As fulfilling as binge drinking/eating and sleeping until 4 in the afternoon can be, I got motivated and enrolled in a month-long TEFL certification course to teach English. Most English teaching institutes require a potential employee to have TEFL certificate, so in theory this could help me find work once I finish the course. I really hope it does, as I have spent a good portion of my remaining savings on the tuition.
So this is where things start to get interesting. Assuming I can't find teaching and freelance writing work, I will be flat broke and homeless in a foreign country by the end of October. I worry about this sometimes, but then realize that it wouldn't be any worse than being homeless in Los Angeles. So I guess it's a "win win".
Actually, I don't have time to worry about destitution at the moment, because I'm way too busy. I'm in class eight hours a day and then there's homework. On top of that we do one hour of practice teaching per week so my nights are usually spent prepping for those little experiments in humiliation. See, I was never much of a student and my "Simple Jack" powers of comprehension are put to the ultimate test in this gauntlet of grammar and Lexis. Yvette, our elitist Argentine teacher hits us hard and fast with lessons on modal verbs, the phonetic alphabet, grammar grids, past present tenses, future simple tenses, past participles and future perfects. It's enough to make a person want to shove a coat hanger up their nose and into their brain.
In one respect I was lucky: the people in my class are all decent, which is surprising since three of them are other North Americans. There are six of us total. There's Buddy, the musician from Memphis, Rebecca, the 22-year-old part Asian super achiever from northern California. Natalie, the 23-year old super achiever from Canada. Kio, the Irish super achiever from Limerick, and Emily, the other 22-year-old super achiver from Connecticut. Not only am I the least intelligent person in the class, but I'm also the oldest. They don't seem to hold that against me, though.
One thing the class will do is give me a couple options. Buddy and I were talking about his recent, two-month-long trip through Columbia and it got me feeling a little nostalgic for the time I spent there. Maybe at the end of October I'll pull up stakes and see if I can't make it north and do a little teaching in Bogota. There's always Madrid, which seems to be in need of teachers and earning an hourly wage in Euros isn't such an unpleasant thought. Either way I don't see myself spending longer than six more months or a year in Argentina. It's the new Cancun here and everywhere I go there's more and more college students and tourists from the U.S. I'm sure most of them are decent people, but together we're all doing our part to ruin the identity this place had, that certain unique quality that made this place special.
The most ironic thing is that I probably have more employment options in third world countries than I could ever hope to have back in Los Angeles. So it's official now: I can't come back, not for at least a few years. I never really wanted to return permanently, but before I left for this country I made one last push in Los Angeles. A hail Mary pass with my best scripts that, had it worked out, would have allowed me to come back to LA for a few months, spend time with friends, earn some money and head back down south in style.
It didn't work out.
I came close. But like all the times I came close before, I fell just short enough to get the false hope that maybe, just maybe, someday in the near future, I could write for a living.
But I'll make another push next year. And the year after that. And in 2015 and 2021 and so on and so on, ignoring common sense and that increasingly accurate voice in the back of my head that tells me I'm getting too old to still be starting out.
In the meantime I'll kick around South America, Europe if I can swing it, maybe Asia, hustling teaching jobs and freelance writing gigs for online marketing companies, sleezing myself up so creative directors will like me enough to allow me to write press releases hyping the features of their useless applications for 6 bucks an hour.
But maybe if I can finish this course I can just spend my time helping people learn English. If that happens then I will have accomplished something I never thought I was capable of: contributing something positive to society.
