9 days, 6672 miles

If a certain English professor of mine had been peering inside of my head yesterday evening, there isn't a doubt in my mind that she would have proclaimed my strain of thinking "soooo postmodern," (in that vaguely British, extremely professorial way of hers) before nodding thoughtfully toward the class in order to highlight the brilliance of the comment.
Now before you all run off (metaphorically speaking, of course) and abandon my blog for less pretentious, pseudo-intellectual waters, let me explain what Prof. X would have meant by that. You see, last night I stood on my tiki-torch lit back porch, pointing at several possibly invisible or, at the very least, microscopic, dots in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, nodding my head and repeating for the umpteenth time what I will be doing with the next 27 months of life.

"Unh-hunh, I'll be teaching English and doing community development projects."
"Well, I'll be in LA for two days, and then I'll fly to Honolulu before getting on a crazy-long three-stop flight that lands in Pohnpei."
"No, no. Not the ruined one. p-o-H-N-p-e-i. It's the capital of Micronesia."
"No, I don't know the language yet. I'll learn it in training."
...and so on and so forth and such.

It was during perhaps the fifth of these conversations that the absurdity of the situation dawned upon me, much in the way that the edge of a cliff dawns upon Road Runner. For the first time, I actually realized that in ten days, I would be moving away from everything I know to move to one (though I'm not yet sure which) tiny dot in the middle of the Pacific Ocean SIX THOUSAND SIX HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-TWO MILES AWAY. I realized that I do not know what language I'll be speaking, where I'll be living, what I'll be taking...but the funny thing was, I was okay with that.
The post-modernity (the meta-me, if you will) entered as I wondered about what the Megan McCrea of one year from now would think of my thoughts at that moment. A year from now, so many of these blanks will be filled in, so many questions answered. I will have realized which questions were valid, which were less important...or even if I was asking the right questions at all. The invisible dots will have become living, breathing places; the faces beaming at me out of the pages of travel books will have emerged as real entities with hopes, fears, and problems just like me. I will even have learned what 6,672 miles feels like.
9 days and counting. Let's see what it all means...