How Can I Leave This Behind? (The Big Announcement)

Almost nine years!

My god, talk about a drinking binge that got out of control. That's almost as much time as Tim Robbins was in Shawshank. Like more than 20 percent of my life!

I've seen teenage party girls become divorced single mothers. Streets full of wooden buildings are now massive glossy shopping centers. The country (and indeed the world) went from bust to boom to bust again.

I certainly never planned it this way. However, when I got here in summer of 2000, I was pretty burned out on moving around. This was my fifth city in my third country in two years, and since 1994, I'd visited several dozen others.

I wanted some continuity in my life.

I got a cat, and a DVD player . . . I still did not, however, think I would be staying more than a few years. But one thing happened after another -- in 2002 I was having too much fun to leave. In 2003 I started doing the online DELTA course, and that took me until 2006 to finish. Then they made me Director of Studies in 2007. . . a bit of an anti-climax, that, but never mind.

Through it all: girls, booze, girls, booze, girls, booze. . .

The drinking and carousing peaked in 2005 and 2006 with a lot of absinthe consumption; it cooled off quite a bit in 2007 and 2008. For good reason; the alcohol was taking its toll on everyone, and I was starting to do things like pee on the rug while I was blacked out. (Hardly the kind of thing James Bond would do.) And even if I caught a Russian hottie, I was generally too drunk to do much other than collapse unconscious.

As for the continuity in my life, that proved to be just as elusive for an English teacher standing still as for an English teacher moving. Every two years, I found I pretty much had a completely new set of girlfriends and colleagues. (Every two years I would talk about leaving, and every two years the females I knew would tell me not to go; two years later, those same females were inevitably either married, living in a different city, or both. It was never hard to find replacements, though.)

Anyway, two things are going to happen this summer: I'm going to turn 40. . .

and I'm going to go to Saudi Arabia to work.

It's a done deal. I signed the contract already, and informed my current employers that I'm going. Unless Pakistan nukes India, or something like that, I'm going. It's defo.

Yes, it's the money, but it's also that I sorely need some sort of perspective restored in my life. It seems to me that deprivation in the alcohol and women departments might renew my appreciation for them. (I find that even barely-legal Russian cootchie doesn't interest me much more than a good episode of THE SHIELD. Pretty much Sign #1 of Burnout.)

So it's been a hell of run, but finally, slowly but surely, it's coming to an end. . .