30 January 2010
From Off the Streets of Honolulu…

Filed under whatever

Feeling better, mostly. My brain is kind of mellow, which is a nice change. Nothing keeping me up, nothing causing me too much stress. I’m a little bit sad that football season’s just about over and it’ll be a couple of months until baseball season. Sorta can’t believe how quickly the school year is going. I have one more day to reconsider making February National House Cleaning Month or whatever I’m going to call it.

I haven’t been in my classroom since late Tuesday night. That’s kind of a long time for me during a school year; it might be a record for the year. Trying not to stress out about that, but we’re about to hit crunch time for the yearbook. Ack. Divert thoughts! Divert thoughts!

A classmate of mine is up for a judicial appointment. It’s her second time up for such a position. She’s married and has twin girls. It’s a logical place for someone smart and competent in her field to go at this point in her career. She may not get this one, but I get the feeling that once your name’s on the list, it pretty much stays there until you’re finally let in, so I figure it’s not long before my friend, someone I’ve known since before we were teenagers, is a judge in this state.

I mention this because I try to picture myself in such a position. It’s weird, you know? I can pretty much hold things together professionally (I said pretty much) but the rest of my life is kind of a joke, not too different from what it was like in college. I don’t understand why my development has been so arrested. I know I’m selfish, self-absorbed, and immature, but that’s what I’m talking about. Why am I those things? Do people become mature because their circumstances demand it? I can be selfish, self-absorbed, and immature in my non-working life because nothing’s forcing me not to. I’ve held off on certain things (like dating, recently) because I’m thinking I need to get my act together first, but maybe dating forces a person to get his act together. I have a couple of friends who have other friends over once in a while because it forces them to keep their houses clean. I sorta do the same thing with my car: offer rides to people when I can give them because it forces me to keep at least the passenger-seat portion of my car tidy.

I’ve heard others in my field say that becoming the department chair forced them to grow up, professionally. Then there are the friends I have who found themselves married and with kids, not exactly by design, and they obviously became responsible whether or not they were responsible before. Heck, if you have kids who are depending on you, you have to be responsible. There’s no choice.

I wonder if I’m doing things in a backward manner. But I also wonder if I’ve got it in me to do it any other way.

2010-01-30  ::  me