via ajpsc

Hello!

A happy Memorial Day to all you USers and a good Monday to everyone else.

It has been a while, and though it feels strange to write a personal blog of my life on FnF, which I consider to be separate from a personal blog, I feel like I owe it to you guys before getting back to schedule. So if you’re interested in why I’ve been away, read on. I’ve divided it into two parts for simplicity sake. If not, there will be a how-to, inspirational article, or other silliness soon.

I wouldn’t call it a quarter-life crisis, because I haven’t felt in a crisis this whole time, but I would call the past eight months a lifestyle overhaul. So many things in my life changed or didn’t in ways I could not have anticipated that a total redirect had to take place, including my absence from the online world for a while. I had to re-center and find my feet again before I could start back running.

In November, the boy and I decided to try for the JET program. It’s the Japanese government’s teaching exchange program. They pay you to go to Japan and teach English for a year. We applied and anxiously waited until February, when we both luckily got interviews. The interview was okay, but I knew then I didn’t do as well as I should have, and Mister felt the same. We continued on in our blase jobs until April when we found out that unfortunately, Mister was not chosen and I was an alternate, which meant after six months of waiting, I still had to wait more. The idea of keeping on in our current situations, me in my cube job 40+ hours a week with a hellish commute and Mister in his low-paying, awful hours gig in the suburbs, was too much to handle after anticipating such great change in our lives. Not to say our jobs were bad, just that we were more than ready for things to change, and drastically. To boot, our relationship was getting to the point where marriage, or at least that kind of commitment, seemed imminent rather than a scary, faraway notion. For the past year and a half of our relationship, we could only see each other two days a week on weekends, as our jobs and lives were on opposite sides of the city.

The end of my lease was looming at the end of April. So, we decided to pack up our things and move to Tennessee, where my family lives. The plan, if JET had worked out, was to move to Nashville for the few months between moving to Japan anyway, and we figured it was our next best bet. Take another leap of faith, and see where we’d land, but at least we’d land somewhere together.

The rest of the story, and what’s to come next, tomorrow.