Absence

The weather is weird, and matches my mood. It is bright, but not sunny, warm but not hot, almost drizzling but not actually raining, gray and muggy as all get out. It is non-committal, indistinct. Make up your mind, weather. What do you want to be?

You'd think with the lifting off of my thesis from my shoulders, I would be taking advantage of this opportunity to get my life in order, make use of all this spare time in my two-week reprieve before the final set of grad classes begins in June to get organized! Run miles! Clean the bathroom! Polish the floors! Plan ahead! Do errands! Dot i's and cross t's that I'd previously been ignoring...

But it's almost unnerving not to have the excuse of grad school and the constant threat of the thesis deadline -- I could hide behind those things, and my overstuffed schedule could explain the dirty-clothes carpet in my bedroom, the empty cupboards, why I never seem to have energy for anything but Hulu and Netflix on weekends.

Without my big excuse, evidence points uncomfortably towards me just being generally not an effective human being domestically. Maybe it's not some external force that's throwing my life off balance -- maybe I'm just not that good at balancing in the first place. Now the overbearing presence of the thesis has become an absence, and I have no more groceries or clean laundry than I ever did... I kind of feel absent from my own life, school too. The unintended side effect of all that emphasis on the state tests is that now that they're over, it feels like what we're doing really doesn't matter. I'm just trying babysit them through 'til June, when we can all go our separate ways and forget, for a while, that any of this ever happened.

I feel stuck like flypaper, like I'm doing laps in a wading pool. Waiting for a bus or a train that I'm not convinced is even coming.

***

My thesis is not the only absence I am feeling. I spent the entire weekend with Corky, playing connect-the-dots all around the boros with various friends' social events. I'm in love with our friendship, do you know that feeling? I am trying to capture her sunshine and bottle it up to stash away for later. And even though I am doing my best to love the fleetingness and impermanence, and to appreciate the present of her presence right now, and to be excited for the adventure that she absolutely deserves to have next year... every time she says something witty or clever, and every time we have the same thought at the same time, I am reminded what a gaping hole is going to be left in me when she leaves.

Her leaving is making me think about my next big step. Ending grad school is kind of a watershed moment. Once I have the degree, my commitment to the Fellows will be finished and my life is mine again to rearrange as suits. And I know I'll be going back to PS 00 next year, the immediate future is sorted. But what about after that? I promised myself I wouldn't become a "lifer," that I won't just wake up one day and find that ten years have gone by. I promised myself wild adventures and excitement and travel and the taking up of ambitious challenges... And not that teaching isn't challenging or meaningful...

But where do you go with it? I believe that's part of the trouble, part of the reason that a really big percentage of these driven young people that join Teaching Fellows and Teach for America tend to leave it after a few years. After you learn to be a teacher, what then? After ten years, you're still hot-gluing Word Walls and re-organizing your bookshelves and deciphering bad handwriting and typing up teaching points and making infinite copies of things. Pretty much the only place to go career-wise is administration, which is actually a totally different profession, since the best part of teaching is the kids, and administrators spend way more time shuffling papers and answering telephones and holding meetings than they do with any children. A conundrum.

For now, I am content with the responsibilities, great and small, that running a classroom entails. I'm 25 - chances are, any job I'm likely to get will involve some measure of tedium... stapling 29 folders to the wall, taking them all down again, walking kids up and down the stairs, copying things onto chart paper, hanging up bulletin boards, rearranging furniture...all that's part of the job I'm fine with all that now. And some people are really great at all those things and don't mind doing them in perpetuity. I just don't think I'm one of those people.