Blog Posts I Started and Never Finished

1. The one where I hiked to this waterfall.

2. The one where I rode a bus from New Orleans to Atlanta to see one of my college roommates/favorite humans get married. The one where I reminisce about reunions and late-night talks and how random dorm room assignments 8 years ago brought together a (now) husband and wife and how absurd and beautiful relationships (all types of them) are. 

3. The one where I spent a night in New Orleans with three of my best friends and realized that I could not remember the last time that I was with more than one of my friends in the same city.

4. The one where I share some thoughts about women’s Olympic gymnastics.

5. The one where my sister found out she's having a girl. 

6. The one where I was, yet again, jobless until mid-August and then in a span of a few hours I got an interview (then a second, third, and fourth), and two days later a job offer. Then the one where I packed everything I could fit in my car in one day and drove to DC with no apartment or plan other than showing up at work two days later. 

7. The one where I crashed at a friend’s apartment while starting my job (5 days after all the other new hires started) while trying to find an apartment at the same time and teaching myself how to parallel park. 

8. The one where my new school is a Catholic school and I had to attend my first Mass afraid that I  would accidentally reveal to my new coworkers that I had no idea what was happening. 

9. The one where I found an apartment in Bethesda, which I only knew to be the home of the girls in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, but is, in fact, a delightful town less than a mile from DC where everyone has enough money to attend $30 per visit exercise classes daily. 

10. The one where I attend a couple of said exercise classes (for the $15 first visit discount) and had some thoughts to share about them. 

11. The one where I slept on an air mattress in my empty apartment for 9 nights until my heroic parents drove a U-Haul here with my furniture, stayed exactly 24 hours, then had to go back home so they wouldn’t miss work. 

12. The one where I live next to a Capital Bikeshare stand (where you can rent city bikes) and have ridden something like 50 miles in the last three weekends. 

13. The one where I try to figure out how to teach 5 classes of over 20 students each when the largest class I’ve ever taught was 15. 

14. The one where I discover that I’ve somehow landed at one of the best high schools for athletes in DC. (Perhaps the country.) Which is not a thing I can ever say I imagined. 

15. The time where my car died in the school parking lot and no one could start it for three days, so I had to Uber to and from school until I finally got it towed to a repair place where they put in a new battery. 

16. The one where I finally finish unpacking and have an apartment that actually looks like a home. 

17. The one where I tell you all about DC and what it’s like to live here so far and how incredibly nice everyone is. 

18. The one where I describe each of the smoothies I splurge on every weekend. Because that truly deserves a post of its own. Though I will never confess how much I pay for them. 

Summer

I’m in a different state and town than I’ve ever lived in. The mountains outside the window of my classroom belong to the same range as the ones I used to live near. Nine hours apart and from opposite sides, but they still feel half familiar. 

I left my job in May after nearly ten months of knowing I would. It was a job I felt lucky to have and a job I really loved. But I left the rural south the first time because I no longer felt like it was where I belonged. I never really believed I could force myself to belong there again. 

Even though I couldn’t see myself in the rural south longterm, it wasn’t easy to willingly leave a job that I looked forward to every morning, or coworkers who welcomed me even when I was hired in a moment of desperation two days before school started and looked the same age as the students, and students who made me laugh and made me proud and made me feel like the things I said mattered to them. 

I started applying for new jobs months ago in hopes of getting back to the East Coast. As luck would have it, I still have no offers. 

I’m teaching two classes at Randolph-Macon Academy’s summer school right now, but it feels less like teaching and more like private tutoring. I have one student in English 11 and two in creative writing. Each class is three and a half hours each day and half a day on Saturday, which makes for a very long week. 

But sometimes on slow days, we walk downtown to the ice cream shop where Bill, the ice cream man, lets my students write essays requesting a new ice cream flavor and then invites us to come back so he can teach us how to make it. Sometimes I bring my mentor group to eat dinner at IHOP, even though it means I have to drive a school van. And sometimes I buy my students cupcakes and then walk 8 miles around DC carrying the giant box of them in the 100 degree weather and wanting only to stop and eat them all. (I resisted.) 

Being at a military school is a little like being in a foreign country that I didn’t prepare to visit. When my boss explained during our orientation meeting that students who broke the rules would be sent to the commandant and assigned tours I spent a while on Google learning what a commandant was and trying to figure out what exactly they’d be touring. I’ve learned the rules about never (ever) wearing “civilian clothes” or close-toed shoes, which means some stealth is required when I leave to go to the gym in the evenings. I’ve learned not to be alarmed when the Junior Marine campers start chanting things in deeper-than-natural voices during meals. 

I’ve been spending my weekends in DC feasting and visiting and exploring. One of my best friends just bought a condo there. It’s beautiful, with these wood floors and skylights and a balcony and a million windows.  

I don’t know how I got old enough to have friends who buy condos. I’m still trying to get used to being old enough to rent an apartment. Purchasing an actual home is a level of permanence that feels so far away from me right now. 

One of my coworkers asked me the other day if I had any kids. My first instinct was to laugh, and I had to remind myself fast that that was a perfectly reasonable question. That, in fact, that  stopped being a silly question many years ago, somewhere around the time that my friends started getting married and buying houses and being something very much like real adults. I can't decide if they've somehow become actual adults or if they're just very good at acting. 

During the spring, I was talking to my students about success and how the concept is completely relative. When I asked them what they thought personal success would look like for them in ten years, one of the girls said, “Well, I definitely want to be settled down by then.” 

“Define settled down,” I told her. 

“I mean, I definitely want to be married and have a kid or two by the time I’m 25 or 26.” 

“You’re looking at a complete failure right here, guys,” I told them. “You’re looking at the world’s worst role model! I can’t believe they let me teach you!” 

Another student who grew up in Europe said, “26!? You want to be married when you’re 26?! No one gets married before they’re 30!!” 

I hope I taught those kids a little more English than they knew before. But more than that, I hope I taught them that success can look like a lot of different things, and those things do not necessarily involve a spouse, a kid, or a house when they’re 26. 

One of my friends is getting married in a couple of weeks. Another friend’s having a baby at the end of the year. Some of my friends teach and some make art and some are still in school, and some make more money than I can comprehend and some make very little money at all, and some own nice houses and some live with their parents, and some are married and some are not, and some have kids and some know they never want them. And I don’t feel like any of those things have anything inherently to do with success or a lack of it. 

My friend in DC and I had a long conversation about how few people we know who don’t hate their jobs, how there are even fewer people we know who are genuinely excited about their jobs (regardless of how much or little they get paid). I don’t know why people consider success anything other than being excited about what you do everyday and figuring out how to make a living doing it. And that’s my motivational speech of the day. 

Now that the general public of Facebook has been alerted, I can 

finally announce the news that I’m going to be an aunt! My sister’s baby is due in January. I refer to it fondly as “the fetus” and she and I are perhaps equally excited about teaching it to read when it’s three, which is the approximate age at which I will stop being afraid to hold it. 

Spring

Spring is always full. Somehow it’s already the last quarter of the school year and time for short sleeves and not being able to breathe through my nose. I ordered my first iced coffee of the year a couple of weeks ago. It’s been over two years since I’ve been able to drink coffee at all. Maybe we lose things temporarily so we can be fully grateful for them later. (Like walking without a knee brace. And finally being able to workout in a gym again.)

A few weeks ago, I coerced a friend into coming to teach my classes poetry. I told him he would make me cooler by association and offered him fancy cheese. (It worked a little too well, as I think my students like him better than they like me. Justifiably so.) In the grocery store, he told me that friends from grad school only exist for him in New York, not in reality. But here we are, he said, walking around a regular grocery store, like regular people. 

I remember the weirdness of first trying to place people outside the context in which they existed for me. Friends from home visiting me at college, visiting college friends after graduation, meeting people now in the places they’ve scattered. For me there was always the worry that the relationship would be different if the setting changed. Sometimes they were different. But it’s easy to tell when a friendship exists because of proximity or convenience and when it’s made of stronger stuff. 

I started last week with a virus that caused me to miss work and lie on my floor with my muscles on fire, eating soup for every meal. I worried I’d have to delay my spring break trip, but my last night with fever was the night before I left. Again with the thankfulness. I drove to Knoxville to catch a bus to DC then a train to New York. Everyone thought I was crazy for taking a bus, but really, the lack of security lines, anxiety, million dollar parking, claustrophobia, and pressurized air made it worth it. I had a skylight, a second floor view, gas station snacks, and two seats to myself, and what more can you ask for? And if given the option, I don’t know why anyone would ever travel any other way but by train. 

On my first night in New York, eleven of us feasted in my old apartment (still my roommate’s apartment), and it felt like the last twelve months hadn’t changed anything. I wondered for a minute if I should have stayed in New York. If I should have spent another year trying to turn my manuscript into something I know what to do with instead of a pile of intimidating pages on my bookshelf. I could have tried to teach at Columbia and tutored to pay rent. I could have had dinner parties and joined a friend’s writing workshop and gone to readings every week and splurged on Levain cookies and weekend bus rides to DC and Boston and Providence. I could have walked with all of my friends at graduation. 

But I don’t regret graduating earlier, and I’m grateful for that, too. Because as much as I miss all of them, I knew it would feel like I was treading water I stayed, and instead I get to be part of that tiny fraction of people who wakes up every day and goes to work excited to be there. 

I filled Easter and the next few days in New York with coffee visits, dinner visits, and the food I’ve craved for ten months (Silver Moon gluten free blueberry muffin, I dream of you still), and then I told my old apartment goodbye. Sophie will move out at the end of May, and that was the last time we’d all be there together before everyone scatters again. My number of cities to visit will grow. 

I took the bus back to DC and spent a couple of days exploring and visiting older friends who’ve know me since I was a silent, nervous 18-year-old who had a hard time speaking to strangers, had barely been outside of Mississippi, and had never tried hummus (Or Greek yogurt. Or bagels.). We’ve come a long way, guys. (Why did you talk to me back then?) I biked around the Tidal Basin and National Mall on a bike a foot too tall for me, saw the cherry blossoms, visited Bei Bei the baby panda at the zoo, and walked a million miles. I used a friend’s guest pass to workout in a gym that supplied me with a chilled eucalyptus-scented towel (which alone probably costs more than a month’s membership at my regular gym). I feasted with people who still feel like a second family. 

My students think I have only have two friends, because they’ve seen one and heard another’s name. When I told them I had this suspicion, one of them said, “No, Ms. Smith, we saw a picture of you with three people. So you must have three friends.” I fear they think I imagined the others. I’m glad I didn’t imagine the others. (Students, if any of you are creeping on here, I didn’t imagine the others.) I’m thankful for friends who travel to sit in my living room floor telling stories and eating pretzels until way past bedtime. And for former roommates who still feel like roommates even when we live in different time zones. And for friends who teach me how to bench press without even making fun of me (audibly).

Ten days and 34 hours on the road later, I made it back home. I thought about grading papers, but I ate a dark chocolate bunny instead, because I know about priorities. 

Endnote

It’s time for my annual New Year’s reflection post again somehow. This is the first that's not bookended by piles of snow taller than I am. 

2015 was crammed too full. I got my wisdom teeth removed almost exactly a year ago, and I still haven’t fully recovered from it. I finished a draft of my book. I graduated from grad school. I organized a reading for my friends. I had two jobs that I loved. I moved home at the beggining of the summer, and then moved again at the end of it. I missed New York more than I ever thought I would. I spent the summer with two stress fractures and a hole in the cartilage of my knee, and I still felt better than I did the previous year. I biked half the perimeter of Manhattan, listened to blue grass  in Brooklyn at 3:00am, and ate BBQ on rooftops in Harlem. I spent 8 months applying and getting rejected from more jobs than I care to count. I did so many interviews that they blur together. I finally got one. I moved to Tennessee for my first full-time teaching job. I moved into my first apartment of my own. I pulled off my first semester and convinced everyone that I knew what I was doing. I spent more time with 48 15-year-olds than I did with anyone else. I flew on 7 planes (my 86th - 92nd), rode on 10 buses, spent 44 nights in hotels and other people's houses in 11 states, and drove 6,500 miles. I saw my friends get published and act in plays and make movies. I hosted some dinner parties. I got paid to publish something for the first time. I saw Boston with snow drift-mountains, Providence in a blizzard, DC during the cherry blossom festival, and the Smoky Mountains with fall colors. I visited old friends, said goodbye to a lot of people, and met even more new ones. I only read 46 books and felt sad about it. I wrote less than I wanted to. I started paying student loans. I put the deposit on my future dog. I turned 26. For the last essay of my semester exam, I asked my students to write about the most important thing they learned this semester, inside or outside the classroom. 16 of the 48 wrote that they’ve become better writers, and 8 wrote that I taught them the importance of kindness. And though I suspect that 80% of them wrote those because they thought I’d give them a better grade, it still made me feel like I’d done something right. 

I’ve started off 2016 with my first sip of coffee in like two years (I survived it), as much reading-for-fun as I could cram in, new socks, dark chocolate, and some diligent Shakespeare research. I get my new dog at the end of the month. I have so many things to be grateful for. 

Wilderness Adventures

I’ve made it through an entire quarter. Report cards are out, and no parent has called to yell at me (yet). No one has dropped out, and I’ve only considered kicking students out of my class a few times. Marks of success. 

We had fall break a couple of weeks ago. If I don’t see fall foliage, my sadness lingers for a good ten months, so I threw some clothes and my camera in the car before school on Friday and ended up in Asheville on Saturday morning. I’ve been to Asheville 7 or 8 times, but never in the fall. The leaves weren’t quite ready for me, so I had to climb some mountains and find them. 

Right after I got home, I left for Field Studies. Each grade at the school does something together as a group immediately following fall break, and for 9th grade it’s a 2-night, 3-day camping trip. As one of the 9th grade advisors (and one of only 2 available females), I was enlisted to go. 

We loaded the school bus on Wednesday morning with the 49 students, 4 adults, and enough luggage to survive for several weeks in Siberia, then drove the 2 and 1/2 hours to a YMCA camp on the edge of the Smokies. 

A brief history of my past camping experience:

-Once my childhood best friend and I slept in a tent in her front yard for reasons that I can’t fully articulate. We were about 10 feet from her front door, and we still got scared when her cat started making noises outside. I recall some friendship-bracelet-making. 

-My cousins, aunt, and I spent a night in a tent in their front yard (also for reasons unknown). Though I seem to recall getting tired of it and going back to the house before bedtime. 

-A few of my best friends and I went camping once during high school. We slept in a 3 room tent but all ended up in the same room because we may or may not have been nervous wimps. One of the friend’s parents were in a cabin next door, so we could go inside whenever we wanted. 

That’s it. 

Thankfully, Field Studies was also the wimp version of “camping,” for which I am grateful. We were in open-air cabins instead of tents, which means that there were bunk beds and walls but only screens on the doors and windows. There were bathrooms in the cabins which reminded me of the bathrooms that high schools have underneath their footballs stadiums. I slept the 2 nights in a cabin with a dozen 14-year-old girls, wearing 6 layers of clothes, trying not to freeze, yelling for everyone to be quiet, and listening to chatter that left me wondering if I was ever actually a 14-year-old girl myself. I finally decided that I wasn’t. I think ages 13-15 I skipped. 

I never went to traditional summer camp as a kid, though I always wanted to. My summers were filled with church retreats, choir tours, and mission trips instead, so the only camps I’ve ever visited have been religiously affiliated. I looked for religion at the camp and found it in the cross on the dining hall wall and the “blessings” we sang before we ate. I have a theory that in The South, every school and camp is secretly a Christian one. 

Some camping highlights: 

-The raisins in the granola

-The grapes on the salad bar (which I subsisted on)

-Canoeing. Watching the students flip their canoes. Remaining securely in my canoe. 

-Visiting with coworkers (Thank you, coworkers.) 

-“Rock” poker with the boys. Because desperate times.

-The times when I sat close enough to the fire to feel my toes

-The times when no wild animals came into the cabin through our non-locking door

-Rocking chairs

-The time when the workers finally brought the water coolers out 4 hours after we arrived (after a couple of us had already braved a few desperate sips from the sink) 

-The time when I did not have to sleep in a hammock between bunk beds

-This guy

-This view

I got back to my house on Friday, and a few hours later my mom and sister arrived, excited for the Bell Buckle Arts and Crafts Fair. It's not just a normal arts and crafts fair. It's an arts and crafts fair on a scale you've yet to ever witness. Imagine Mardi Gras but in a miniature town with fudge and fair food instead of alcohol and cheerful middle-aged women instead of drunken tourists. We had to arrive at 7:30 in the morning so we didn't get stuck in traffic trying to park for an hour. My mom and sister bought home decorations. I considered buying a hedgehog. 

And now that I've experienced Field Studies and the Craft Fair, I feel that I've made it through initiation. My reward is Halloween candy and three weeks until Thanksgiving break. 

Fall

I’ve been teaching for six weeks now, which means it’s been six weeks since I’ve written one creative word. Which effectively makes me feel like a crazy person. 

My parents brought my bed up a few weeks ago. I now have internet. I bought a couch. 

The delivery people gave me a four hour window when it would be delivered, so I had to call my leasing office and ask if they’d be willing to let the delivery men in. 

“Well, we don’t like to. For liability reasons,” she said. “Don’t you, like, have any friends who can be there? Don’t you know anyone you can ask?” 

I almost asked her if the guy who takes my order everyday the coffee shop in town counts. We don’t know each other's names, but he smiles when he tells me my tea costs $1.91. Or maybe the saleslady at the other furniture store who tried to sell me a couch that was $500 over my budget, but she was too nice for me to escape from, so I spent 45 minutes pretending to be interested. 

Instead I told her, “No, I don’t know anyone. Except for my coworkers. Who will be at work with me.” Thank you for the boost of self-esteem. Also, if I did have friends, they’d probably be at work from 10-2:00  on Thursday, too. 

It’s my first one-bedroom apartment. And even though the rent is significantly higher than it should be because it’s a short-term lease, I still pay over $200 less than I paid for my individual bedroom in New York. 

The walls are thin and my neighbors are either blaring a vulgar family drama or having a constant domestic dispute, and my door has 3 locks that still don’t close quite as securely as I’d like. There was a notification stuck in my door today giving me a “friendly reminder” that I’m violating my lease by having an undisclosed pet without properly notifying the leasing office, and letting me know that my neighbors have complained about my dog. 

I don’t have a dog. 

I have 4 chairs, but no table. There’s no light fixture in my living room, so I set a lamp on one of my 4 chairs and grade papers on the floor next to it. We need fewer things than we think we do. 

I have complicated feelings about being back in The South. I keep making social mistakes. Like when one of my students was talking about the Young Republicans Club at school and I said, “Oh, that’s awesome that you guys have political clubs. Is there a Young Democrats Club, too?” 

Silence and blank stares. 

Someone finally said, “We’re in Tennessee…” 

Lesson learned. 

I can’t stay in Murfreesboro too long, so I go to Nashville and grade papers in the coffee shops. I really like Nashville. I think it has better coffee shops than New York. 

Parent’s Day was last Friday. I had to teach in front of 4 classes full of parents and then have back-to-back meetings with them for 3 hours. My TMJ almost got me, but I survived it. I haven’t talked so much to humans over the age of 15 in almost 2 months. 

A lot of parents told me how shy their kid is, and I told them how I used to be so shy it was painful. “It gets so much easier,” I kept reassuring them. One boy's parents told me how reserved their son is and how too much social interaction is exhausting for him. I said, “I totally understand, I’m the same way.” Another social mishap. Don’t worry, I corrected that one well.

I’ve realized that there aren’t enough hours to teach. I’m used to the teaching hours at Duke TIP—7 hours per day on weekdays and 3 hours on Saturday. I teach each of my classes here for 3 and 1/2 hours per week. I wish I could give them 3 hours of homework each night. Then again, I also want to keep my job and not be a cruel tyrant. 

I feel like I’ve finally gotten my feet under me enough that I don’t feel like I’m in constant chaos. Maybe I’ll try to do something wild, like read a book, soon. 

I’m ready for fall, but I’m not ready for the sun to set so early. Fall makes me miss New England and the entire Northeast. I miss apple picking adventures and October farmers markets and Sophie’s pie. But I’m also happy I get to teach here. 

In a Sudden Turn of Events

In the last 10 days, I’ve slept in 5 different hotel rooms, a haunted mansion (long story), a near-stranger’s house (an immensely kind near-stranger), and a boarding school dorm room. In other words, I’m homeless. (At least until Wednesday.) I’ve moved to a new state and started a new job with less than 24 hours notice. It’s been a long week. 

Of course it would happen that after the months and months I’ve waited for a job offer—the thousands of miles I’ve traveled, the dozens of hours of interviews, and more false alarms than I want to count—of course I would get two job offers on the same day. And of course that day would be less than a week before school started. 

I got an email from one school last Monday to arrange phone and Skype interviews. I got a phone call from the second school on Tuesday. They wanted an in-person interview. “School starts on Monday so…Can you be here tomorrow?” So I packed in an hour then drove the seven hours to Tennessee. I interviewed for half of the next day and then was offered the job. I did a Skype interview that night (at 10:00pm in a hotel room) and was offered another job. 

I thought I’d decided, then I changed my mind, then I changed my mind again. I slept some and changed my mind some more. Then on the way home the next morning, I called The Webb School, a boarding school in Bell Buckle, Tennessee, and told them yes. I got home Thursday afternoon, crammed as much as I could fit in my car, and headed back to Tennessee the next morning. I made it to Bell Buckle with a couple of hours to spare before I had to greet the new students and their parents in my classroom (my classroom!)  and act like I knew exactly what I was doing. One parent looked me up and down and said, “And you’ve taught before?” which I think I handled rather well. 

This last week has been surreal. I’ve successfully completed my first week as the new 9th grade English teacher. I’ve found an apartment in Murfreesboro, about 30 minutes away, that I get to move into on Wednesday. I know most of my students’ names. (I know fewer of my coworkers’ names.) I’ve been mistaken for the English department chair’s daughter three times. (She’s in 9th grade.) 

Bell Buckle, Tennessee, is not the place I ever imagined myself teaching. I imagined myself on the East Coast. I imagined New England in the fall. I imagined snow boots. I imagined a Harry Potter-style dining hall. 

I did not imagine fireflies and instantaneous downpours. I imagined an equestrian team, but not being surrounded by more horse farms that I’ve ever seen. I did not imagine a school that believes in “seersucker Thursdays” (only before Labor day, of course) and has a shooting club. I’ve spent the last 7 years almost always having the most southern accent in any classroom. (Which is saying something, seeing as how my accent is maybe a 10th as strong as anyone else’s in my family or hometown). Here I have no accent. 

Some things are what I imagined. The students dress formally for class—imagine the Chilton uniform in Gilmore Girls, but with less plaid. We have chapel every day and sing the alma mater in Latin. In my 9th grade class, we’re reading a book that I read in my 12th grade AP class. Tuition costs nearly as much per year as my undergrad tuition. During school breaks, teachers lead student groups on trips to France, Italy, Japan, and Cuba. 

For now, I’m trying to plan more than a day ahead and actually read the books before my class does (they already had the reading list before I was hired). And even though it’s not exactly what I imagined, the fireflies are nice. The mountains are nice. The students and faculty are so nice it makes me nervous--I think I've had a dozen strangers offer me a place to stay and help finding an apartment. I had forgotten this level of kindness and hardly know what to do with it. Everything is pretty nice. Being here is pretty nice.