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For three years, I have been in China teaching Swing Dancing. Now I'm wandering yet again...
2005-08-27
And the latest
I've got some good friends out here. My friend Orchid, student card #001, is one of the most stable and helpful persons I've known. She's the most likely person to rely upon if something important and challenging needs to be done. She's also a quite good dancer.
Chris is also a good girl. She and I trained extensively for a while, and she became my dance partner. She's doing so well at dancing now that it's scary. Since she has had to be both a leader and a follower in dance, she's getting good at them both. Plus, she's got a certain youthful energy and spunk which keeps me going sometimes when I need it most.
My friend Mike is also an American, about 25, and he's also running a business of his own out here. He's very high-energy and intense, and he lives one block away from me right now. We get together about once per week and say hello. He's been a good ear, too, when I've had something I need to talk with about someone.
Ivo is quite an interesting character, too! He's Dutch, and he's teaching ballroom dance out here. He always comes to my swing classes, and he refers a lot of people to both the classes and parties. Also, since he is trying to do the same type of thing I am, I find he's perhaps the only person who understands the difficulties in trying to run a social dance school. One of the few people I can relate to, and also a cool person to hang out with on the afternoon. I think of him as a younger brother sometimes.
Andrea is another wonderful person. She was the boogie woogie and swing dance champion of Europe for six years. She and I worked on the movie the White Countess together, and when the time came that it looked I would take the center stage and she would have a more supporting role, she never got jealous or contributed any less. I wonder if I could say I would have done the same!
And then there's Annie, a very intersting girl. President of the college swing dance club, she's one of the very few people I can count on to always volunteer and always come to the events. She's also ambitious and organized enough to take care of getting 30 students, arranging for a practice space with a stereo, and handling all the advertising and such things. I have high prospects for her.
There's my friend David, who's an older guy who has helped promote various swing events. He's in the U.S. right now for the summer, and I often miss his youthful energy and frenetic flow of ideas.
And so on and so forth.
These last couple of weeks I've been feeling a bit drained, so I thought I would be a good idea to remember just what things I do have in life right now. And in Shanghai, the people I have met and what types of things we have been able to do together.
I'm working now, as I've said, on making the swing dancing thing a legacy. I need to get another job (unless something changes drastically), so I can see how I might not be able to be at the core of things. I guess it's been a difficult realization. It's not an outright defeat, but it is a dissapointment in a way. After two years, we have gained so much, but the 'movement' as such has not taken off to the degree I'd hoped for. I'm going to take a final withdrawl from my savings, then come up with a transition plan. At the moment, what I want to accomplish is to make swing self-sustaining. Then step back from it for a while and hopefully it will stand on its own and continue to grow, not unlike a child in some basic respects.
Then I need to re-examine my regular career prospects. E Commerce related things would be a logical choice. There's also Event Management, which is something I've had experience with in China for the last two years. I think E Commerce would be far more lucrative, and frustrating as it may be, still more predictable than Event Management. Having followed my dream and my emotions with swing, I have experienced the life of an artist. It is really cool, however, I can't shake the lack of security feeling. The responsibilities in any job will eventually become burdensome, and if there's no financial reward in it, makes you wonder if you are doing the right thing.
I guess there's also the back-of-the-mind thing about whether to start a family or not. At 35, I'm at the point where I am still healthy and physically able, although I feel the difference between say, this age and 10 years ago. Looking forward 20, or 25 years, I have to think that I'll need to have the energy to maintain a family, so perhaps I should not wait too long. Financially speaking, too, even if I don't decide to have a family, I'll need to be able to retire at some point.
My fried Mikey from back home said once that he could see me being the type of person never to have a family. I think this is possible. I've had several long-term girlfriends, but in only one case have I felt there was a future to look forward to. In most other cases, I've enjoyed the relationship but always felt like eventually it would change on to something else.
Also, I've never been a person who's be too altogether fond of kids. You see them, say hi, then by bye, but that's perhaps good enough! The people I know who are similar in personality to me and have kids usually say about the same things I'd expect to say: it's nice, love their kids, but it's kind of draining and not that much fun. With plenty of people in the world as it is, there's no global responsibility to create more people. Probably just the opposite. And I may be able to get all of my 'nuturing instincts' fullfilled by doing things like teaching, helping others, and so forth. I've somehow always been more involved and excited about projects and goals than relationships.
I was just reading something on the internet after a search on 'being happy', and it said that happy people tend to like others more and empathize with others more. The 'out for themselves' philosophy tends to be held by more unhappy people. So I'm going to try to focus a little more on other people and relationships and see how that goes.
All for now-
J
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