Past, Present, and Future

 Today I log in to my email accounts and turn to the calmail.berkeley.edu site. Only to find that, I no longer have access to this email account. I knew it was coming, the last month I've been telling myself to send an email out to all of my contacts and let them know they need to contact me through a different email account. I procrastinated, it was the most procrastination I've ever done. I waited beyond the deadline. I knew the date was around the 10th, but apparently it was the 9th. Why I've been holding onto this last piece of connection to my beloved alma mater, well, many reasons. While it has now been 10 months since graduation, the cold rainy days in San Diego always bring me daydreaming back to Berkeley. Where I enjoyed the rain and appreciated the harshness of the cold while I consistently wore jeans and the same Cal jacket practically every day. It was indeed, the only jacket I had, unless I wanted to bring my snowboarding jacket from SD, but that would be over doing it. We San Diegans, don't have much use for jackets.

Realizing Berkeley is in the past has been rather difficult to implant into my encephalon. Instead of trying to make new associations and trying to break away from my past to make sense of my present and future, I use my past (Berkeley) to make up for my current feeling of discontent with my occupational accomplishments. Graduating in 2010 was one of the worst times anyone could have ever graduated along with 2009 as the U.S. economy hit the recession deeply. Adding to this, the desire to work for a nonprofit, economically made things difficult. I did find employment though, thanks to a friend who was already employed there. It is a place of employment I likely never would have applied to work for as it works with a population whom I never found an interest. Additionally, knowing that the wage I would earn would be much less than the wage I earned before I was accepted into Berkeley made it more of an undesirable position to apply for. Sure enough, the population I wanted to work with, refugees, required workers with 5 plus years of work experience and/or graduate degrees and/or knowledge of Burmese, Karen, Arabic, and so forth...All things of which I do not yet attain. Therefore, seeing my bank account dwindling to a frightening minimum and the job prospects not looking in any direction but down, I went for it and got it. Being there for 9 months has shown its ups and downs. Currently I am applying for a different position within the same organization and have a very strong chance of acquiring it. The interview was yesterday and it went very well.

The last few weeks I've been reading a blog I found of a person I've come to admire. He moved to Hanoi, Vietnam, in May 2009 and plans on staying until the Spring of 2012. He has continuously studied Vietnamese and creates blog posts that are historically, culturally, socially, and environmentally descriptive, interesting, and compelling. See: http://hanoiscratchpad.blogspot.com/ One of the last few posts I read of his was about enjoying the present. This is something I've certainly had trouble with as of late. I continuously look at maps of Cambodia and Vietnam, read about their histories, cultures, languages etc. The daydreaming, dreams, and images that pop up are constantly surrounded by these two countries. It's difficult for me not to do these things as I feel like a school boy getting the answer to a question right and receiving a piece of candy. The excitement for my eventual sojourn in Vietnam mounts day by day. Consequently my ability to appreciate the weather, flowers, and scenery of San Diego lessens continuously. Finding balance is the mantra I need to live by. Balance after all, proves to be the best way to handle things in life. I hiked black mountain last week and vowed to myself I'd make it a regular occurring exercise of mine. I skipped this week, adding to the imbalance and current state of turmoil in my mind regarding my life. I now have 4 hours until my Vietnamese language class and have yet to complete the homework and many of the chores I meant to do yesterday on my day off. Yesterday I played, today, I work.