On Being at Cross-Purposes With Oneself

I have just understood that my two fundamental goals in being here are incompatible with one another within any kind of acceptable time frame, and that one of them is incompatible with my job.
My two goals are: reach conversational proficiency and a high level of comprehension of written and spoken Russian; obtaining enough money to ride aroudn the world by bicycle in three very long legs, the first starting in Tierra del Fuego and ending in Alaska, the second starting in eastern Russia and ending in Portugal, and the final one from northern Africa to Capetown.
A third goal, paying my remaining 20,000 dollars of university loans, hinders my realization of the first one by forcing me to work more, subtracting from the time available to study Russian.
What do I need to accomplish the first goal?
1 Work less- work occupies a huge amount of my time
2 Study more Russian
Point 1 interferes with my bike trip, because if I work less, I will earn less money and never have the amount of capital required for such a venture. It also means I will stay in debt longer.
I could just work my ass off for 6 months, and pay all of my debts within that time frame, but since I want to leave for the bike trip in December, that leaves 4 months or less to reach the level I want in Russian.
Since what I want to do is basically undoable, I allow myself to believe that by reaching the highest level of certification you can get in Russian, the Test of Russian as a Foreign Language, Level 4, I will have mastered Russian to the point I can say I was damn good at it, and then file it away in my eternal Swiss account of knowledge and experience. But Russian, because of its complexity and alien-ness, is the kind of thing that requires constant practice and determination, is precisely the type of thing that you cannot file away. The document I get after passing the test I can have hanging on the wall till the end of my days, but the knowledge it is supposed to stand for will fade. And the test itself, while difficult, is really an exercise in grammatical navel gazing which merely implies -and does nothing more than imply- a high level of correctness and communicative ability in Russian.
I either need to stay here and plod on for two or three more years, dedicating myself completely and wholeheartedly to mastering it, or go on my bike trip. Each goal excludes, or at least seriously delays the other goal, and all other goals I have.
This is the heart of my problem: I am good at enough things, and attracted by enough of those, that all of them holds serious sway over my imagination. I know I am sharp enough, and have enough time to master, at least two of the following disciplines to an extent:
-journalism
-travel writing
-language learning (the sheer number of languages in the world, combined with my interest in everything, condemns me to a life of constant learning), including polishing my French to a high luster
-language teaching
-study of the human memory
-a thorough study of US history, or a study of world history focusing on a single theme
In addition, I am attracted especially by things I am not sure I am capable of mastering. There is something very gray and sad about people who try only things they know they will succeed at. That I suppose is why I started studying Russian. It's hard. Some other things that attract me because of their difficulty:
-bicycle trials riding
-rafting
-drawing
-mathematics
-the game Go
-Hindi
-a tonal language
-various alphabets of exotic languages
Attempting even a couple of those things in a serious way will require several years of my time.
This city, with its constant offering of heaps of cash, is actually a distraction. That explains why I am distracted, which explains why I have difficulty sleeping, which explains why my blood pressure is sometimes too high, which may explain why I have very low interest in women while living in a city of some of the most beautiful and available women in the world.
It's like I am heaping up some vast stock of cash, experience, and knowledge to impress some unknown (female) person, but since I am never satisfied with my levels of cash, experience or knowledge, I will never stop stockpiling and will never have the time to impress anyone.
I feel my blood pressure rising as I write this.
Today I am heading on the train to Kazan, the capital of Russian Tatary, where I will stay for two days, probably attempting to see every damned thing in the city in the space of two days.
French and German are languages that one can master within a certain reasonable time frame, and then not lose them within a short time frame. France and Germany are countries that one can, in the space of a very short amount of time, exhaustively travel, and then check off one's list.
Russian is not a language, and Russia is not a place, one can check off one's List of Things to Know.
Two years ago, I walked through France, starting in Normandy, making my way down to Toulouse, and finishing in Marseille, over a period of about 70 days. Every millimeter I advanced on on my path was due to my own muscles. Those were really the best times I ever had. I remember the satisfaction I felt after passing the territory covered by one detailed regional map created by the Institut Geographique National, where one kilometer is represented by one centimeter. On a flat, even road, in good weather and in good shape, you can cover one kilometer in ten minutes. You progress across a meaningful part of the globe is visible after ten minutes. In one hard day you can walk a hand's breadth of territory. Knowing every bourg and "-ac"-suffixed nowhere in particular town, some of them quaint, some of them less so, on just one of the 74 40x120 centimeter maps, would consitute an empire of the mind. And the only way to really know in a serious, intimate way all those bourgs and acs is walk from one to the next. Each map could take a year. It doesn't take an empire of the mind to do the math.
I still have some of those maps, and show them to students so they can practice talking about imaginary situations in the past: what would you have done... It's a consistent favorite among my students. That trip is now almost three years in the past, and the paper is now worn though in many places from being folded open and closed so many times. My reverence for the creases and fine tears indicating important towns of only 300 people whose names are wearing off the map because of my pointing at them, piques the student's interest, which in turn piques mine even more, leading me to scrutinize the map more closely, and again reflect on how unfathomable the whole picture is, and to ask myself what I am doing in a place I at heart like only to dislike.
I think I need to go on my bike trip. Or back to France.