2/9/10

The snow's falling fairly quickly outside. After I wrap this up I'm going to turn the lights off and open the blinds and watch it fall for a while. It's soothing. I know LB doesn't understand this bizarre fascination I have with snow, but it's peaceful. When a good snow starts hitting the ground people hole up in their caves and wait it out. Me, I prefer to go out into it. When I was a kid I took so many walks by Turkey Creek as the snow fell. After putting some distance between me and the house, 9.5 times out of 10 there wouldn't be another soul between myself and a million falling snowflakes for a half-mile in any direction. Isolation can be a wonderful experience in moderation.

T-minus 39 days till our big day. Can you believe it? It seems like there are a million things to do and not nearly enough hours in between now and then to do them all in. It's 2:38 in the morning now and the wedding begins at 10 am on March 20; 944 hours to go. I'd go into the minutes of the thing, but it seems a little silly to be honest. Time is marching by so quickly, I should really change the verb to "jogging," or "trotting," or even "zipping." I find myself worrying that this is all going by too fast, like this is the time I'm supposed to be savoring somehow, but instead it's a convoluted blur of 100 level classes I should have taken three years ago, pointless three day work weeks, and staying up till 3:00 am trying to decide which of an increasing pile of assignments should I try and peel off and to curse at them all and climb into bed. I thought the senioritis was bad last semester, I'm all but worthless these days!

More than becoming a father, more than becoming a husband, I'm terrified of trying to find a job with an English Degree from what is essentially a community college. Sure it says "Indiana University" on the diploma (in my imagination, my diploma is already printed, signed, and waiting in a sealed vault that is being guarded by Secret Service agents wearing chain mail armor and their black sunglasses while holding fire swords and fully automatic firearms. Cool right?) but I don't actually know anyone with an English degree that has a job right now. Have any of them gone down the road I'm going to seek? I know Andrea embraced her role as a stay at home mom and Samantha decided very quickly into her post-graduate life that she wanted to teach and immediately enrolled back in school to get certified, but there are people I went to school with that still work at Starbucks making coffee and hoping that their knowledge of Eliot, Keats, Faulkner, and Joyce will somehow yield them jobs as CEOs of a major corporation. (Point of irritation: Firefox's spellchecker is trying to tell me that "CEOs" should be "CEO's". I'm not trying to show that CEO possesses anything, I'm indicating that there is more than one prospective CEO in the smattering of people I'm referring to. It's the same thing that comes up when people try to write about the 60s and 70s and insist on tossing an apostrophe in between the 's' and the zeroes. Language is a gift, use it well. I should really just teach shouldn't I?)

I believe that Lauren and I have decided that the baby is going to sleep in our room at first. I'm sure this is a normal decision and if you're reading this and have a modicum of experience with child rearing you're probably scoffing at my naivety, but this is my first so leave me alone. Anyway, this makes me want to move the computer back into the other bedroom. I really don't like it where it's at. The only reason I bring this up is because I'm looking right at it. There it is, sitting in the middle of the dining room against the wall, mocking me with its (<--- see that?? proper possessive usage!) out-of-placedness. (made up words FTW!)

That previous paragraph has me thinking about teaching. Were I a high school English teacher, what would I teach? I'd try to teach Tolkien. I think his works are so ingrained in our culture and are the modern example of the epic. I suppose it depends on the class and the curriculum the state requires. With my luck I'd be stuck doing 19th century American Lit (possibly the most overrated generation of English speaking writers in the history of English speaking writers! Dickinson and Thoreau ugh! I know, I know I'm conveniently omitting Twain, Hawthorne, and Melville it's just that I hate transcendentalism so much! ) I would definitely petition to become the sponsor of the school newspaper though and if the school was a member of Quill and Scroll I'd try to become active in that as well. I also think that once I secured my Master's and got to working on my PhD I'd try to teach intro level classes as an adjunct at a school like IU Northwest, for extra money and such. I just really don't want Lauren to have to work until she absolutely wants to. I don't mind working myself to death so long as my child is brought up in an environment where a loved one is always around for them.

Well its a quarter past 3:00 now and I DO have class at 10:00, so now's a good a time as any to crawl into bed, after I go get the laundry out of the drier. Of for the day I get to stay in my own home to do the laundry, how I envy how the other half lives.

I tend to start these blogs and forget about them, but maybe this will be a nice release valve for me as these incredibly stressful days pound away at me. Wish me luck all.