The Wandering Monkey

Since it has just gone past midnight, it is now technically Christmas.  I'm very tired and about to go to bed, but first I thought I'd put down a few thoughts.

Today I went to Willow Creek community church, which has some 70,000 members.  They have done a very good job there of making the church current.  Their services include a lot of singing by a talented group of musicians.  The entire thing is played on a big-screen behind the stage where the people stand.  The auditorium seats several thousand and has three tiers of seats.  It is not unlike going to a music concert.

They also had today a videotaped 'thought of the day' made by one of the female MC's of the day.  And later, the pastor comes up and delivers his message, along with another guy.  The main pastor of that church is a man with a great deal of charisma.  You feel stronger just listening to him, and makes sense and doesn't say anything foolish.  He's obviously a very intelligent man who understands how the average people see the church these days, and can relate to their questions and doubts about the whole thing.  He focuses a lot on the connection between people in the church, and the good deeds it does, plus also of course the essential beliefs of the church.  A final note; this church is one of the phenomenally successful ones in America.  While many churces are failing to attract new people and are losing old ones, this one keeps gaining people all the time.  Harvard business school has done many case studies on the business model of the church to try to explain why it is so successful.  (I could not help but think that some of their methods would be good to understand to help getting swing dancing to expand in China - minus the religion aspect of course.)

After church, we came back home and had the usual food.  A few members of my sister's husband's family joined us.  We ate then watched football.  Pretty normal stuff.

After some consideration, measuring my emotional responses to different situations over the past few weeks, at the moment I believe I will leave Chicago as soon as I can.  I could stay at my mom's place, living in the basement for a while, but I think I need to be 'out there', doing things.  I think that I must keep active, moving, and busy in order to be healthy and happy right now.  So, one way or another I'm going to leave Chicago right after New Years.

There's two possible options I'm considering now, same as before: San Francisco and Shanghai.  I could see myself going back to Shanghai right away if a good job offer came up.  But there's no immediate option available, and I'm not going back to Shanghai without a job.  Yesterday, I sent a message to my girlfriend back there, telling here I will be needing her help to get rid of the apartment.  So tomorrow I'll call my landlord and tell him, and we'll take it from there.

While looking for a Shanghai job, I'm going to live in San Francisco and do whatever contract or temp work I need to do to get by.  This could potentially lead to a long stay in San Fran.  I'm not going to worry about that.  I'm just going to keep moving.  Where I end up, that's where I"ll be.

Back to today: After dinner I worked a while on some new web page technologies.  I spent about two hours on it, getting the animation and different graphics working properly.  There's still a lot more to learn.  It seems endless.  But I did it several hours and I found the work interesting.  Then I played a Risk game with my brother, and I found I could not concentrate and kept making dumb mistakes, so I conceded after my position got really bad. 

Afterwards, though still tired, I was a little too wired to sleep.  So I opened up the laptop to see if I could do some more swing-related work.  I opened my music collection and started to go through my swing music collection and classify the works based on whether they are good dance songs or not.  After about 15 minutes of this, I felt really sick of it.  I really didn't feel any enthusiasm for it, and I didn't want to even hear the music.  So what does this say about my feelings about swing?

When I was in San Fran, I went to one swing dance night.  It was really cool meeting all the old gang again.  And I did have several swing dances, and they were really cool.  I had expected most of the people there to be better than me, since San Francisco was the home of the 'truly intimidating' dancers all during the time I lived there.  However, I didn't see that many who were way better than me.  There were many different dance styles, and I'd like to learn from them, but I felt confidently on par with about anyone there.  This surprised be, because I had sort of been feeling my dance skills had been *decreasing* over the last year, having no inspiration from which to draw.  But, as it stands, I'm doing fine.

The thought of teaching does not pique my interest, nor do I want to go through all the DJ work again.  (You would not believe the time investment it takes to be a DJ!  It is so easy for people to take this job for granted when they don't have to do it themselves.)  But I have noticed that I feel just fine making plans for expansion of China Swings, working on the websites, performing analysis of profit-loss, and working on logo design and graphic design.

This leads me to think I'm no longer wanting to teach or DJ or probably perform.  I'd like to learn new dance stuff, and participate in the parties!  That makes me a student!  But I'd also like to direct the scene and organize it.  Before I left Shanghai, I felt that I was burned out on teaching and running the scene week-to-week.  I did not know how I'd feel about it after I had a break for a while.  As it stands, it looks like I'm done with teaching for the forseeable future.  I think I've done my part, anyhow.  I have an instructor taking care of it there, and he's good and enjoys the work.  We're going to go with that, as I like to say, for the forseeable future.

So today is the 25th.  I'll definitely be in Chicago until a little after New Years.  I don't feel a future for myself here.  Almost all friends married, many with kids.  Can't live at my mom's because it's in the middle of no where and I don't have a car.  Don't want to live in Chicago downtown because it's cold and I don't know anyone around there.

So I'm off to San Francisco.  Got to get a month-to-month apartment.  Something not too expensive.  Live in the city, where I won't need a car.  Perhaps live close to Chinatown, where I can find people to practice Mandarin with.  Go to go with the temp agencies to get some short term jobs for cash.  Probably need to pick up some new clothes, since I left a lot in Shanghai!  Keep expenses to a minimum.  Connect with the swing dance scene.  Work on my technical skills.  Pursue the jobs.  Get a temporary cell phone for fielding phone calls.  SF will be my temporary base of operations until I nail down the international job.  Who knows, maybe not even to China?  Maybe to Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnamj. Japan!  Not Singapore, though.

Merry Christmas,
Jim