I have arrived back at my apartment, and my subconscious understands that this means I am truely getting close to school starting up again. I feel the demands of time hammering down on me. Homework. Preparation. People to contact. Getting the apartment ready. Time sensitive odds and ends. And that familiar anxiety that accompanies being a new teacher. There is so much to do. So much. I have no hope of doing it all, and I'm ok with that.
What troubles me is when I find myself focusing on some minor task that is really more of a distraction than a useful thing. The problem is that my environment is surrounded with objects that call out to me to be fixed. As if the objects in the room were truly animate and had small, childlike physical voices that are calling for my attention. Asking to be moved or have their problem resolved. I sit down to get started on one task, and in the middle I am distracted by a second. And in the middle of that one, I'm distracted by a third...
After having just come back from the sweet, relaxed, feel-good experience of Fairfield Iowa and hanging out with my longtime friends, this feeling is starkly contrasting. I like a slower pace of life. I like being surrounded by community.
My protection is a little piece of paper I carry with me and write down these things so I won't forget them, and so I can go back to work, with that particular voice, quieted.
On my morning run/exploration, I saw a feather in a parking lot that was floating in midair. Not rising, or falling, or moving left or right. I marveled at it. tiny, fluffy, as if held in place by an invisible being. I wondered what could account for it, and then slowly it started to descend, straight down, not even swaying side to side. I put out my hand, took a step or two forward, and let it fall into my outstretched palm. Magic.
Brattleboro is all sorts of interesting. Just on this one morning walk, I found more intriguing places than I can count on one hand. All of them closed, since it was both Sunday and early in the morning.
I had an interesting set of dreams too. Unusually lucid and vivid. In one, I was kissing an unknown but pretty girl, enjoying the intimacy and warm fuzzy feeling of the act, but then I remembered that I needed to find a girl with whom I had that warm fuzzy feeling via just talking and interacting, and I set out to try and have a conversation with her and see if we were compatible personality-wise, as people who could become best friends. My brain seemed to have difficulty generating such a situation on cue, like when I try to read books in my dreams, and I think I woke up. Shows where my mind is at. Being best friends is one of the things to look for in a potential romantic partner, so says some of books I'm reading. The problem is, it becomes so much more difficult to just be myself and find that out, when I'm in the awkward position of trying to 'date' somebody. It's like trying to act natural while you pay rapt attention to everything you are doing. Possibly impossible.
Well, off to do more work.
-IO
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