Impatiently Pouting

I am grouchy with impatience. I want to feel like we're making progress, moving forward. Most of the stuff in the house, we can't Freecycle or sell until the spring. The job offers aren't really going to happen for another 3-4 months. Some have been trickling in, but it's a trickle. The job updates e-mail comes in every night at 5 pm, and it's like opening a tiny gift with a few clicks. Most of the jobs available now have been in places we're not interested in, like China and the Middle East. A few came up last night for Sudan. I clicked on the school's link, curious about what they'd have to offer to get people to teach there, and the answer is everything. Salary, huge housing allowance, laptop, even a car. They had to emphasize that it was a safe place to live. I wish them luck, but I think I'm all set with a place where "hacking by machete" is a top cause of death.

I spend any free time at school on Google Earth, looking at school locations and trying to imagine where we'd live (I am so glad that my lessons are time-tested enough to just pull them out and go). One of my top considerations is living somewhere we wouldn't need a car. I love the idea of taking public transportation to work, and this is reinforced for me twice a day when I'm stuck in my 18-mile, hour-long commute. Yes, 18 miles... one hour. The traffic is mind-numbing.

In Germany last year, I met up with an old boyfriend of mine from high school who basically never left. Although he was as American as they come back when I knew him, he is a German citizen now, and even speaks English with a slight accent (because he's so used to speaking German) which blows my entire mind. He said something to me that stuck firm like the Sean Penn relief thing. He said he couldn't stand the car culture of the US. You have to drive everywhere. When he comes back to visit his parents, within a few days he and his wife will look at each other, usually in the car stuck in traffic, and say "I want to go home." He doesn't own a car. He says that he likes the idea that he can walk out his front door to the bus stop, and from there he can go anywhere in the world. I suppose this is also true with a car, but there's the issue of parking and insurance and BLECCH. We're selling our cars when we leave and we sincerely hope that we won't need to buy another for many years.

I think about this every day as we creep, creep, creep forward on our way to or from work. Car culture. It is soul-sucking and exhausting, and by the time we get home we're irritated and tired. Even half of the ads on TV and radio-- and the most shouty, annoying ones-- are car ads.