Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Those Days, These Days

"As busy as I claim to be,
I've still got the greatest job in the world."
~Peter Criss

I remember a specific conversation between my college roommate and I. We sat, perched on our apartment floor with a taco pizza, some DOS, more commonly known as Diet Orange Soda, and watched our favorite television show, "Felicity." How I would love to warp back to 1704 and relive some of those moments. Good times. Na- scratch that. Awesome times.

We studied a lot- probably too much. We both put huge amounts of pressure on ourselves and success served as the only option. However, Tuesday nights were our nights to take the hour from 9:00-10:00 to eat and talk and forget about looming tests and unwritten papers. We hauled ourselves out of the library and set up shop in the Utopian world of NYC, where our friend Felicity served coffee at Dean and Deluca and dated an exceptionally attractive guy named Nole. I still hate myself for not living that cosmopolitan dream, but that's another post for another time.

I remember how we were totally angry with all the work we had to accomplish. Actually, I specifically remember staying up until 4:30 am that night/morning, studying and practicing problems for my Statistics mid-term that would promptly arrive at 10:30 am.

We'd have given our right arms to trade places with Felicity. She had an amazing industrial-style apartment, studied art at NYU and had that easy, relaxed style that couldn't be copied. And, naturally, she never had big tests or insanely long papers to write. She painted at an easel with natural sunshine streaming through the window. Na- we weren't jealous- not one bit.

However, that spohisticated life wasn't in our cards. We found ourselves bogged down with uninspiring work: statistics problems, f-scales, standard deviations...an analysis of the Freudian Theory as depicted in the movie "American Beauty," and a 4 page proof for Descarte's philosophy, "Cogito, ergo sum."

At some point, between the chowing and studying, I commented, "I can't wait to get a job. Then, when my work day is over I can go home and be finished- done for the day. There won't be any more of this studying every free moment, hauling books around and being a slave to my safely guarded stash of floppy discs."

We talked about this for awhile, about how nice it was going to be when we could leave work and go home and "exist."

Well, go figure, but that never really happened.
I've found myself so busy these days. My days are packed with work, meetings, grading papers, planning lessons, analyzing my assessment data, differentiating my instruction, finishing report cards and thinking about all the other things I need/should be doing to help push my students to the next level. I type plans at home, grade papers at the kitchen table and research the latest books while sitting at my couch.

So much for that innocent conversation on one December evening in 2003.
At least some young student who recently celebrated her birthday brought me this cute mini-cupcake. I didn't eat it though-- I gave it to one of my munchkins.

1 comment:

Maria said...

I love this post and pictures of your desk.

I don't remember ever watching TV in college. We did order lots of pizza's and made endless amounts of popcorn.

Our study break was when one of our friends was working at the school radio station. She would play all our favorite songs (and there were so many in the 80's!) and we would dance in the hallway, blasting the music. It was our weekly study break from 6-8 on Tuesday nights. SO MUCH FUN.

I think we should all do more dancing!

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