Saturday, August 15, 2009

What am I doing with my life? Part 3

I am not a person to make plans. I mean, I'm an INFJ and yes I prefer to know where and when I'll be hanging out well in advance, but I don't run my life by plans. I'm a passive person and I like to sort of let things happen to me, things tend to work out like that. Other people seem to have direction and ambition; I just sort of float around. I tend take my life one "chunk" at at time: in high school, I didn't think beyond college. In college, I didn't think beyond moving to Stockholm to be with my boyfriend. Turns out that necessitated a move to Korea, and now that I'm in Korea, I'm trying to figure out what the next chunk is.

I've been dating my boyfriend for a while now, about six years. I definitely want to spend my life with him, I'm not suffering from cold feet. But...I really like Korea. My job here is pretty easy and fun (most of the time), it's very easy to save money, and honestly I like puttering around on my own. Being a grown-up in Korea is surprisingly easy. Additionally, I've made a few friends here that I will miss when I go home. I'd like to have more than one year with them. (It's hard for me to make friends, but once I do, they're really important.) I'm running out of time here in Korea, and the pressing question just becomes even more important: what am I going to do when I go home?

Part of me wants to go back home, work my old job, lose some weight (vanity!), visit my boyfriend, and then come back Korea in 2011. I've taken to Korean culture pretty easily (like a fish to water, or more appropriately, a Russian to vodka). Plus, as a weigukin, I could rock graduate school for an obscenely little amount of money. Not that I've ever been particularly enthusiastic about graduate school, but much like Jaclyn, I feel that as a "smart kid" I'm obligated to collect degrees like Girl Scout badges. At the least, I'd like to take some Korean classes.

At the same time, despite all my fun here, I miss my boyfriend. I know he misses me, too—to be honest, he's probably the one worse off during my contract. And while we've spent most of our relationship on different continents, I feel like one more year in Korea would be an unbearable strain on our relationship.

Unfortunately, he would be hard pressed to get a job here in Korea. You need a four-year degree to teach here, and he never went to university. And there's not much else for white people who don't speak Korean to do here, it's pretty much just teaching or military.

So I have before me: move to Stockholm, stay in Korea. Not counting my love affair with Indonesia, or flights of fantasy I have from time to time, where I spend a year or two just idling around with college friends in a new city back home. There's so much in life to do, it's impossible for me to pick.

No comments:

Post a Comment