Strawberry Swing

It’s Friday and I’m quarantined. It gives me too much time to think in a small space and makes me feel for those two journalists detained in North Korea. I’m quarantined because within 3 or 4 days of being back I started up flu like symptoms. Honestly, I feel sick. Not sure it’s swine flu…but we’ll see when those test results come back. They were supposed to be back tonight but they are NOT, so I guess it’s tomorrow.I just got back from America. My best friend is married…it’s crazy. My best friend is married, one of my other best friend’s is engaged and pregnant with her second child, and my other very close friend (who is basically me) lives in Russia. I will never tire of saying, ‘life is weird.’ I feel like in this blog I tend to stay away from how I feel about everything unless I’m angry. Also, I’ve gotten really behind. If anyone still reads this…sorry about that. I know that by deciding to live overseas I made a choice, a choice that is accompanied by some fallout. What I mean by that is when you go to live overseas you naturally lose touch with some people, naturally grow apart from others, and grow in a different direction than you would have back home. I knew this when I decided to leave but I had no idea what it would feel like. You don’t even realize it’s happened though, and there’s the rub. It’s like not realizing you lost your wallet until you reach for it and it’s not there. At first, you feel emotional and panicked, but after a few minutes you realize there’s not much to do anyways so you may as well chill out. I have never felt lonely in Korea until today. I realize that this is probably due in large part to the fact that I’m quarantined, but the feeling is still there. I was thinking about the life I chose and talking to a close friend of mine who lives in Russia. I told her that when you choose a life like this, you just have to accept this strange loneliness. You know there are people that love you very much, but you chose to live very far away from them so you have to deal with whatever you find where you end up. I’m not complaining, I know what I chose. Most of the time, I love it and would never choose a different life. But there are definitely times when I realize that the things I care about more than myself are very far away. In unrelated news, my co worker did a midnight run. If you don’t know what that is, it’s when an employee leaves the country they’re working in without any prior notification to their employer. My boss didn’t find out until 5 minutes after the first lesson started (there’s some good management for you). He called me pretty panicked. We had just been to the public health office on orders from a doctor to get me tested for swine flu. The office put me on quarantine and said I couldn’t go anywhere and my bosses last sentence to me when he called was, “You’re quarantined, right?” I’m not sure if he was asking if I was still around and not leaving without notice, or if he was trying to get me to work today. Either way, he was freaking out. I guess with all this free time I could figure out my life. Then again, what’s the rush? I’ve been saying I need to figure out my life for at LEAST a year now, what’s another day?