Extended absences are good for the soul. Many moons ago, I lost all of the posts on the previous incarnation of this blog, and my general disinterest in blogging at the time led me to abandon the institution of blogging altogether. But I could never forsake my old mistress completely. Absence, as they say, makes the heart grow fonder. So, without much fanfare, the blog is back. I will be maintaining this blog, as well as The Adventures of ShadKat blog on which both my wife and me post intermittently.
What’s changed? Well, let’s see. My wife and I have been teaching in South Korea for over a year and a half. The zeal with which we initially entered the field of teaching English as a Foreign Language has waned, and we’ve decided to set a hard and fast time frame for our stay in Korea: three years. That means that, in another year and a half, we’ll be back home in Arizona. What, exactly, this entails for our future remains to be seen.
They say that employers look upon a prospective employee’s work experience abroad as little more than a paid vacation – that someone who teaches in another country should expect to return home and start from scratch, so to speak. I respectfully disagree. I think I can parlay my three years of experience in South Korea into a rewarding career in diplomacy. I’m currently working toward becoming a Foreign Service Officer (FSO), a much longer title for someone who is pretty much a diplomat. That means becoming well-versed in a wide range of topics, including foreign policy, the histories of hotbed nations like Afghanistan and Iraq, and reading a daily rag like the New York Times.
It’s been an informative past few months, to say the least. I’ve blown through my first issue of the Journal of Foreign Affairs, a publication so massive that it only comes out every two months, several weeks of the ultra-liberal news magazine The Nation, and the first half of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, which is on the Department of State’s recommended reading list for one reason or another.
What this means for you, dear reader, is that I’m back to posting about things you may or may not care about. I’ll try to stir up the pot a little bit because the Facebook fights resulting from my blog posts are always entertaining. Feel free to share your thoughts on this blog, Twitter, or Facebook.
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