Life Update: Welcome to Tan Dinh, My New Neighborhood!

It's that time again, folks - I've moved! And I have to talk about it! And lots of other things! Because I can never shut up!

I have a great new place with a big ol' room for my kitties and a lot of exciting street life, restaurants, and cafes for us big two-legged bipeds. And hence... the itchy typing fingers have got ahold of me. I'm all out of video games, I can't stand to read the Stephen King book about a magical pandemic (!!) that's been hanging out on my nightstand since February, and I'm sitting on a thousand or two pictures that need sharing.

Before you ask, you might notice that not only have I abandoned Facebook posting, I've also now left Instagram (itself Facebook-owned). Sadly, social media is not great for my mental health, and pursuing those little dopamine hits easily spirals out of control for me, personally. 

My new neighborhood is Tan Dinh, a smallish area surrounding the eponymous market and home to a lively and engaging space.

Click through for all the details!

He's Come Undone (33rd-Year Edition)

I can't articulate WHY... but this speaks to me.

Real talk.

For a while in 2016, it indeed looked like I'd come undone. A better metaphor is that it was like being unmoored and lost at sea.

Unmooring a vessel means to lift up the anchor and release ties to the dock, releasing it to the weather, the sea, and the skill of the crew. It's always the start of any journey, and no ship leaves dock without a destination. I unmoored myself from Chicago when I left to travel abroad. The thing about journeys is that, when you have a stated end goal, your journey will end in either success or failure.

In other words, becoming unmoored is the first step to achieving your dreams. However, being unmoored is also the first step in getting truly lost.

This year, I ran into some headwinds at sea.

I had a series of jobs that I didn't like. I felt like my real talents were going to waste, but wasn't always able to articulate those talents in a way that made sense, to myself or employers. I attempted to start a few businesses, and was marginally successful in one of them. I got a job I loved, and then got fired from when I demanded a contract (oof, disheartening - she operated in America, FYI). I followed a lot of irrational hope, in hindsight.

In the meantime, all my internal plans were in disarray.

Three Vital Skills I Learned from Acting Classes, and One I'm Still Working On

I don't always use memes, but when I do, I use five of them.

I've always valued the training I received in theatre school. It was a really rough time for me mentally, but as I've grown older ('matured'?) I am able to look back and be amazed by just how many wide-ranging situations I've navigated by dint of my training.

I am continually surprised at how these various skills (and, my god, what a bizarre, heady, useful range of skills they turned out to be!) have come in handy here in this brave new world of traveling abroad. As I get to know myself better, and fall back in love with who I am, I wanted to take a moment to detail here how they've helped me on my worldwide, and inner, journeys.

I graduated with a degree in Technical Theatre. Practically speaking, I was a carpenter, designer, stage manager, stitcher, props designer, and periodically unemployed person before deciding that my career in theatre was unappetizing and way too uneven, to say the least. I wanted out, but I had no idea what to do, where to go, or how to get there. It was like coming to the end of a road and discovering that the last bridge I crossed had been struck by meteors (that I helped direct there) and the road up ahead goes off a cliff into a ravine, like the train tracks in Back to the Future 3.

For years I thought I didn't have a hoverboard or means of escape... but I was wrong*.

I bemoaned my theatre degree for years. I made terrible mistakes. I bemoaned my life choices. I lathered, rinsed, and repeated... and instead of being an agent of change in my life, I became one who reacted, instead of acted. I was a passive, unhappy meatbag of a person.

I bemoaned a whole lotta things, and never really got objective enough to rise above the bleak, depressed person I was and achieve something brighter, something that my Self always knew I was capable of, but never let myself achieve.

But then I made a choice.

To me, this choice was to build a new dream, something with long-term value and interest for myself. (which are evolving every day). I want to get into sustainable landscape urbanism, with a strong eye toward regional environmental balance. We are social animals, and we should live within our environments, in balance... and in cities.

To survive in a foreign culture, I think that you have to be willing to embrace a certain amount of flexibility. This was definitely NOT in my personal vocabulary when I came, or at least not in my immediate brain. My animal brain knew what was up, though, and kicked into gear. And while Flexibility is certainly a skill that theatre helped hone (along with creative problem-solving and keeping a cool head), there were several skills that I discovered came from the most unlikely of places...

No one was more surprised than I to find that these skills originated in acting classes.

Saigon Survival: How to Get a Tow Truck for Your Motorbike in HCMC... and How I Know This

D1 in the distance... so close, and yet so far. I had to leave it here for a bit...

Broken down on a highway or rural part of HCMC? I know the feeling.

Boy, do I ever.

Yesterday I had the unfortunate luck to develop a flat tire on my way to Vietnamese lessons (which are going much better than last year, btw!). The number of extenuating circumstances, however, were really just improbably high... 5 hours after it all started, I was finally on my way, my bike repaired.

But how did I get there?

Story time!

And BONUS - scroll to the end for contact information for what might be HCMC's only English-speaking Bike Tow Truck service.