the airline industry

When you ask for a flight from City A to City B, you expect a flight from City A to City B with maybe the occasional stopover. Less frequently do you expect two, or even three, stopovers in order to reach one destination. Well, American Airlines gave my boyfriend two stopovers thousands of miles apart, and when we asked them to change the date of the flight, they decided that they would charge him fees for having to change all three flights. The cost? It would've amounted to $310. Ridiculous!

So for a short period of time I thought that maybe I would be able to visit New Zealand to shorten the 5-month separation time, but alas, not anymore. I was even prepared to take an unpaid leave because the only return flight I could get from Auckland to Tokyo at the end of March was a business class seat, bound to arrive in Tokyo on 2 April--of course, the day that school reconvenes. The Faculty Handbook clearly states that

Personal leave or unpaid leave may not be used the day before or the day after a school vacation or a long weekend for the purpose of extending the vacation or weekend.

Due to 'extrenuous circumstances' the principal was going to try to get me one day of unpaid leave. Well, that seems no longer necessary.

Long-distance relationships are difficult because they challenge both parties to maintain an undying, unfloundering loyalty and, more importantly, trust for each other. Unfortunately this trust is like the First Pig's house of hay. It takes so much effort to build once, and it may withstand some natural elements, but at the end of the day it is quite frivolous, and one substantial blow! reduces it to rubble. It must be built up all over again. The second time is harder; with the falling of the walls came the falling of a certain trust in oneself that you could accomplish things. So you must first build self-trust, and then rebuild the trust you had for the other. This, needless to say, takes a long time and a fortituous spirit of persistence.

Being a fairly weak person in spirit the abovementioned task has proven to be quite difficult. I suppose it is just one of those things you have to work hard to get, because it takes a long and difficult fight before you get to keep some of the best things in the world. I just get tired sometimes of putting up a good fight for it.