updates

Last Sunday a friend gave a slide show presentation of the trip she took to Asia last summer and it hit me again how blessed I was to have gone on my trip last summer and how much I really do miss the people and places I visited and perhaps will never get to see again. This week I tossed off a few long-overdue e-mails to some of the people I met on the trip. I have had a few responses and updates in return and it reminds me again of how my life is not the only important one on the planet. It also gives me several opportunities to chuckle over the various language bloopers and mis-used figures of speech (with full understanding that I have nothing in my basically unilingual-state on my multilingual correspondents) that they write in good faith.
So I answer in like good faith while resolving never to marry someone whose first language is different from mine (communication is hard enough at the best of times). As much as I am planning on not marrying any of them, I do miss them a lot and wish that I could be more involved in their lives and develop a deeper friendship with each one of them. This mixed-bag of feelings gives birth to a similar mixed-bag of feelings on my tentative plan to do a longer-term bout of teaching English overseas. It's such a rich experience but hard to leave. But I suppose we shouldn't give up on a good thing merely because we'll miss it afterwards.