How Did I Get Here?

To quote a great poet, David Byrne: "You may find yourself living in a shot gun shack. / You may find yourself in another part of the world. / You may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile. / You may find yourself in a beautiful house with a beautiful wife. / You may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?" The song questions the nature of life and time, using the metaphor of a river to talk about how the course of someone's life is really left up to so many variables, it might as well be called chance. Really, the joy in life comes from enjoying the ride.

Maybe it's because I am have been in sort of a glum mood due to the amount of work I am putting into certain endeavors in my life with little immediate response (do people still say glum), but I was overwhelmed with retrospection this evening. It turned me into a pretty shoddy pool player, so to turn lemons into some sort of lemon-flavor beverage, I hope to exorcise this retrospection in blog form.

In short, like Byrne, I wonder how did I get here. But more than that, my mind keeps focusing on everything that I have lost to get here.

I don't want to make it seem like my sacrifices in persuit of an education are the stuff of Hollywood movies. I come from a well-education parentage, I coasted through an elite college prep high school, went to a private liberal arts college and got a job I was not qualified for immediately out of college. I've faced no discrimination, I've had few societal hurdles in my way as I have gone from youth to adulthood. In actuality, I have been presented with more opportunities than the average person gets. I won't go into the patronizing argument about the burden too many choices presents in a persons life; suffice it to say, my journey here (and here is pretty good) was not, in a grand sense, difficult.

However, I have had to make really tough decisions, keeping focused on the end goal: getting a job in college academics. Honestly, this has been the only thing I have been good at, and which I really liked. I was a decent caterer, but I hated that job. I was a good delivery driver, but found that job numbing at best. I've built bleachers, sold things from the trunk of my car to passers-by, schlepped books and DJed karaoke parties. Other than playing bass in a band, none of the jobs or hobbies I have had fulfilled me the way that academia does. It's not just the fact that I get summers off, I get to read and talk about books, and that the work is not all that hard (at least that's what people on the outside think; academics know that the job is not physically demanding, but there is a certain strain on the mind that can be equally as troubling - I know: it's so hard to think, right? But it is; not everyone could do this job). These perks certainly are welcomed, but what I like, what I genuinely enjoy, is teaching. Even the hard classes, the ones that burn out other teachers, provide a sense of gratification. If even one person says, "Huh...that's interesting," or I can guide one student to a better understanding of communication, it makes all the slack-jawed, glass-eyed students immaterial. Call me old-fashioned, or overly Romantic, but I really like being an academic.

This has been important to me for a while: finding a job that I liked to do. There are a lot of stats that talk about how much of your life you spend working at your job, and all of these suggest that a good chunk of your life is spent working. I was determined to make sure that I spent that part of my life doing something that I like doing.

I get this from my Mom, who left a decent administrative assistant job to be a museum educator. At the time, my family needed some extra money to help float us through two college and two high school tuitions. My Mom worked hard as an administrative assistant, and that is certainly no easy job. But, ultimately, that is not what my Mom wanted to do with her life, so instead she looked around. Had my Dad not talked her out of it, she might be a medical billings specialist, but instead she went for another interest of hers: historical education. She guided tours, mostly school groups, through Naper Settlement discussing the interesting historical facts about the random buildings collected there. She did so dressed in authentic attire, most of which she made herself. It was a grueling job, requiring a lot of time on her feet in all sorts of weather, working with outdated tools and equipment, and constant struggles with an administration that did not fully understand of value the educational staff. But talking about history, teaching young people something new, even if only one or two people all day would walk away with anything, made her happy. She gladly spent hours thinking up new activities, planning overnight parties and so on.

This was a polar opposite of my Dad, who hated his job. This dissatisfaction with his job, I feel, poisoned his family life, particularly towards the end of his career when, after 35 years with ComEd, they were passing menial, entry level tasks on him, hoping to push him out. When Arthur Anderson merged with ComEd, there was the constant threat of lay-offs, and my Dad lived nearly 10 years of the end of his life waiting for the eventual pink slip to show up on his desk. Nearly everyone that worked around him was either laid off, or left for other positions. My Dad, though, put his nose to the grind stone and worked harder and harder. He got passed up for several promotions, was not given raises some years (which is like a pay cut), and was forced to work through some nights. At one point, I think my Dad was working six days a week for 10 hours a day, too scared to resist because he needed that job to support his family. I don't know what else my Dad would have done with his life, but I don't think managing systems for a power company was his dream job.

When your career is that toxic, there is no way the rest of your life is going to be enjoyable. I think a lot of my Dad's prickliness stemmed from how much he hated his job. After he finally retired (because he was physically unable to work, not because he wanted to), he became much easier to be around. In fact, towards the end of his life, we got along great, and I wish, as everyone does, that I would have spent more time with him in those declining years.

When I was driving trucks to make ends meet, rapidly advancing up the delivery driver ladder, I realized I was genuinely unhappy and saw that I might end up in the same position my Dad took. I didn't want to hate my job so much that it affected my personal life. In fact, I wanted to love my job to the point that I was happy to come home to my family, proud of my work. That was when I decided that I was going to teach. I wasn't qualified for it, and was sort of jaded from my time in the Monmouth Education Department, but I put my sights to it.

Initially, I got a job with St. Dominic as a para-professional, teaching computer classes to K-8. I liked it, but was much happier when they took some computer classes from me so that I could teach the new writing curriculum. And then, once I was given reigns over the entire junior high language arts program, I was extremely happy. I loved talking about literature with the kids. I found that I was really good at engaging disinterested classes. The greatest compliment I received while I was teaching came from a parent: I was told their daughter, "came home and did more reading since I had taken over because she wanted to have something to say in class." Had it not been for the cumbersome involvement of parents, I would have stayed at St. Dominic, in a different place in my life. I'll say this about the parent/teacher relationship: before you decide that a teacher's curriculum is either problematic or inconsequential, you should at least provide them the courtesy of a discussion. I toiled over my lesson plans, often staying much later than the students, thinking of interesting questions, trying to find interesting ways to teach inherently uninteresting subject matter (like sentence diagramming). I weighed the amount of work each student should have to do, and tried to balance out the week, and the work loads of other classes. Still, several parents made my life quiet difficult. I knew when I was approached at Target one Sunday afternoon for an impromptu parent/teacher conference, that I wanted to teach in an environment with fewer people watching over my shoulder.

So I enrolled at Southern Illinois University. At the time, I was seriously dating a woman I knew from high school, and we were quite comfortable with each other. At the same time, she decided she was unhappy at her job and enrolled at the much more prestigious Northwestern University. The distance, about five hours by car, was quite a strain, as were our competing work loads and academic pressures. Her coursework was far more competitive than mine, but I carried a teaching load. An MA in English is far less subjective, and requires a lot less navigation through people's personalities, so I had that going for me; but her degree was creative, so she spent a lot of time writing where I spent hours with my face in dense theory or in course work I was less interested in (like eighteenth century literature). Though we seemed to be in a similar boat, there was a lot of tension between the two of us. I think we both tended to view the other's life through our own circumstances, and found that the other had it easier.

Eventually, the strain of the distance and the incongruous life styles lead to our breakup. I was genuinely sad to see Jenni go, and sometimes I wish things had worked out differently. Though, if I am honest with myself, I don't think this move would have sat well with her. If SIU didn't kill us, Aberystwyth certainly would have.

At the end of my tenure at SIU, I started dating another woman, and we hit it off well. This relationship, though, was doomed from the beginning: I had already been accepted to Aberystwyth and the move was almost a reality. I was also accepted to the University of Washington, but for one reason or another, I came here. Again, if I am honest with myself, this decision hung over my relationship: I could choose Aberystwyth (the selfish choice), or Washington (the selfless choice). It might have been easier on us had I gone to Washington, since she could have packed up and left to Washington without needing a visa or anything. Washington, though, was not as good a fit for me. I could have done what I needed to at Washington, but Aberystwyth, on paper, looked to make me a better academic, and gave me more opportunities down the road. In the end, I choose Aberystwyth; Maggie and I didn't even make it to my departure date. The enormity of it all crushed our relationship, and in the end it was probably for the better. I don't think we gelled as well as we thought we did.

Before I left, I met Erika. Well, re-initiated a relationship with her. See: I had met and grown quite close to her while at St. Dominic. Due to unfortunate circumstances, we were not able to see each other; then we both went our separate ways. Then, literally two weeks before I was about to leave, we found that our deeply buried emotions still existed. Again, at that point I could have pulled out of Aberystwyth, and we both knew that. Things were not immediately awesome here, and there was good reason to rethink my decision to expatriate. Again, after a lot of sleepless nights, I went with Aberystwyth; even as a less awesome option, it was still better than the alternatives. Even though I really felt strongly for Erika, I knew that I would not be happy unless I did this in the way that made sense to me. I really tried to make our relationship work, but in the end, the enormity of the commitment was too much for Erika, and she pulled the plug (as everyone who reads this knows).

So, now I am here, in a foreign country, and feeling a little lonely. I worry that this might not have been the right choice. I worry that I zigged when I should have zagged. Could I have been happy working the community college circuit in Chicago while I tried to get accepted to a local University for PhD work? Could I have struggled through the parent/teacher relationship to keep my job at St. Dominic? Would it have been better to focus on who I spent my life with rather than what I did with it? These are the questions that will keep one up at night.