wrote_and_writ

I’ve been home for two weeks, and it’s at least a month before I can go home again. Life is weird.

We’ve got a spring break coming up, the first week of March, and the second I got paid, I was on the internet, looking up flights. Should I go to Edinburgh? Amsterdam? Madrid? Yes, to all, but also, not this break. I still don’t know how much my plane tickets to get back to China will cost, so I am being Very Responsible and saving my money. After all, Edinburgh, Amsterdam, and Madrid will all be there this summer, or next year during our October break, or next Christmas. And there’s Australia and New Zealand and Germany and Wales and Morocco and Greece and Norway and Canada and the world.

But making actual plans? That’s a different story. Making plans for anything more than a year out scares me. It always has in a vague sense, and now, as I’m in a sort of exile due to the most bonkers unforeseen circumstances, plans seem utterly futile.

I had lunch with my bestie yesterday, and we talked about our jobs and families and she mentioned that after her current doggo shuffles off his mortal coil (hopefully not for YEARS because he is still a pupper), she wants a German shepherd, but she wants to wait until she retires so she can have time to properly train an intelligent dog and spend loads of time with it. Bestie is seven years younger than me, and she’s been at her same job for the last seven years. She has complaints about her post — and who doesn’t? — but she is going to stay. She has a house. She loves to travel, but she is going to stay where she is. Now, she has some family circumstances that make a few of her choices for her, things I don’t have to deal with. But, I mean, she has plans! She has a retirement account, plans to pay off her student loans, and just, like, goals.

My current retirement plan is to work until I’m about seventy, travel on the breaks, and then just, like, die, I guess. Preferably at my desk in the middle of an obnoxious class. No, I don’t want to traumatize the kiddos, even if they’re being assholes. I want to die in the middle of a staff meeting. Just, like, chuck forward and my admin’s feet and expire. I want my last words to be, “this could have been shared in an email.”

Obviously, I’m joking. A little. I can start at any time to make a plan, to get my retirement shit going. But there is a part of me that is like, “why, though?” It’s not that I particularly want to be dead, but what am I chugging on for? Right now, I love my job, I love to travel and there is so much of the world I want to see, so many people to meet. But in thirty years? When I’m tired? I look at my grandpa, who’s ninety one and missing my grandma so much. He can’t really do much. He loved to make clocks, but in the last five years or so, his hands basically quit working for him. I don’t want to chuck on for another fifty years, not like that.

I don’t really have a point with this. It’s just something that’s been on my mind. Also, the phrase making plans connects in my brain with the phrase making pies and the Patty Griffin song of that name, in which the narrator is a middle-aged single lady who lost her sweetheart in a war, never married, has a nephew, and walks to the diner every day, makes pies, volunteers at the church once a week, and that’s it. No one can eviscerate me quite the way that Patty Griffin can.

I’m being a bit stupid. I’m not stuck. I’m not broken. I’m not in charge of the universe, but I can do some things. Sometimes, though, I get stuck in that vision of myself, behind a counter, endlessly making pies.

What are my pies?