I'm Not Doing Anything

Well, that's not entirely true, but it would sum up my father's feeling about my current state. What is true is that I am 25, I live at home with my parents, I do not have a job and I am not going to school of any kind. This isn't to mean, that this is some state that will not have change, just a current description of what is currently true about my life.

This should come with a bit of backstory, seeing as this makes me sound exceptionally pathetic and useless. My name is Breene Murphy and I was born in Oahu, Hawaii during Hurricane Ewa. I'm not sure how that has affected my life, seeing as no injury or malady happened upon me from that event. The reality is that I just slept right through it, or so I'm told. I just included it because it is one of those random factoids about people that seem give particular enjoyment.

Now that you have that little nodule of knowledge, I figure I'd give a more recent history so as to explain my current existence. I lived in Chile last year. I had gotten fed up with working in advertising and needed a change in career path. I had been an International Development Studies major (kind of a cross between international business, history, political science and a foreign language) in college and wanted to seek an opportunity down that career pathway, however the fact that I wasn't fluent in spanish (as that was the language I chose) was quite an impediment to the potential jobs for which I could apply.

Becoming fluent in spanish, or any language I suppose, requires that you can speak it right when you wake up in the morning. If you are tired or hung over (or both) and you can flow in conversation that means you're alright. I know it sounds weird, but if you can speak under those conditions it means that you are no longer thinking through the language, it is more of a reaction than a thought process. And the only way you can create that situation is to live abroad where the language is spoken

For that reason, I lived in a small fishing village/seasonal getaway town with a family where no one (save the eldest son, but he was at college) spoke any English. I could have done it a much more formal way, by going through a university or some private school in Santiago, but I figured a university would have me live with other english speaking students and a private school would probably just be an english student tutoring spanish to gringos to pay the bills. I figured this person wouldn't be any more qualified than another spanish tutor somewhere else and there was the additional fact that I wanted to surf.

At first, living with the family was really hectic because there was so much family staying at the house and the two teenaged daughters spoke so fast and with such unique slang that they were rendered completely unintelligible to me (it also didn't help that three quarters of the women in the house were named Pati). However, with the help of my spanish teacher, the diminutive Tati, I made progress. And after a while the extended family returned to their homes and extra time with just the family and the girls allowed me to finally understand what they were saying the whole time. Apparently I'm going to marry one of the daughters.

But more on that another time (I'm going back to visit the family in two weeks so the subject will be revisited), I'm making an attempt to stay on track. So, back to why I don't do anything. While I was staying in Chile I decided to write a blog about all the craziness that occurred (should you be interested http://breenesadventures.blogspot.com/ ). I had planned to come back and find a job that would allow me to use my spanish and travel like a state department job or working for the international division of a surf company but a really good family friend liked my blog. This may seem inconsequential but he is in show business and is currently working on a project where the main character is a early-mid twenties kid who has traveled...2+2=4... so he invited me to work on his project with him. Only thing is, the project hasn't quite been greenlighted, so I'm basically hanging around waiting to see if it's going though. I'm not going to apply for other jobs because I'm an honest guy and I would feel like an asshole if I quit after two weeks if I found out the project was going to start up. And for similar reasons, I'm not going to get an apartment because I wouldn't want a lease a place knowing that I would have to leave it behind. So where does that leave me? 25, jobless, living with my parents and writing about it.