Making Decisions

Sometimes you make perfectly good decisions, and everything goes terribly wrong anyway. Sometimes a bad decision you made a month or a year or five years ago suddenly causes everything to go terribly wrong in the present. Sometimes good things come from bad decisions and bad things come from sensible well thought through decisions. Sometimes you have no clue whether a decision was a good one or a bad one.

And sometimes you meant to make a decision in October that you did not for various reasons and even though you don't regret it, you know you can't just let it go again because this time you will regret it.

I have things keeping me here until the end of the summer, but at the end of August, I need to leave.

1) Do I move to D.C. like I have always wanted to because I love the city and want to be near my grandmother and also the east coast?

2) Do I move to Chicago because the city is okay and I could live with Alexa and be near my sister?

3) Do I call the French Embassy and ask to be put on a list of candidates to fill in for the assistants who cancel in August so I can go back to the life that still sometimes keeps me up at night missing it?

Any one of these could end up being a Poor Decision and that is why they terrify me. Sure I love D.C., but it's expensive and I have no job. What if I don't find one? Will I be okay living with strangers? What happens when my good friend there finds her way back to New York and leaves me possibly friendless? What do I do after I've spent all of my savings and still have no job?

Chicago is pretty cool, and I can live with my Alexa and torment my sister on the weekends that she is not traveling the country with her swords, but it's expensive and I have no job. Also, it is damn COLD in the winter. And far from many people I do not want to be far from.

I miss France desperately, and I miss the excitement, the food, the language, the uncertainty and the drama, the travel, the adventure, my friends and my students. But I remember the angry emails and the tearful phone calls home, I remember missed buses and lying officials, I remember strikes and everything being closed on Sundays and Mondays and Wednesday afternoons and sometimes Saturdays and occasionally Thursdays. I remember bleeding money and yelling at completely apathetic kids and suffering through cold showers and washing my clothes in the bathroom sink. France is almost always a terrible idea, but it is my very favorite one.

So now what?