tired, or retired?

ive always admired retired people. the freedom they have. ive always imagined it as a kind of paradise thing wher eyou get to sit around and admire the facet that youve done lots of hard work throughout your life. you can sit around if you like, wake up late when you are tired. wake up early when youre not. you can rekindle past hobbies if you like, take long walks, take classes, bike ride across the country, you can. if you want to watch tv, throw pie into your face and do headstands on the middle of broadway, you can.
anna and i are effectively retired. we wake up at 9, or 10, then lay in bed for a little while longer. we drink coffee and eat peanut butter sandwiches (our last canister of peanut butter is rapidly disappearing and a new one is out of the question for some reason here in buenos aires, thus our style will be somewhat cramped, but we will improvise for the last month...) and play free cell. we go to the gym. we go about our daily business (one goes to this cafe, the other to that, with the basic end purpose being that we have different stories to tell each other when we reconvene at 7 for wine/fruit/nuts/olive hour. then, we watch a comedic dvd, play more free cell, then, go out to eat, or cook something. at this point, when we are done, it is approximately 11 or 1130, at which point we have the monumental decision as to whether or not we should go to a bar/club/cafe/movie/bed/tango show.
retired from what? you may be asking. and yes, i have asked myself this as well. the retirement was not what we had wanted. exhibit a) we came to bsas with a job connect that turned out to be terribly shady and in the end to not even contact us. exhibit b) the english-teaching job market in bsas is illegal at best, takes a while to develop a good schedule at average, non-existant at worst. exhibit c) teacing english to individuals yielded a student who was going to give us a few hours each week and then decided first that she didnt want me to teach her, and has since begun flaking on anna.

alas

so we are coming home in june anyway and have enough money to live cheaply until then, so all the efforts in job-search are being put forth to the new york market. so, until then, anna and i get to live the retired life. i write, i read, i walk, etc. however, my mini-retirement isnt quite as i would want my real retirement to be - you know - the one that will start 5 years from now after i make 1 billion bux. the main difference being that when you retire after having worked for a long time, you get a pension! that means that whatever you choose to do, you dont have to worry about money. free-time is a misnomer at best, an oxymoron in reality.

but, dont feel too bad for us :-) being tired of being retired is still the good life category!