1 down, 3 to go?

One of my goals in coming to Buenos Aires was to learn to relax and not find myself in the position of having 4-5 jobs, as was the case for my last 9 months in Columbus. Despite my efforts to simmer down, I find myself again potentially having 3-4 jobs. Do I need the jobs? No, not really. I need one good job so I don't have to dip into savings (and I think I have that and will explain later). The reason I think I need to take all these jobs is this... I feel like I'm in the all-you-can-eat dining hall at Miami University again and I can have any and as many deserts as I want. They've all been laid out before me for the taking and if I don't eat them, the lunchlady is just going to throw them all away (I unfortunately know this to be a horrifying fact because I was at one time a university dining hall errr lunchman). Anyhow, what I need to tell myself is that I don't have to be the Takeru Kobayashi of jobs, that choking down 70 hours of work a week is probably about as healthy as choking down the same number of hotdogs, or deserts for that matter.

So I'm trying to practice restraint, to force myself to take on just enough work to get by, more or less, and to concentrate instead on opportunities for relaxation, friendship, language learning, and exercise.

That said, after a second interview this afternoon, I accepted a job teaching two ex-patriot kids from the U.S. I'll be teaching Reading, Science, and History for a total of 6 hours/week on Tuesday and Friday afternoons and will also have paid planning time. The curricular parameters within which I'll be working are very general and the job should allow me almost full creative and philosophical autonomy in creating lesson plans. The cherry on top is that 10 or so hours/week of work should in itself pay for my basic living expenses in Buenos Aires. Exito (or success for the Spanish challenged).

I strode happily out of my interview feeling as if a backpack of worries had been lifted from my shoulders. I had one good job and even if I decided to do nothing else, It was going to be ok.

On the way back to my host family's place, I stopped in at a great natural food shop on Arenales street in the Recoleta neighborhood (I believe it's called 'Natural Buenos Aires'). I was planning on treating myself to my favorite sweet in Buenos Aires, a Lemon/honey iced cake that for some reason is supposed to be healthy because it's low cal and doesn't have any sugar in it. I missed this cake the entire time I was in the U.S. and was looking forward to inhaling one as soon as I stepped off the plane. The good thing is that it still exists. The bad is that my health food shop was out of them today and won't have any back in until Monday. Demand for this cake was high last year when I was here. Health food shops would sell out of them on the same day the shipments came in and then be out of them until the following week. For whatever reason, the makers and distributors still haven't figured out how to meet the demand....In any case, I've had a dream of introducing this item to the U.S. Any venture capitalists out there, please write me privately and we'll talk. Just kidding, but not really:)

During the remaining walk home, I thought about how I might incorporate the rest of the jobs I'd been offered into one week, to shove them all into the suitcase of my life here so that I might be able to jump on it and latch it shut. Could I fit it all together and make it work? Could I do one or two of the jobs on the weekends? Would I be ok with the idea of working on the weekends? Did I come here just to work, and for not much money at that?

These questions swirled around in my head, combined with my desire to avoid the conflict that comes with telling someone, 'No, sorry, I can't do it'.

In the coming days, the plan is to figure out what I can and can't do. To figure out what I want to and don't want to do. And to find out more about each of the remaining opportunities to better inform my decision.

Also, I promise, on request of my sister, to continue to take pictures in the hopes of providing you a respite during my long winded entries.