Yatta!

Yesterday afternoon I did something slightly impuslive.

Well, as impulsive as something that I've wanted to do for over a decade can be.

But, yesterday I finally put my years of indecision aside and took drastic action.

For those of you who read my blog and also talk to my parents on a regular basis, don't tell them yet. There's a possiblity I might be going home today, and I want to surprise them. :)

Profound Thoughts, Maybe

I feel obligated to write today and say something incredibly profound. Now is the perfect time for profound, reflective thoughts. I have cleaned my room, said good-bye to the last few students for this year, officially accepted my job offer at this school, and I am merely sitting at my desk with nothing but summer projects to do, waiting for the administrators to tell me I can go home, which won’t happen for another few hours. I have survived my first year of teaching. I am no longer a “first year” teacher. Now is the perfect time to fill in this empty blog space with all sorts of profound thoughts about teaching, how I’ve grown as a teacher and as a person over the year, and other such reflective topics. However, I don’t really have anything to say. I did learn a lot about teaching, and I did grow a nearly unchartable amount as a teacher and a decent amount as a human being over the past few months, but I don’t have any profound thoughts to offer all the people who keep asking me what my final thoughts on the year are. I guess the closest I could come is to say that, after nine months of school, I like teaching. That’s pretty profound, but only to other people who have spent time after school or during classes wondering if this is really what they want to be doing with their lives. I don’t know about the rest of my life, or the next five years, or any such far away lengths of time, but now, today, I like teaching. I’m excited for next year.

Perhaps the real reason I have nothing more profound and earth-shattering to say than “um.. I like teaching?” is because I haven’t been reflecting on the past year for the past few months. I’ve been gearing up for the future. I have a million plans for my summer, and a million hopes and dreams and challenges being thrown at me next year. As an added incentive to forward thinking, my future has been up in the air nearly constantly over the past few months, and, now that I finally know better what it will look like, I am surveying it with great interest.

And I’m determined to make this summer awesome. For the past nine months, it has often been an all-consuming task just to keep up. A common thought pattern was: “I can’t do __________ because I don’t have time, or energy for that matter.” It’s a fair argument to make that I might not have done _________ anyway, being naturally lazy and often inclined to say that learning new things takes too much effort. Now, things have eased up, and summer is stretching before me. I am determined not to let my natural laziness or summer lethargy find my summer over before it’s begun in August. I am planning to make things happen. I will get back into climbing. I am learning to skateboard. I will bike lots of miles to beautiful places. I will learn new songs on the guitar. I will spend lazy moments in the park. I will cook fantastic food. I will put miles of roadtrips on my car to see things I haven’t seen yet. I will stay up late talking; I will get up early to see the sunrise.

In short, I am resolved to let neither fear nor laziness stop me this summer.

Gannungagap

I wanted my students to have experience with more mythology than just the Greek and Roman varieties, if you count those two as separate, which I don’t. So I spent an hour this morning researching Norse mythology. The more I read about it, the more fascinating it is. It is unbelievably complicated, which gives me the challenging of picking out the essential bits for my students and simplifying it down, and is very different from the mythology I’m used to studying. However, although its outward forms are unfamiliar and strange, it is also a mythology with which I, and all of my students are intimately familiar. Although Greek mythology is the one whose stories we know, and for whose gods we named out planets, and the pantheon we study over and over in school, Norse mythology is the one that has captured our fantasies since our ancestors lived in the deep forests of Europe. Our academics may have adopted the Greek mythologies, but our folk tales have many more elves and dwarves than they do chimeras and centaurs.

Not only that, but it contains even more fun words than Greek mythology does. Although I love words like Diomedes and Hephaestus, they can’t compare to something like Gannungagap and Ymir and Niflheim.

Two unrelated notes:

1) I have now officially applied for my own job. Applying for the job I already have feels slightly weird.

2) In a brief moment of boredom, I cyberstalked someone today. I admit it! I googled them. And I found pictures of them when they were in high school and the address of their blog. I guess I have now officially joined my generation.

A Dream Deferred

"A Dream Deferred"

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

--Langston Hughes

The long awaited email finally came. Amity Corp sent an email that nicely thanked me for my time and effort and told me that they will not be offering me a position. It's been less than a week since my interview; I guess they didn't need to think about it very long. I'm not really sure what happened. I know my interview didn't go spectacularly, but I am also rather overqualified for the position. I really really wanted to go back to Japan. It was the only teaching related thing that actually called out to me as something I wanted to do. And I was so proud of myself for being brave, being willing to strike out on my own, and for following my dreams. I felt so good about trying this, about giving it my all, that it's disheartening to have it simply disappear without even a fanfare for farewell--just a simple, silent email that I happened to see just as my last student headed out the door for the day.

I do have other options for going to Japan, but they would all include a major step backwards in my career and my usefulness. It looks like I will be here next year. And who knows? Maybe the year after that. Cancel all the excitement, all the premature good-byes, all the hopes.

But all is not lost, and I really have no right to complain. Just yesterday a small miracle happened. My principal informed me that, contrary to everyone's reliable information, there will be an English position open at my school next year. I love my school, and there are many real advantages to staying here. So I do have a plan, an option, and an opportunity. I'm still bummed, and I feel like I just got yanked back three months emotionally, when I had just resigned myself to staying in the country at least another year and hopefully planning on staying at my school. I was genuinely looking foward to it. Then my job fell through and I started searching for a dream to chase and found it in Japan. Then, yesterday I found out the that there will be a job to apply for afterall, and today that the dream I've been chasing for months isn't possible anyway.

I'm a little emotionally confused. I'm happy that I might get to stay, but crushed that I can't go. So, I think I'll eat some chocolate, read a book, pick the yearbook staff for next year, and maybe go for a bike ride. If the past while is any indication, what I want will have little effect on my actual options, so it's best to be happy. Assuming that my future doesn't suddenly reverse course again in the next while, I'm looking forward to next year...in Utah. That is, I will be after some ice cream and chocolate and just a dash of moping.

Westward Ho!

This may surprise some of you, but I'm flying to Seattle today.

I'm flying to Seattle to interview for a job that would take me to Japan for the next year. Remember a few blog posts ago or so when I mentioned applying for a job that I really wanted? Yeah, this is it. I got an email from the company on Tuesday night asking me to be in Seattle this weekend for the interview. So I blew my savings on plane flights and hotels, and I've packed all my suits and professional clothing in my backpacking pack. I was up until midnight working on an example lesson plan and the accompanying props. Speaking of props--major props to the friend who came over and took me grocery shopping and helped with my props until nearly midnight, but they don't read this blog anyway. But without them, I probably wouldn't have gotten any sleep at all.

I'm gambling a lot this job opportunity, but that's what trying to fulfill dreams is all about right? Taking risks. It's about not doing sensible things like fixing one's car and instead using that money to buy last minute plane tickets to Seattle and moving to foreign countries to live by one's self. It's about going for broke. Right?

I wouldn't call myself incredibly well-travelled, but my record's not bad. I've travelled to three foreign countries and two other continents. I even have a fair amount of solo travel experiences. I've flown to Hawaii, Japan, Washington D.C. etc. on my own, and I've wandered around strange cities many times. But I don't think I've ever done a trip quite this solo. I've never bought all my own tickets and reserved all my own hotel reservations. I've never not had someone to meet me in the destination city, whether at the airport or near to it. This is my first trip completely on my own. Chances are, no one else from my interview group will even be in the same hotel. The number of things that could potentially go wrong on this very high-stakes trip (did I mention that I blew my whole savings? and that I really really want this job?) are rather alarming, but, overall, I'm staying confident. I'll have my cell phone and my computer, and there are few problems that can't be solved with internet access and phone calls to friends and family. I've looked up the necessary bus schedules, and I've got double copies of all the important information.

So, wish me luck, both with the travel and the interview.