When I was a little girl, there was a part of me that wanted to wear glasses. I thought it would make me appear outwardly as smart as I felt inwardly. Then I went to the eye doctor to do a check up, and became instantly terrified of people going near or touching my eyes. I should have known: I never even liked sunglasses because they came too close. A tickle of the eyelashes. The sound of hair on glass buzzing in my head.
So when things started getting blurry last semester (when did 10 point font start looking so….small?), I avoided the doctor as much as possible. I avoided even thinking about it until the headaches began in earnest, and Kate began getting tired of my whining. The last straw came when I drove Kate to Indy, and had trouble reading the road signs on the way back. Fine. Whatever.
So here I am, now the proud owner and wearer of pearly pink, nearly rimless reading glasses. I hate them. They frame the world, despite the lack of rim, change my perception, make everything that is not text (I know, Derrida--Il n’y a de hors texte) soft at the edges. And Mango ate the case.
But it does make me feel smarter. Or maybe older. More professional. More Professorial. And that’s a good thing, because this is the first time in 23 years that I am not a “student” taking a class. The real world is blurry at the edges, but it’s creeping in, making itself sharper in my peripheral all the time. Every time I teach at Ivy Tech, I feel less and less studential. Less studerian. More like a real human being alive. A human being human--fantastic!
And as a human, despite not being allowed/able/prepared to take the prelim exam, I am beginning to prepare for the job search, which begins next fall. Part of me is now split--while I always planned on either going back to Bluffton or back to Boston, I thought I'd be teaching at a traditional four year university, preferably smaller than Purdue, and with a more Liberal Arts emphasis. I thought about publishing in the areas of Rhet/Comp, fandom, and the English novel. But this teaching non-traditional and adult learners thing is really cool. Frustrating, but cool. Without my own classes to prepare for, I'm a better teacher, in general (this bodes well), but I actually look forward to teaching my 9:00 class at Ivy Tech. My Master Plan, that which has motivated and directed me since I first realized I would have to leave Boston--that which caused me to start this damn blog in the first place--is getting fuzzy now, and I have no Plan B, assuming something more falls through (and I can't blame Sandy's dad for being ill. I just can't).
Of course, "Plan B" usually refers to a failure of some sort. But maybe Plan B isn't always a bad thing. I've come to not believe in the God Has A Plan For Me rhetoric because it's too narcissistic, too American, too Capitalistic in nature. If something "bad" happens, it's because it happened, not because God has some coded riddle for me to figure out--my life isn't a parable with a tidy moral at the end. The dystopian impulse, the progress narrative's mirror image, forces us to look to the end (it's entellechial) to give meaning, to give us reason for action, to guide our processes. But this is postmodernity, and we know better than to assume time is neatly causal, or that there are limited positive outcomes for each situation. Fate is made, time is Wibbly-Wobbly, and a person's life doesn't have to have a singular, coherent narrative--that's a job for biographers and obit writers. And for filling in slots on class reunion forms.
So I've decided to embrace the Zen attitude for the moment--an attitude toward history which is neither comic nor tragic, and would have driven Burke mad. To simply be in the moment without plotting or extrapolating, without judging or narrating toward an end (or beginning). To be without temporal relationships. This is, of course, impossible, and I have already failed by writing this blog entry in the first place, but like most religious undertakings, it is the attempt at the impossible that matters, not the execution of perfection (rotten with perfection).
So I'm going to be a good little adult and go to bed before midnight. Time stamp: 11:57.
