Checkpoint, October 16 2023

I promised my friends I would blog my journey for the next year; it’s taken a while, but here we finally are. What was it that Douglas Adams said about deadlines?

Suggested music: Donkey Kong Country 2 - Stickerbush Symphony

I’m 22 years, four months, and five days old plus or minus a few hours. This past August (really this past May, but for technical reasons it’s August), I graduated from a big school called Michigan in a small city called Ann Arbor. In winter you could sit under the snowy grey trees and let the flow of the Huron River soothe your ears, and in summer you could perch yourself atop a hill on North Campus and watch the reds and pinks of the sunrise paint over newly green trees. I loved it, then hated it, then loved it again until I said goodbye.

In the middle of August I left the country that I’d been in for most of my life and snaked from Portugal all the way to Lithuania over the course of an exhilitaring, exhausting forty-day journey. Now I’m in a small city called Łomża two hours northeast of Warszawa, six time zones away from the Huron River¹, where I can anticipate settling in until July of next year. From there, life is less certain.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been asking myself what the heck I’m doing here instead of jumping into a PhD or a $100K+ tech job like most of my friends. The factual answer is that I’m an US Student Fulbright ETA (English Teaching Assistant) in Poland, and if I want my own answers I should look at the essays I submitted to get the job. But I’m teaching computer science courses instead of English, and I don’t know that what I wrote a year ago is accurate anymore either.

Why am I here? Why am I so far away from the people I love?

I feel that I’m looking for an answer to a specific question. I can count the decades I’ll have with the fingers on my two hands; I doubt I can do the same for the decades I want. My biggest fear is death, but my second-biggest fear is turning 70 and realizing I wasted my time. So the question is: with these decades, what do I want to do? What do I want to do before I go? What can I accept never experiencing, and what things are a must? I ditched music, writing, art, sport, even reading before bed to get my computer science degrees, and at the end of the day I’m just not satisfied at the prospect of spending every waking hour with an IDE open². I have no problem dedicating an honest week of work to programming; the question is what to do with the rest of the time.

My hosts have been incredibly generous; I’ve received an electronic drawing pad and supposedly a guitar is coming soon. My laptop is a workhorse that can happily run composition software or a game engine editor. I have a left luggage in Spain with a few hundred dollars’ worth of textbooks for study (all software-oriented), as well as my swimtrunks for when I have the energy to go to the local indoor swimming pool. The camera I bought for my Europe trip is sitting on my desk; the 100 GB of photos I’ve taken are in the cloud and ready to share once I finish writing the five or six blog posts that will accompany them. On top of all this, my job is only 20 hours a week. This will probably be one of my best opportunities to explore in my handful of decades.

Still, I long for home. I want to be with my friends – not on a Discord call but with them, in the same room – laughing, teasing, telling them the things I wish I’d told them. I said my goodbyes, but I wanted to say more. I suppose it’s a matter of courage, because it would be perfectly possible to withdraw and spend all my free time playing video games, doing nothing, and then come back to the United States and simply be a year behind my classmates who went directly to work. If I’m going to avoid making these next nine months a waste of time, then I’ll need to be stronger. People better than me have told me that I am strong. I hope they’re right.

Anyway, that’s where I’m at right now. My first class is in an hour. I’ll keep you all posted.

1. It really should be seven. The sun is setting at 15:30 in December, which is completely bonkers to me. But then you could say Poland is Eastern European, and supposedly they really don’t like it when you say that… ↩

2. Nothing against the folks who are satisfied at that prospect; I do enjoy coding and I find large software ecosystems in particular fascinating. But I don’t think coding by itself is enough to satisfy me. ↩