I don’t think I have particularly high housing standards.  Of course, I want what everyone wants - clean, lots of light, space, etc.  But I accept that I’m probably not going to find the perfect house in a rental.  We’ve spent multiple days looking for houses in Charlottesville.  I’ve looked at duplexes and traditional complexes.  Ivory towers and 1950s homes.  Shoebox rooms.  Missing appliances.  Questionable stability/cleanliness.  It’s been so much harder than I imagined to find a rent-able place.

At one point we thought we’d stumbled into a hidden ghetto judging by the amount of people standing around drinking Schlitz.  More disturbing has been the amount of people who informed us that this was normal.  It’s Charlottesville, they said.  Some even said that it’s a Southern thing.  According to these folks, it’s perfectly normal, non-ghetto, thing to stand around in your wife-beater, drinking a beer, leaning on the hood of your car, surrounded by your pregnant, actually barefoot wife and seven toddling children.  This, they said, is normal. 

My own expectation is that on a weekend day, people are moving.  They’re taking in groceries.  Washing their cars.  Mowing the lawn.  Cleaning the sidewalk. Pulling weeds.  Walking the dog.  Walking the children.  Going somewhere.  Coming back from somewhere.  The only standing around happens at barbecues.  Perhaps this is a Northern expectation.  And I’m not particularly Northern. 

Our last trip proved more fruitful.  Apparently, that extra $200 makes all the difference in the world.  We also learned some important things about the difficulties we’re going to have searching for our future house.  If left alone, I’d move into any quirky, hidden, victorian with tricky cabinets, oddly sized rooms and state of the art kitchen.  I think though that that house will be left for daydreams.  Which isn’t a bad place for it.  At least in my daydreams there isn’t any Schlitz.

I can’t believe I’ll be starting a new job in less than a month.  There is so much unresolved that I feel like my mind just might explode trying to prepare for all the possibilities.

This is, of course, what landed me in therapy before - possibilities.  I suppose I shouldn’t try to take pride in being good at it.  It’s a bad habit, this following every possibility to all of its potential outcomes.  I was pretty good at utilitarian ethics for this very reason.  What better thing to do in bed at night while trying to fall asleep than to think, “Well, if this happens, then I’ll do this.  But that could go these three ways and in each of those situations I’ll do these things.”  You can see where this is going, but who needs to sleep?!

All of this uncertainty has led to a certain sort of immobility.  Normally a crack decision maker, I can’t seem to make any decisions at all.  Worse,  while I vaguely recognize that it would be good to make decisions about this or that, I feel like I’m lacking so much information, that I instantly block out the fact that it probably isn’t as hard as it seems to make a decision and do something.  Even the simple things, like what to eat for supper, get left until they practically decide themselves.  If I can’t decide what to eat, I’m going to have a really hard time deciding how to get organized to move…

The bottom line, I’m just not a very good waiter.  I like to have as much information as possible all the time.  I think I’ll be an excellent librarian.  On the other hand, I might be still here in this chair this time next year.  Getting up would involve deciding something.

The Foreign Service is a series of goodbyes.  You arrive someplace and stay there awhile - one year, two - and from the moment you arrive you start saying goodbye.  Often you’re welcomed with a party celebrating all the other new arrivals (summer is the busiest moving season) and at the same celebration, those departing for new places are being thanked for their time.  This “Hail and Farewell” is an odd sort of thing; the new folks feel alternately disoriented, jet-lagged, welcomed and overwhelmed while those leaving may feel bittersweet, grateful, anxious or sad.  I’ve been at those parties where I’ve hit every emotion on the spectrum and then some in the space of an hour. 

That said, I think the hellos are easier.  Someplace new offers endless opportunity to occupy your mind with the details of getting settled.  What to do daily, where to put the furniture, how to unpack, how to negotiate strange telephone and internet providers, getting to know your colleagues.  You’re neck deep before you realize it, in fact, by the time you look up, six months have passed.  But the goodbyes always follow.  Even if it isn’t you, others are saying farewell, to mixed degrees of happiness and relief. 

This week marked the first of the significant goodbyes for me.  I always take it too hard, dwell too much on endings, feel too certain its always the last time.  I expect this farewell will be worse than the others since it’s two kinds of permanence.  A traditional and a final Foreign Service goodbye.  I don’t expect to see my friends again.  After all, they’ll be vacationing in Turin, not Charlottesville.  Will it be emails and cards for the next 50 years?  Unlikely.  It’s much more realistic that this is goodbye and it’s a painful, ripping sensation.

This morning, I said goodbye to the last class I’ll teach.  I was surprised at how quickly tears came to my eyes and how much I meant it when I told them I loved the Foreign Service.  I think I didn’t realize how much until that second.  It’s permanant, yes, and painful.  But, it’s time.

Congratulations are in order.  I accepted a job at the University of Virginia!  I’m so delighted to be working somewhere else, it almost overrides the overwhelming fear of inadequacy!  Yay me!

I admit I’ve been keeping this news from you.  I know.  But you know what happens when you tell the Internet something: it just can’t keep a secret.  Yes, I’m talking to you.  I’m delighted that I finally can tell you about my house-hunting woes, my new job jitters, packing and moving, and did I mention my almost paralyzing fear of trying to appear competent in my new job?  Yeah, I have a lot to say about that.

Since I won’t start until the end of July, I have an entire month to fret.  Fretting is, possibly, my most skilled hobby.  In fact, I imagine I could almost be a professional fretter.  Pity there’s no money in that.  What makes life exciting is that I, Fretter Extraordinaire, live with Pollyanna!  An odder pairing you’ve never seen.  She has perfected the fine art, nay, the zen art, of taking every problem and saying “it’ll work out.”  And let me tell you, it does, but not because things just “work out“.

Oh no, in addition to being a pro-worrier, amatuer basketcase, and if you ask her, part-time crazypants, I am also an 168-hour a week troubleshooter.  Yes, things “work out“, but only because I’ve wedged them into a satisfactory conclusion by sheer force of will.  I can only imagine where we’d be without her announcing the inevitable positive conclusion and me pouring hard labor into making it happen. 

Just because I feel like fretters are the very necessary, critically important, can’t-live-without-them minority, they get all the points today.  Take that!

Resigning from the State Department appears to be no easy task.  I did expect someadministrative difficulties and the occasional speedbump.  My friends warned me, of course.  Brave enough to resign years ago, I thought I might fall on them like a pillowy cushion of goodwill and sound advice.  But while supportive, they have offered only tales of woe.

“They kept paying me!  I had to set up a repayment plan!”
“It took me over a year to finish all of the paperwork; there were so many hurdles.”
“Don’t take your eyes off of them for a minute.  My retirement still hasn’t been converted!”

No one seems to be able to answer my questions about reimbursement for countless hours of unspent leave or how I avoid getting paid in excess.  I don’t want to spend a year “calling constantly and harassing” people as some of my friends have done.  I just want to quit.  In fact, here is what has happened in the two months since I officially withdrew from my assignment and announced my resignation: nothing.

Oh I’ve filled out forms.  I’ve turned them in.  I’ve noted my specific departure date.  And, nothing.  Silence.  It is now less than a month until I go and still, nothing.  I know it was difficult to get in, but does it have to be so difficult to get out? 

Points for listening.  I promise - good news is forthcoming.

I admit, I put the wheels into motion months ago to leave the Service.  I sought and got a secondary degree, something useful that I could use immediately.  Last fall I started searching for new jobs.  It wasn’t easy.  Typically, officers change jobs every two years and to leave suddenly, early, would have left a gap that my colleagues would have had to manage, cover and overcome.  Ethically, I struggled with my decision to apply to even one job before my assigned departure date.  I even waited to apply in earnest until the new year, hoping that lengthy academic hiring processes and other bureaucracies would keep me with State long enough to avoid being missed.  Hoping, honestly, to be able to make a decision to stay.  I never imagined how stressful it could be to juggle school, job searches and ethical professionalism without dropping a ball.

In the end, I had to drop a few balls.  I’m happy to be able to stay almost through the end of my tour.  In fact, the gap that’s coming is not one of my making.  Few bridges were burned and I believe I’m leaving with my supervisors’ and collegues respect intact.  Not an easy thing to do when you’re making a desicion so completely in conflict with their chosen life goals.  I’ve hesitated writing any of this at all - frankly, I could have used the outlet months ago when I agonized over every choice - but while many officers are bloggers, there is still a post-cold war sensitivity about airing dirty laundry. 

But I’m not the only one making this choice and I don’t feel like invisibility still suits.  Points for reading along.

What, Who, When: Atonement by Ian McEwan, reprinted in 2007.

Why on Earth: I am so delighted to be finished with school.  In two years, I haven’t been able to spend time with a book and enjoy it. And, while I’m looking forward to seeing the film, I haven’t gotten quite that far yet  and there the book was, jumping into my hand. 

Well?: I enjoyed the story.  Not surprising, given that the story was a successful film.  While I took issue with some of the main plot points, I enjoyed the way the tale wrapped around historical events like a vine, tightening on each character in turn, squeezing and blooming over each person as they grew and developed. 

I admit, my principal quibble was nothing that could have been avoided - I intensely dislike plots built on fallacy, events that, if all the characters had spoken up, could have been avoided, sparing everyone involved.  I recognize that this is a fairly common plot convention.  A and B have a falling out that could have been avoided if C had only shared what she knew.  Worse yet are the ha-ha stories of mistaken identity; A and B fall in love, but B breaks it off, causing everyone pain and suffering, because of a deep dark secret that, if A only knew, wouldn’t have been a big deal anyway.  Yes, I know this is the basis for every romantic comedy. 

Antonement’s fallacy is pivotal and runs deep enough that I could see past it for a possibility.  And so I didn’t put the book down in disgust.  In truth, I enjoyed it and left it with my sister.  It was good enough to recommend.

Normally, I dole out points at the end, but I recognize my posts have had a dark tone lately.  That said, I offer points for just being here.  Congratulations - you’re in the lead.

I’ve waited so long to write this post, I find I don’t know where to begin.  I turned in my resignation this week.  Officially, I resigned last month, but the paperwork required to get out of a bureaucracy is as bad as it is to get in.  I don’t think Secretary Rice is going to be shedding any tears over my loss and in fact, it frees up a spot for someone who really truly wants to represent their country overseas.

This was the most difficult decision I’ve ever made.  After ten years, this job has become who I am.  It’s not as if I’ve been bringing work home.  It’s that work is home.  We live diplomacy.  Our friends are diplomats.  Everything we do is what country we’re assigned to.  When September 11 happened, I was in Africa.  Africans provided solace and other American diplomats provided the tiny circle of grieving.  That night I watched French television broadcast the same shot of planes and buildings over and over with a woman who I am friends with, was friends with, will always be friends with in part because she sat with me and shared my shock.  She has since left the Service also, and I’m sure is happier for it.  When I scrubbed Anthrax from the walls of our little mailroom in a bright green bio-hazard suit, identified a friend three days in the river in a hot African morgue, hid under my desk as molotov cocktails shattered on the walls and flames licked American flags, I took those feelings home, assuming I’d be better for it. 

But here’s the bottom line: I’m not better for it, I’m worse.  I left for DC ten and a half years ago energetic, normal-sized, happy.  All the Foreign Service has given me is weight, pain, bruises in my mind, heart and soul.  I’ve spent half that time trying to get myself back; to find the woman I recognize in the mirror and convince her to stay.  When I stopped getting glimpses of her, I knew it was time to go. 

Sometime this summer, I’ll have my last day.  I don’t know when it will be yet.  I don’t have a job, although I’m working very, very hard to get one.  I’m sure that wherever that job is, I’ll find a missing person: me.

I’m not sure what it is about today.  My eyes keep falling shut.  Driving home today to walk the dog, I yelled at myself. “Hey!” I shouted.  “You stay awake!”  I learned something new while doing this, I don’t like shouting in general, but I particularly don’t like it when I shout at myself.  The drive reminded me of the long trips to and from  school when I was 19 and could be relied on to crash into sleep after an hour of driving, whether or not I was behind the wheel.  This tendency resulted in some terrifying feats of luck.  Once I pulled over in heavy fog to eat some chocolate in an effort to sugarfy myself into wakefulness, only to find when the fog cleared seconds later that my front tires were on the edge of a cliff.  I was alone, looking into nothingness and terrified into wakefulness.

Today, nothing is working.  Things I have tried:
one half peanut butter sandwich
three bottles of water
one coke
one nap in the backseat of the car (at 98 and rising, determined it was too hot)
one nap on office floor (20 minutes later I woke up wondering where I was)
one narrowly averted crash of forehead into keyboard
four walks around the building (in heat and ac)
one snickers bar
internet meandering times 7
one set of shoulder shrugs
3 efforts to consider going home and aborted while worrying I’d fall asleep on the way
one attempt to research a presentation
one comic attempt to shout at myself
one 15 minute period spent worrying that the reason I hit a curb and blew out my tire yesterday was sleep related, determining it was not and then stretching my arms and legs.
one narcolepsy search
one piece of apple flavored gum

I am still very tired.  I’m gratified know I could go to bed as early as I want to tonight but unfortunately, I know I won’t be tired then.  Go figure.  In the meantime, shhhh.  I’m trying to sleep.

This weekend, we drove past a row of couches turned up on end on a steamy, hot street corner.  If they were free, we’d have snatched one up instantly, but as the nice man expected cash, we demurred.  Our couches look like they have lost a jungle skirmish, scarred, ripped, beaten down.  We could have brought home a pretty, new couch, but that would have meant explaining things to him: