"I move in water, shore to shore"

Anyone who reads this or has talked to me knows that my time here thus far has been very up and down. I think it's like that for all of us. Socially, aesthetically, it's pretty good. I meet new friends every week. Moving to another country is hard, though. Moving to a country where most of the employers don't give a crap because there's so many people to replace you is harder. Being a non-EU citizen and having to deal with the heart-attack that is a work visa, harder still. I've come to the conclusion that nobody can agree on one set of rules because there isn't one. Like living in the Smith dorms, if I can survive this (or the crazies, in Smith's case), I can probably survive anything.

Sometimes I have a great week, then a terrible one. Three bad days, then an amazing one. One good hour, one bad. We'll be on the minute scale soon, I'm sure. I don't know what I want or what I should do, what I'm doing because I feel guilty and obligated and what I want to do. Most of the time this is okay, I really need to work on not taking life so seriously, but sometimes it gets to me.

This week has been hard. Job hard, communication hard, life hard. Germs hard. One of my good friends is moving away on Tuesday and that's also unfavorable. After suffering through the TEFL course together, it's like losing a comrade of sorts (and a vegan one, at that!). The downside of the whole expat thing is everyone's always in motion. Don't get too attached, they're just going to leave, you know. It's like college, but in months instead of years. I've already seen many people head off to bigger and better things and I've only been here about 3 months. And hell, I'm going to leave too. Sometime. When this is and where I'm going also changes every five minutes. I have a lot of plans and dates in my head, but I needn't speak of them until they stay there for more than a few days. We'll see. An inkling in my brain of doing the WWOOFing thing when the dead of winter is over, then making it back before graduation if the teaching thing doesn't stop stressing me out so much. I would very much like to see everyone left at Smith in one place before they all head off everywhere.

I've been reading "Animal. Vegetable. Miracle." and it's making me want to live somewhere for awhile so I can grow nut trees and asparagus. I think I could be almost content in life with just a garden, a food processor and a puppy. And maybe the internet. The addiction runs strong.

The point of this entry is that even though I've been having a stream of days that lead me to ask the ever-present questions, "Why am I here? What am I doing with my life? What will I do next? When will 'next' even be?!", today I decided to walk back from I.P. Pavlova instead of taking the tram 4 stops. As I was walking up to the park I normally cut through, I saw this tiny scraggly dog, maybe a small Yorkie, hopping around at the entrance. His owner, a man maybe in his late 30s, bent down to play with it, picked it up to his face level and presumably said lots of really cutesy things to it in Czech. He then put the dog down, who was content sniffing a bush, and started walking ahead. Upon whistling the dog immediately ran to his side, then ahead, and kept peeing on the fence every 10 or so feet while making eye contact with him in a "Daddy, look what I can do! This fence is mine now!" gesture. Eventually the dog ran up to a dirt pile near me and rubbed its butt across it. It made my day much better. It also made me decide that if I'm going to be straight I can only date boys who play with dogs.

How simple life would be if my only goals were a) sniff things and b) pee everywhere.