snow patrol - chocolate

this could be the very minute
i'm aware i'm alive
all these places feel like home

I gave my formal notice at my job: my last day will be Aug 28. My visa is good until the end of October, however, so I might stick around and be a bum for two months after finishing work... I haven't decided yet.

I've accumulated a lot of junk -- far more clothes than I'll ever need (I have knee-high boots, goodness knows why, and what will I do with all those salwar kameez back home?) And as I am clearing it all out to figure out what stays and what comes home with me --

More than anything else, I want to take back the "fuck it" attitude.

India's taught me that it's going to be okay in the end -- or if it's not going to be okay, there's nothing I can do about it. I can ride sidesaddle on a motorcyle without a helmet, multiple times, and nothing will happen -- but then an acquaintance stopped at the side of a road will get his legs broken when a car runs into a motorcycle which runs into him.

I realized a couple of weeks ago, while singing along to the music in a cafe as I frequently do now, that I never would have done such a thing back in the States. Well, why the hell not? What do I have to lose?

When everyone is staring at you anyway, when you are always a freak show no matter what you do, you just start to enjoy it, enjoy the freedom of not really caring. And over that time, that freedom turns into assertiveness and confidence.

These days, if someone does something I dislike, I am incredibly blunt in correcting that person immediately. I am getting better, though I still need to work on it, at giving feedback to folk with the assumption that they just didn't know that some kind of adjustment or correction needs to be made, and that we should work together to figure out what that adjustment is.

So I'm going back to a country where most interviewers will likely not believe any of my stories about my current job because they honestly could never happen in the States. I have no job, no plan, no boyfriend, no clear future and will turn 30 in a year-and-a-half.

Oh well. Fuck it.

I could focus on what I don't have, but why? It's much more fun to focus on what I want. I want to sing along to songs at cafes, so I will. I want to be ripped off less, so I bargain. I want to get my juice with ice and I want to sit in a booth instead of the uncomfortable chairs at a restaurant, so I ask.

At work, I want a certain level of quality from my staff, so I demand it. With my friends, I want them to understand me as clearly as I am, so I am blunt with them, too, even when it might hurt a bit.

It all works out in the end somehow. And if it doesn't, there's nothing I can do about it.