Four more sleeps and then I am off.

I am shards of emotion, swept together like a pile of broken glass.  The edges are raw and sharp, and as I look down at my pieces shattered on the floor, I wonder how I ever fit whole together.

A few days ago, I asked one of my friends if it would be acceptable for me to run around screaming, hands waving in the air.  She advised me to do it behind closed doors, if I must, which made me laugh.  And while I probably won't actually run around screaming--I mean, this isn't a Disney or Family channel TV show, or anything--I do feel like a mess of emotions waiting to explode.

Saturday I will be flying to another country, in another continent, not for vacation, but to live for a year.  It's not a simple thing to come back home if I miss my parental units or if I have forgotten something.  What's more, I'm going to a country where the main language isn't English.  I will be completely out of my element.

Scared?  Oh yeah.  I feel confident in saying that I am terrified.  What if something goes wrong? What if I have trouble adjusting or making friends?  What if I don't like it? These thoughts nag at the edge of my consciousness.

And yet I am also excited.  More excited for this adventure than many other things I have done to date.  When I think about the coming year, I get a goofy grin on my face and I can't wait!  It's hard to believe that I leave in just a few short days.  When I first accepted the job in January, August seemed so far away, but now I stand on the threshold.  I've been waiting for this moment for so long and it is finally here.

I think it's okay to be emotional at this time.  It's okay to feel topsy-turvy and upside down.  It's weird, and a little unnerving at times, but it's okay.  After all, it is a huge change.  It would be weirder to not feel anything, I suppose...

And am I fully packed yet? Nope. Not quite.

Packing to Move

No matter what kind of move or how far away, I doubt it is ever easy.  I've had to move each year during my university career and each time I went to pack up my room, it always amazed me at how much stuff I somehow collected.  How could I have so much?  Where did it all come from in the first place?

Each move was simple in that for the most part, everything was coming with me.  Get the boxes, fill them, put them in the car, take them back home--or to my new residential unit.  Then unpack and wait the 8-12 months until I would do it again.  Rinse and repeat.

Now that I am moving to another country, I am faced with a different type of dilemma.  I can't just bring everything (and honestly, I wouldn't want to bring everything), but it's a tough process deciding what is necessary and what is redundant.  Space is limited (as is weight!) and I don't want to fill it with items that I can later easily acquire.  Instead, I need to conserve my space for the items that I won't be able to get and yet will still miss.

It's hard.  I wish my bags would pack themselves, but I suppose life is not that easy.

Onward I go!

Losing some Wisdom

I remember watching an episode of the cartoon Sabrina the Teenage Witch when I was in grade school where Sabrina's wisdom teeth were coming in.  As a young witch, she didn't see why she had to do have the mortal operation.  She didn't want to suffer any pain, swelling and overall unpleasantness from the surgery.  Naturally, as a young witch she decided to magic them out.  This, however, led to other complications. With her wisdom teeth magically removed, Sabrina starts making extremely stupid and dangerous decisions--as though she has actually lost her wisdom.  In the end has to magic her wisdom teeth back in order to have the mortal surgery.

All this to say that I got my wisdom teeth removed last week.  Maybe I was channeling my inner Sabrina, but I really wished I could magic my teeth away without having to go under.  I was terrified.  Call me a big baby, but I was more scared of going to the surgeon's last week than I am about my upcoming move to South Korea.  Maybe it's because I have a good imagination and the thought of the pain and discomfort was too vivid. 

Peu importe!

I walked into the office with sweaty palms and a nauseous stomach.  Good thing you're not allowed to eat 8 hours before the surgery!  The nurse asked me some questions, hooked me up to an I/V, we chatted... it was almost time... she put in the anaesthetic... and then it was over.  I was waking up to a frozen face.

While I won't deny being terrified, I will admit that the whole procedure, and even the follow-up couple of days, were not as bad as I thought they would be.  I didn't even need a lot of pain medication.  The worst part was that I wasn't allowed to do anything that would get my heart rate going.  I couldn't even walk my dog.  I was stuck at home and that was B-O-R-I-N-G.  That and I really missed chewing.  I didn't think that chewing was something you could miss until all I ate was yogurt and soup for 48 hours--really, not even a terribly long time, but long enough.  

I just wanted to bite into something!

At least now, my wisdom teeth are not something I will have to worry about.  And I suppose I learned something from the whole procedure, too.