My, has time flown by. I signed up for an online course through Harvard which basically sucked up every ounce of spare time I’ve had since early October through five days ago when I took my final exam. It was an attempt to figure out whether an MBA is something I would be interested in, and I’m sorry to say it did not help me definitively want one or not want one. The work was interesting and I’ve always loved school, but sometimes I worry that all of my competitive energy of my late teens/early twenties has been sucked out of me, and all I really want at this moment is to enjoy my life. Plus, nine years after leaving Georgetown, I’ve probably paid more than $100K on my student loans and still have $35K left (interest, man…) so the idea of forking over a bunch of money for more education does not excite me. But there’s not much demand outside of the beltway for two people with political science degrees and years of government work. So who knows what is going to happen these next few years, it’s all incredibly fraught and to the extent I am able I am trying to maintain present and enjoy the moment. (Though that was difficult this past week as I battled the most severe case of the flu I have ever had in my life…I missed four days of work!)
What else has happened over the last few months? Well, I owe more photos and anecdotes from the Scotland & Ireland trip. We went on a whirlwind trip to Israel (Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Acre) in October. Sev got appendicitis in November and had an emergency appendectomy here in Cyprus. It certainly didn’t look fun for him, but the surgeon seemed nice and the hospital was ok, from what I could tell. We hosted some friends/colleagues/Marines here for a big Thanksgiving, and then again for a big Christmas. Between early November and January, I saw Amay often but for the most part did not jump because he’s been a little lame in his right front foot. We left shortly after Christmas to head to Baja & San Diego– it was an epically long journey, with long flights that really stressed me out, but we got to see folks in Barriles, visit Todos Santos, and then catch up on life management (haircut, optometrist, shopping shopping shopping) in San Diego, and see family there (and celebrated a big birthday for Dad!) I went to Vienna for a few days shortly after I came back from Cyprus. Someone from the Embassy organized a big dinner at a microbrewery in Nicosia (which makes Nicosia seem a lot more cosmopolitan than it is!)
Politics these days have been particularly tough. This has been our first presidential transition since being in the Foreign Service so it’s particularly hard to determine what is normal churn and what is leader-led chaos. Needless to say, the transition has made our jobs harder as we struggle to explain what exactly U.S. policy is on any particular issue. We are taught to answer tough questions by pivoting to the process or principles– i.e., a foreigner asks you a hard, uncomfortable, or otherwise unanswerable question, and instead of explaining the policy they asked about, you explain how U.S. policy is determined and how sometimes it is messy and complicated. This flows nicely into a little civic education about division of powers, checks and balances, and the U.S. Constitution. Generally I think our institutions are quite strong and capable of weathering almost anything, but this post-truth era of “alternative facts” and @AltDepartments is more than a little unsettling.
Anyway, one of my New Year’s intentions was to write more, and to write more about life in Cyprus, not just trips. It’s now-mid February and I’m just starting, but maybe starting after most people’s resolutions have failed will only bode well for my success!