The Uncertainty Principle

Things are a bit uncertain around the foreign office these days. There’s a potential job near Munich, a deadline looming, a simmering discontent over the status quo and a lack of certainty around what to do about it. If that sounds exceedingly vague, well, that’s entirely appropriate. Some of us are wandering around the apartment muttering about the Bush adminstration and our failure to skyrocket to personal fame, others are muttering about their desire to see the new year arrive below the equator and why haven’t we won the lottery already?

I carried my suitcase up from the basement this morning and went through my dresser. Some stuff stays here, some stuff goes back to Seattle, the logic behind those choices is unexplainable. A few days ago we delivered a plastic bag of older clothing to the Red Cross bin at the intersection. Last week I was able to pass on a substantial portion of my library. I’d have given away more, but I couldn’t carry the weight. In spite of the fact that I’m waging a war on stuff, I’m still dragging a lot of it around the planet with me.

(Should you, fellow expats, ever have the nerve to invite me to come and stay, I will show up with English reading material by way of thanks and commiseration. Caveats? I have health issues with smoking and I don’t eat red meat. That sounds like a pain in the ass, but really, beyond all that, I’m very easy going. And I’ll cook for you.)

This morning I am the yin yang symbol, the darkness and the light. I emailed flight details to my airport shuttle friend and I can already smell the big bowl of spicy Vietnamese soup that the Moonlight makes. But if I look out my window this morning, I see a bright blue sky and leaves that have turned remarkable shades of orange and red and gold. The Steiermark fall has been beautiful beyond my expectations with less than a week of bad weather in the last two months. I will fly in to a rainy Seattle and construction in the basement – but also to the open homes of my friends. There are great opportunites for work awaiting me, but no one to hold my hand on a walk downtown to get fish and chips. I’m really sad and outrageously delighted. This is messed up.

The foreign office remains open at 50% staff until the holidays. Or later. We don’t really know yet. The plans to get below the equator are incompatible with the potential move. Lottery winnings would help with that, but working would be more practical. I had a banner year for slacking, totalling a mere four months of credible employment, a magic trick if ever there was one. And while it would be lovely to think of this past year as usable precedent, it would also be wrong. And probably very foolish.

So. Tomorrow we are off to spend one last night in Vienna and then, I will get doped up on Ambien and tiny bottles of wine while I try to reduce the transatlantic flight to a chemically induced blur. On Wednesday, I will breath in a big noseful of steamy soup and put my feet on the ground in Seattle before counting the days until I call the foreign office back to the Seattle headquarters.

When we went to pick up my folks at the airport last month, we’d printed up these silly little signs that had their last names on them and said “Nerd’s Eye View Tours.” We wore our Nerd’s Eye View t-shirts. A man standing next to J. holding a similar sign kept leaning over to read J’s. Finally, he asked J. about our business. “Oh, we have a small office here but our main headquarters is in the US. Seattle.” They proceded to have a perfectly serious talk about the custom tour business. Then, the man collected his passengers and wandered off, wishing J. a good day.

If you’ll be in Seattle and you need a tour guide, drop me a line. It’s where I’ll be, wrapped in ambivelence. You can’t smoke in my house or bring your pets, plus, my place is small and far from child proof. But I’ll cook for you and you’ll have a lovely time, I’m quite certain of it.

–

FYI, if I ever do skyrocket to personal fame, I’ve decided that the celebrity I’d like to be linked with in the tabloids is none other than Seu Jorge. For those of you that don’t know him, he’s the musician that played David Bowie songs on the guitar in Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic.