Wednesday, Sept. 10, 2003
Restlessness, posted at 9:44 a.m.
Epiphany in Baltimore has moved to epiphanyinbaltimore.blogspot.com Lately, I have been feeling very restless - restless in a way I haven't felt since I packed up my bags in Michigan upon getting my certification and moved down to Baltimore without knowing a soul. The origin is undefined for the moment, but it came to a head last night as I hung out with Bette and Sunny at the Orioles game. Both are ex-colleagues, both are at new schools this year, and both are extremely happy. The things they describe seem like a utopian teaching experience - being reimbursed for the materials spent on a classroom, having supportive administration, a free gym membership because employee health is valued - seem so civilized, so nice. I work at a school with an incredible turnover of staff and a 100-member staff where I know few teachers, and hearing about a small, close faculty is tempting.In all honesty, I don't know where my next career step will be. I'm not talking about not teaching - I'm going to be teaching until I'm 65, at least - but I'm wondering if this is the right school for me right now. I don't feel stagnant, but I don't want to even begin to feel that way.
Bette spent a few years when she was my age teaching overseas, in Morrocco. She's been hinting for years that the idea might be good for me, and now I'm beginning to listen. There are programs where I could make much more than I make here, and begin to get out debt, as well as satisfy this urge I have to see the world even though I have severe financial problems. I might even be able to claw my way out of debt if I did something like that. Another colleague, Charles, taught in London for years and loved it.
I think I'm getting a sense that Baltimore will not be my final settling point, and the fact that many of my friends have left is making it seem more pronounced. It's feeling less like home rather than more like home. I still love the city, but the lonely feeling of going through the motions is catching up to me. I'm working so much, but it also seems like so many of my other activities are solitary. My daily off-day trips to Trader Joe's and Barnes & Noble no longer have that joyful feeling of being solitary yet happy. They just feel lonely.
I'm content, but not always happy. I was talking to Gale last night, about the pizza delivery man who had the bomb strapped to his neck. Now that he's gone, all the articles mention his simple existence: how he lives alone with his three cats, how he was a creature of his routines, how he lived for his Sunday night steak dinners with his mom. I don't want to become that guy. Gale assured me that I wouldn't because, after all, I live hundreds of miles from my mother. That made me laugh, and I knew I was being a bit overly dramatic, but it's impossible not to wonder why I'm 26 and still don't have much of a direction in my life, with few relationship possibilities and not many prospects except my career that I love and a somewhat waning idealism.
The last time I went on a date, it was this girl I met on the Internet down in DC. I drove down, and we had a pretty good time - saw the film Identity, and by the end, we had propped our legs on one another's and on the seats in front of us and things felt pretty good. By the time we got back to her apartment, though, things were weird again, and she was so strange on her couch that I didn't even call her again. We were messing around a bit, and things were progressing marvelously, and then she weirded out. I realize this is something I probably have had patience for, but I didn't, and didn't call her again. She was a graduate student who lived in NYC and was only in DC for the semester, so there were probably no real long term possibilities, but it still was at least something. Reflecting on it now a few months later, I feel like Chandler in the early years of Friends, when he was looking for any excuse to dump a woman and then was worried that he'd end up like their neighbor upstairs who died alone.
Well, at least Chandler eventually got married.
This is a pretty whiny entry, and probably has as much to do with the gray day and the shock of being back at work after a beautiful day off than anything else. But it probably also has to do with the fact that so many of my friends have married off or coupled off or moved or bought a house in the last couple of years and I'm still in the same place.
I have no desire to be a tumbleweed, blowing from city to city without ever truly finding a home. I want to be closer to my family, not farther. This school is a pretty great school, and I feel like at least my department head is someone who can really help my development as a teacher, even if she did give me all 9th graders for the third year in a row. I still want the chance to be head baseball coach, after two years of voluntary assistant coaching and what's looking like will be a third year of the same. But I'm still having some dissonance about where I want to be next year, if my life should continue down this clear, comfortable path or into something that is more dangerous, more exciting, and more challenging. I'm beginning to wonder if I should maintain the status quo or strike out again on my own.
PS: The fact that my gym membership has lapsed and I'm not working out is the main reason why this sense of dissatisfaction is creeping into my life. Need to get that renewed. I miss Bally's.