Nervous

My stomach has been in knots since mid-day yesterday.

Our family plans to spend our Christmas holidays in Australia.  We have discussed this trip since we began seriously talking about life in Jakarta.  How much closer can you live to Australia?  This is the time to go.  But life kept us preoccupied until the past few weeks, when we realized that we will be visiting Australia during high season.  Many hotels were already booked, and many more were outrageously expensive.  I spent a solid two days making plans, contacting Homeaway.com owners or hotels and reserving tickets.  Most things fell quickly into place - only a few rooms were available in Melbourne, so I watched email obsessively for a day to make sure we booked the best of our options.  However, Sydney proved to be the most difficult.  We could not find anyplace that fit all of our needs and was also available for our dates.  Actually, we could.  The affordable serviced apartment that I'd been referred to had rooms available for our 8 days in Sydney - with a bill of $6,000.  So when I heard back from an apartment owner in an amazing location with a better price, I grabbed it quickly.  I arranged the wire transfer and called it done.

And then, when he ought to have received the money, I didn't hear back from him.  At all.  I spent the last few days worried that I had wire transferred our vacation money directly to a scam artist, and my fears reached their peak last night when I told Dave.  He didn't have any words of consolation, which only made me feel worse.

Happily, I heard back from the owner this morning.  He had been out of town for the past week, and seems entirely legitimate.  Phew!

But my stomach remains in knots.  Today seems to be the culmination of quite a few things making me nervous.

I spent the morning scouting out locations for my music classes.  I had such success opening up a music center in Caracas that I came into Jakarta with confidence - the city is much larger and so is the embassy community.  If Caracas was simple, this ought to be a breeze.  I ran two free classes back in September, and people attended.  But too few people registered, partly because most of the embassy's young children live in a neighborhood far from my own.  The complexity here is simple - Jakarta is a big city with awful traffic.  To reach the young children that I know, I need a new location for my classes.  Scouting out new locations this morning went well, but not great.  I have more work to do, and I feel more nervous now than I did when I left the house this morning.

Within the next hour, I will leave to have my hair done for the Marine Ball tonight.  Two more things making me nervous.  I haven't had my hair cut in Jakarta yet, and I don't know much about the stylist doing my hair this afternoon.  I have had some bad hair cuts in the past - new hair dressers make me nervous.  And then my gorgeously cut and styled hair will need to stay in place through the steamy weather - in fact, the currently pouring rain - while I come home, manage my own makeup, fancy dress and heels, Dave picks up his suit from the tailor, and I put on my social butterfly face for a party with a number of people that I only know slightly. 

These are first world problems if there ever were any.  All the same, they make me nervous.  I wear makeup only a few times a year - who wants to show up to a ball with messy eyelids?  And although I'm excited to socialize without children and in a pretty dress for a few hours with a number of people who I honestly want to get to know, I'm still nervous.  This season is still new, and as such my life is missing the comfort of seeing and socializing with old friends. 

I am not a worrier.  I am confident that each of these things will work themselves out well in the end.  Even if the music classes fail disastrously, they will still fill my resume and give me strong talking points for my next job interview. 

But this future confidence does nothing to resolve the butterflies currently filling my stomach.