The Fourth House...

I love my job.  There are aspects that I could do without, of course; and even the best of jobs has the worst of days.  Sometimes it is frustrating, often it is stressful, it is almost never completed, and it is always tiring.  All in all, however, I truly enjoy teaching classes, connecting with students, and generally trying to make the world a better place in my own small corner of it.  I may not like starting my day when it is dark and ending when it is dark, but the exhilaration – or ‘teacher’s high’ – after that last class is undeniable.

This is not a blog about my job, though.

Some time ago, I made the choice to live in the moment as much as I could.  I’ve refined it to live in the day.  By this I mean that if there is something undesirable coming towards me, I will simply enjoy all the desirable moments in between.  By not letting these dreaded moments rule my life, I’ve come to enjoy the intervening moments all that much more and the interruption of undesired necessity is that much easier to endure.  This means that every evening spent at home I am really, truly, at home.  I’m not thinking about the dentist or that visit from the realtor, or the nine thousand errands I have to run.  I may be grading or thinking about the next school day, but only in terms of preparation.

But this is not a blog about changing my daily perspective.

I only want it understood that the following is not about finally getting free of a job that I don’t like or simply the relief that comes from leaving a necessary, but unwelcome, place.  It’s not about letting go of dread or not taking the moments of my life for granted.  I have a very good life and my workplace is filled with some of the funniest, kindest, and supportive people I know.  No, this blog is not about letting go of worry or about getting away from something, but rather it is very much about returning to something.

One of the best parts of my day is the moment I get close enough to my driveway to see that my husband’s car is already there (and not because it is a nice car, though he’d tell you that it is if you asked him).  That car sitting there means that there are lights on inside, there’s a hug waiting for me, and there’s someone to talk to.  Sometimes it even means that dinner will already be cooking.  It’s walking in the door and instantly feeling that I’m home.

Home is where I am a side of me that I only touch on at work.  It’s when I relax and can be silly, I can wear my frumpiest clothes and feel like the most beautiful woman on the planet.  I can make immature jokes and act like an idiot and it will be met in kind and with laughter.  I spend most of my evenings being reminded that I can be silly and that life is too short to be too serious for too long and too full of love to be wallowing in fear or worry about the wider world.  That part of me is always there, but there’s something about him that makes it that much more likely to thrive.  Our lives are not complicated or enriched by children – though we have three cats and a dog that keep us on our toes in various ways.  For a large part of our existence these days, it is just him and I.

Him and I.

We’ve had some upheavals of late and though they don’t really belong here, it is enough to say that we’ve both made colossal mistakes, we’ve both found our worlds suddenly a little smaller, and we both rediscovered what it means to be in love.  My world is both bigger and smaller, both deeper and lighter, both sillier and more emotional.  I have new dreams and plans to get there.  Not worrying about the future has gotten so much easier because my present feels content and reinforced.  This is where I want to be.

Here.  With him.

He is the light to my darkness – laughing when I try so hard to be serious.  He is the dark to my lightness – keeping my idealism closer to earth with a healthy dose of realism.  He is the confidence to my insecurities.  His height gives him a perspective that I don’t have and yet he doesn’t look over me or overlook me.  We work together well and though we have our troubles, like all couples, we are suddenly becoming much more adept at working through them together.

Together.

A thousand clichés talk about marrying one’s best friend and the importance communication, and a thousand clichés can’t be wholly wrong.  I am more content now than I have been in a long time, though I see the world around us and worry that the End Times are upon us.  I am content because my immediate world is beautiful in all its oddity.  

One of the greatest feelings in the world is my hand in his.  Or the warmth of him next to me as I lie awake at night and slowly will my aching back to ease up enough for sleep.  There is something comforting about the warm weight of a loved one nearby – be it cat or dog or human.  My house is one full of love and it’s a love that extends to the houses of my parents and my siblings.  The world spins around us, and yet I have so much love in my life to support me as I try not to let the emotions and the craziness crush me.   I’m not afraid or ashamed to talk about the love I have for my parents, my siblings, my sibling’s spouses and children.  I am proud and humbled that there are three houses I can go to that are filled with love and where I am accepted for who I am – for all my quirks and mistakes, my talents and abilities.  I am loved for who I am.  And, at the end of the day, the fourth house is the one I call home.  It is my home and my heart, my soul and my life because he is there.

Him and I.

Home.

Together.

Us.

The Only Way…

As most of my friends and family know, I'm pretty much always on the go, always doing something, always working on a project of some sort. It's frustrating to them quite a bit of the time, I'm sure. They tell me I make them tired, they tell me I should learn to say no, they demand I tell them when I sleep. And that last part is what leads me to the purpose of this blog. It's to show just how deep the geek in me really goes. When I finally decide it's time to shut out the lights and get some sleep, I find myself lying in the dark thinking about all the things I am currently in the middle of and wondering how classes will go the next day and what I want to do over the weekend, and what my next blog will be about, and…well, you get the idea. I find it horribly difficult to shut my mind off. Sometimes, it's terrible. As Calvin once said, "night time is dark so you can imagine your fears with less distraction" which means that too often, I start to worry (77). My insecurities, emboldened by the security of darkness, come on out and run rampant. So, my night times are often spent wondering, planning, worrying, or being too eager for the next day. They say it takes, on average, 7 minutes to fall asleep. But that's only when you can stop thinking long enough to actually shut down. Over the years, I've developed techniques to distract my mind with a project that requires no notebook, pen, computer, conversation, or calendar. I've developed things to do to keep tomorrow at bay and allow me to get some sleep so I can have a clean reboot to start over the next day. Here is my confession.

I play word games in my head.

I give myself a challenge that involves the alphabet – think of ten words that start with 'A' and are five letters long, then 'B' and so on. Think of ten actors whose first name starts with 'A' and name a movie each is in. Name ten adjectives that start with 'A'. The games run over several nights – sometimes more nights than I remember. I probably do the same letter more than once because I can't remember where I left off. I'll get stuck on the same letter and spend two weeks trying to think of a ninth and tenth word of four letters that starts with 'O'. I lose count and have to start over. None of those things matter, really – what matters is that I'm not thinking about Middle States or how many papers I have left to grade, or how the laundry needs to get done and the gerbil cage needs to get changed. I'm not thinking about how I'm going to reach that one student in the back who is continually disengaged or whether anyone remembers that dumb thing I said at the last department meeting. Sometimes I move through the letters quickly, but then I always hit that one letter where it slows down just a little, and I'm so dedicated to finishing what I started that my whole being slows down as I try to think of the next word, and then the next. Eventually, instead of the next word, my mind finds sleep and peace. I will pick it up the next night…

There is something soothing about words…they are steadfast and powerful, limited and amorphous. The games remind me of how much I love words and how this helps me relearn the joy of them in a world where the 10 second email takes precedence over a well crafted sentence much of the time. When I was younger, I did myself a disservice by limiting my external vocabulary in order to limit the repercussions of being too smart. I was, then, a nerd. Socially awkward, I spent my time reading and doing crossword puzzles and not much caring for the basketball team or the latest television show. I couldn't shake the words completely, though, for I still wrote poetry and worked on the high school literary magazine. Much of my love of words stayed a private thing, helping me get through my days and the now-trivial drama of youth. And that love is with me still.

My words and my love of language never really left me, and here, in the quiet of the night, is one place where joy of words finds its voice – serving me in yet another way and keeping my mind sharp even as the edges of my consciousness grow fuzzy and fade into sleep…



Watterson, Bill. The Indispensible Calvin and Hobbes. Kansas City; Andrews McMeel Publishing, 1992. Print.