Flashes of Panic

I’m glad I didn’t write too much about Osaka given that things got a lot more complicated yesterday. It turns out the work is managed by the Local Organizing Committee (LOC), and the IAAF was contacting me on their behalf, hence the Japanese tax. But then the LOC decided they didn’t have a vacancy after all.

My editor said a number of nice things about my work in Fukuoka, and made another offer: different work, directly for the IAAF, for which they would either pay as usual or pay my flights/hotels for the meet. (For the LOC, that would have been “and” instead of “or,” but it would also have been more work.) Beyond that, though, could I come to Stuttgart for the World Athletics Final later in September?

As I said the other day, I’d already been toying with the idea of going and trying to round up enough work to break even. This new offer gets me very close to break-even, closer than I had been before, and offers a greater amount of slack time to pick up more work; it only looks bad next to the offer that turned out not to exist. And I want to go; unlike a lot of domestic meets (Indianapolis!), I can get excited about the idea of a week-plus in Osaka even if the meet isn’t the best ever. (This would also have been true of Helsinki in ‘05.) So I’m not very far from taking this; it’s a good offer outside the context in which it arrived. But I’m concerned about taking the time away, and being close to break-even rather than well-over puts me in a gray area.

The Stuttgart offer, on the other hand, seems like a no-brainer. It’s only a (four- or five-day) weekend, it’s a place I’ve never visited and an event I’ve never seen. (Someday I’d like to do some kind of ten-day European trip that hits two or three of the Grand Prix one-day meets, but maybe that will be at a time in my life when I do that as a vacation, not a working trip.) I think that one’s a go.

I feel like I am making too many firm commitments without knowing what else I’ll be tied up in when those commitments come due. Or even where I’ll be living.

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