Hello, Fall

Last Sunday I had a nice gchat with my friend Jeanne, who is living in France and teaching college English courses. We talked primarily about how she is in a temporary situation and she is starting to think about and look for jobs that would fall more under the category of "career path." In other words, a job that she feels passionate about and wants to pursue for more than two years.

This is a question that often bugs me (especially when I'm in stress mode)--the basic question of whether teaching high school is my "career" that I'm staying in or not. I was fretting over it for an evening and a day and then I realized that I was really just yearning to be back in touch with the literary world.

I've said it before, but I'm especially thinking about it lately: I am content with many aspects of my life right now, and I am also desiring being in the company of writers and being in that mode where I'm coming up with ideas and writing short stories. I was feeling a giant fear and anxiety that Sunday that my life was quickly passing me by and the older I get, the harder it will be for me to make a big job/education change, the harder it might be to justify that change, and when I'm ready to have kids, maybe it will be downright financially impossible to go back to school.

I've since calmed down. There are a few reasons why. Reason one is that I figured out that a lot of my anxiety stems from the fact that I have no focused plan--no step by step to-do list. I was freaking out about too many things at once (even over the fact that I haven't been reading good novels and short stories that will affect my inspiration levels to write). So Monday I made an extremely short-term to-do list in Microsoft Word that was only intended for that particular evening. It had things on it like "cook dinner," "run," "read a chapter of Of Mice and Men." Because I made a list, I did the things. Or most of them. For writing, I've decided that I'm going to finish The Great Typo Hunt because I borrowed it from my friend at school and I told her I was going to read it. After I finish that, I will make a list of things that I will do to nurture my writing life. Maybe it will include reading short stories and finally finishing those books about writing techniques and novel-writing. Maybe it will include doing exercises from a writing book. Maybe one day I will be able to hook up with writers from LSU in some way. Maybe there's a way for me to audit a class or pay for just one class. Who knows.

There are some other reasons that I've since calmed down: school is going awesome, and dance has been a blast lately. This week at school, I got asked to go get trained to start teaching AP courses. My department head said she was looking into moving (and retiring, at least from our school) sooner than she thought and that our principal may be paying me a visit that day to ask me to take over her AP classes. There aren't really any such thing as job promotions when you're a high school teacher, but this is about as close as it gets. Sure enough, the principal came to my classroom on her planning period to ask me about it. I said yes, of course. It's a pretty big honor--especially because my department head is kind of a legend at our school and following in her footsteps is a pretty big challenge. It made me feel like I got an A+ in my job. I rarely see the principal or my department head (and, therefore, rarely think about what they think about how I'm teaching these days), so it was a nice surprise.

As for dance, we've been working on a fund raiser for a few weeks that was described as a "5k Zombie run" ending in a street performance of Thriller. I saw last night that it coincided with the opening of the 13th Gate, BR's haunted house, so that was some smart planning on our board's part. Anyway, we've been holding Thriller classes for the general public and got a pretty good-sized group going of dancers and non-dancers--maybe about 40 people. So I met with my dance friends Steph and Micaela at Goodwill to buy some Zombie clothes--I found a light blue size 18 dress shirt with some ruffles in the front and a Victorian collar. I went home and put it on and Leif strategically cut it up (he's a much bigger Zombie fan than I am) and rolled it in a little molasses and dirt. I put on cutoffs, cut up some black knee high stockings, made a tall hairdo, smeared liquid eyeliner all over my face, and ran out the door.

There ended up being something like 400 runners! I hope we made lots of money. And when we performed Thriller in the street last night, it got an awesome response. I think it's fair to say that we killed. A couple of my former students were there, and they liked it. Leif said it looked awesome, and that there was actually some pretty intricate movement in there.

And THEN, later while we were hanging out in the L bar for the after party (right next to where we performed), the DJ was still going. A few of us were cuttin' a rug. And he kept playing good songs, so we kept dancing. Carrie's boyfriend bought us pizza from Pasttime (I'd never had any before! It was so greasy, but good). And then much later in the night, he got the DJ to play Thriller again, so Carrie, Steph, Micaela, and I "performed" it right in the bar (we were still in costume at that point, and it was pretty dark in there, so I'm sure the effect was great). Everyone there got really excited and people were filming us with their iPhones. I felt like I was in an '80s movie where it cuts to a dance scene and everyone just so happens to know the six minute dance sequence. Afterward, Carrie said something like "Well, I got to fulfill my lifelong dream of performing a dance in the middle of a club." When we were leaving, there was a beautiful dry fall breeze in the parking lot.

It was so freakin fun.