will be a guilt-free, self-rewarded indulgence for meeting my commitments as an English teacher when all I’ve wanted to do for the last few weeks is breathe on my own, to not be regulated by automated systems and reflex actions, eliminating choice. To wake up when I’m good and ready. To come and go when I’m good and ready.
Even before eating, upon returning around three, I started to pack containers away…each the right size for easily transporting toiletries and tools for making sure my nails aren’t long or sharp. To reduce the background noise of things in my cyclically cluttered space was my aim. With the two hammocks out of the other backpack (replacing the suitcase) there’s enough space for good emotions, those associated with hope.
A lesson has been learnt about my attachment to things—if it’s not in active use, get rid of it. The hammocks were to be presents, now they’re destined to dry rot in someone’s cupboard, but this is what happens when you become a burden, you get left behind and forgotten. The would-have-been-recipients won’t miss what they didn’t know they were going to receive, and when was the last time any non-tourist in Barbados lied down in a hammock anyway? Holding on to things to adorn parallel lives will turn me into the Just in Case Man, trapped under his clutter.
Proud of my increasing indifference towards things, burning my two pairs of work shoes will be a highlight. The flaky black pair can only get away with being shoes at night. The brown pair, made of cow skin (bought at a time this fact didn’t horrify me), has cooked and cracked in the sun where they bend. Both let in water when it rains and spend the next days smelling dead. I’ve also got two cotton shirts I’d enjoy burning because they always fall out of the dryer, chewed up and refuse to be different after ironing (also, I stopped ironing them for this reason).
Facebook Hates Me
Finally satisfied from relieving anxiety by sorting through it, I ate half the amount of food I normally do because this is trending in my life, even as I suspect I am not enough for Facebook’s algorithm and am consequently fading from likability…and hence from people’s lives. My theory is that I don’t post enough and when I do, I don’t post enough of what the masses crave—distraction in the form of socially acceptable jokes, fashionable tragedies that allow you to overlay a selfie on a flag, videos with cats or people attempting a jump but missing etc.
The importance of being the centre of the world that knows me as God (population me), makes it difficult to leave though. Sometimes up and down my page’s mirrored pathways I scroll, to find my pride in each lack of a ‘like’. A lack of ‘likes’ has come to validate the righteousness of my ways, paved with the same piety that spurs on the religious to fanatic heights (or is it, once more, ‘debts’?).
How am I making money if I’m not teaching English?
Perhaps there has not been a response from the farm I’ve applied to work as a volunteer because of timing—the Christmas cheer (giving gifts with the expectation of receiving them) was over and it was time for yearly one-week resolutions and then, if the rest of Latin America is like Panama, there’s nothing like following up the birth of Jesus Christ, the gateway to heaven, with the gateway to Hell—Carnival! People stop taking work (and religion) seriously until March.
My challenge is to not apply for a teaching job in Costa Rica. On Craigslist I’ve seen about five and they’re great. They say things like “serious inquires only” and “not for anyone vacationing part-time” which I interpret to mean “not for people who want to live their own lives” and one even promised a work visa. They’ll own you then for sure.
There’s a feeling measuring an image of someone who is me but is a silhouette as I see him from outside myself. He’s been told there’s an ocean to catch him at the bottom and, without looking, he dives off the cliff. The units of measurement are ‘oh fucks’.
How am I making money if I’m not teaching English? I fall… in a fit to the floor of my insides. If the fit knew it was called anger, it would laugh out at how wrong I got it since even the purest white has in some black. And that feeling scooping out your insides as you fall…and I burst into tears less as an emotion and more as a signal of the end of falling, hitting and being broken.
Here Global Crossroad talks about visa requirements for volunteering abroad
They say that volunteer travel organizations usually only require a tourist visa, but what about if I want to work with an independent gardener?
I came across one on encuentra24 looking for a job. He takes care of farms and does organic agriculture and he’s never had an offer like mine and I’d have him all to myself and he’ll be glad for me to translate his advertisement into English and his contacts will be useful after I work with him and get some experience. It feels right in my gut…but perhaps flying fish followed their guts into nets before having them ripped out, roes and milts seasoned, fried up and eaten as a delicacy in Barbados.
In nine days I’ll be jobless. I’ll have, if this ‘trickstress’ landlady pays me my deposit, 1000 US (750 without). Next month in Costa Rica I must start earning. How am I making money if I’m not teaching?
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