makin' like a hockey player and leafing

Coming Soon to an America near you!

Just got off the horn with Hawaiian Air, and Australia will be short one Ben come Sunday. Plan is to dust off from Sydney in four days, land in Honolulu ten and a half hours before I take off, hang out in Hawaii for a shade over a week, and then pop off to Santa Francomocisco on June 18th. From then I'll probably burn a week in the Bay Area before moseying to points east.

Aside from selling off the car ($800AUD, and the radiator went pear-shaped hours before I sold it. Lucked out with two Brits who didn't mind fixing it themselves for the right price.) the past week has been mostly waffling about what I should do - go back to the states and rustle up a job, pop off to NZ or thailand/laos/cambodia/malaysia and break the bank, or find some cash-in-hand work in australia and then pop off to other lands. I finally sacked up and decided to go home.

I'm in no particular rush to get home, but it seems like the right choice. That's not to say I don't miss friends, family, and familiarity - I missed them the moment I left. It's more that there's no deadline, mostly no job or classes to start. But the biggest question I've got right now (and for the past few years) is if I've got the chops to actually work - to actually design something I'm proud of, to produce something to call my own, to actually affect something other than my own development; to just make Something happen. And to misuse; semicolons. It sounds like hippie crap even as I write it, but it feels right. Staying here and working wouldn't be the challenge I'm looking for, despite getting flair points for being NotAmerica. Maybe an engineering job in NZ, Dubai, or perhaps Europe would scratch the travel itch and chip away at the work thing at the same time. I feel like I'm almost over my Having A Purpose hangup, and willing to finally try something. Or maybe I'm just trying to tack some personal change on at the end of this Oz trip.

Here's where the paragraph about how travelling has 'changed me' (Changed Me? don't think I like the capitalizationing anymore) would go - but I haven't the slightest idea how it has. It was frightenly easy to slip into old internet-addict (short-term mental stimulation addict) habits once I lost momentum here in Sydney/Manly - so I'm not exactly some phoenix reborn. A friend pointed out, I may well realize further down the road that something has changed. Either way, I can say for sure, it certainly has been a trip.