The Lunatic, The Lover, and The Poet

Face palm. Oh my God that was needlessly frustrating! And now I feel like an idiot.

Now that I know that I have an apartment, I’m really looking forward to getting to Ottawa and picking out furniture, decorating and getting settled. Not that I want to leave my friends of course – honestly, I wish I could bring all of my favourite people with me – or wish my summer away, but I am excited and I’m anxious to get into my very own place. I seriously can't stop thinking about it, and the plethora of home-improvement/decorating shows that have been on recently definitely aren't helping! Although, that's probably my own fault there :)

I'm also really looking forward to my vacation – I'm leaving on Friday and I'll be in Ottawa for a week for my cousin's wedding. It’s going to be a really great trip – I’ll get to hang out with my cousins at the wedding, we’re staying overnight at the cottage that my uncle has rented for the weekend and then it’s Canada Day so I think the plan is to stay for the family BBQ and then head back to downtown Ottawa for the fireworks! Then I sign my lease on July 3^rd, and there will be lots of shopping at Ikea and other places to look for furniture and stuff. It’s going to be so much fun! Busy, but fun!

To get ready for the wedding / vacation my sister is going to cut and dye my hair tomorrow - I'm in serious need of a trim apparently and I think I'll go shopping tomorrow for some new summer clothes since I have some birthday money from my parents. I might save a bit to go clothes shopping in Ottawa since they have some stores that we definitely don't have here.

Eeee! I'm super excited!

My parents and my cousin went to look at apartments for me today and it looks like we might have found one! It's in my cousin's building - second floor and she's going to be on the sixth. It's really big, has lots of windows and the layout is the one I wanted. So they submitted the application that I sent them a few days ago and now it's just a matter of waiting to hear back! I'm so excited! I can't wait to have my very own place!

And now to wait!

I saw this ad on Facebook so I thought that I would repost it and the link to the article. If there were JC Penney stores around here, I'd shop there just because of this ad. :)

There is so much involved in moving to another province! Admittedly, most of the paperwork that I have been doing in the past few days deals more with getting ready for school than actually moving, but this week the focus has definitely become finding an apartment in Ottawa.

Wow I'm tired, and I haven't even been doing much of the heavy lifting in the past few days. My sister, V, moved into her new apartment yesterday and for the last few days, after finishing my thesis (and therefore operating on several nights of very little sleep), I have been packing like crazy too. We didn't finish packing until roughly 3 am this morning because my parents (or at least their stuff - they're driving up on Sunday) are moving to Ottawa today and the majority of my stuff is going with them so it'll be there when I join them in September for Grad School! :D yep, it's official! I have been accepted into the Masters of Arts in English program at Ottawa U with a specialization in Medieval and Renaissance Studies! I'm so excited! I'm currently staying out of the way because the movers are here, but it's next to impossible to sleep with them banging around upstairs. So here I am, super tired with nothing to do for the first time in well over a year, and unable to do much about it. Yawn. Maybe I'll put in some ear plugs and attempt to go back to sleep :)

Canada has a federal election coming up on May 2nd. Make your vote count!

So, good news: I got the job! It's also why I haven't been posting since last week. I'm overwhelmed.

Everyone, or almost everyone I know has been asking me, "How was your first day(s)?" And since you asked, I'll tell you what I've told everyone else so far... and possibly a little more.

My usual answer: It's going well so far. I'm just overwhelmed because of the amount of information coming at me all at once without a chance for me to get myself organized first. The kids are good, I've taught one of the courses before, and everyone is super supportive. It may be a little hectic right now but it will get better soon.

Most of that last part was more to convince me of that fact than anything. Have I mentioned that I'm overwhelmed?

I feel like I have so much information in my head that it's coming out my ears. The more I take in, the more I lose. I'm not organized and for someone like me who usually has everything colour coded, alphabetized and in its place, being unorganized is likely to make me go crazy. Quickly.

My mom says I'm a "C" Personality. Basically someone who is analytical, conscientious (funny.. that was always the standard adjective used to describe me on report cards in high school), careful and precise, uber organized and a perfectionist. She's probably right.. it sounds like me with my colour coded markers and daily planner that never leaves my side. So imagine this: you take one of those people, who's sanity and ability to work well depends on their organization and plunk them down in the middle of a chaotic situation without much warning and ask them to organize everything. You would have picked the best person for the job but that poor little C personality is going to have an anxiety attack. That's where I am right now, fighting an anxiety attack.

Don't get me wrong. I'm glad I have the job (I think. Or at least I will be on pay day..), and I know (logically) that it will all be ok, and probably pretty soon, but my goodness, is it summer yet?

1:30 am: I have no idea how I am going to make it through the day in one piece. Vikki kept me up helping her with her paper until 12:30 and it's now an hour later and I'm wide awake, staring at the ceiling, unable to relax and fall asleep. I have to be up in less that 5 hours and awake enough to deal with junior high students, then ace an interview for a job that I'd really like to have. I suppose it is probably a good thing that I have a plan for next year that doesn't involve trying to get another teaching job, because it means that there's a little less pressure to be brilliant on no sleep tomorrow/today. Doesn't change how much it's going to suck though! I suppose I should try to actually sleep though. Might prevent me from being delirious in my interview at least. Don't want to completely embarrass myself.

I posted this to my facebook already but it's hilarious so I had to post it here too :) Enjoy

So anyway, on to the main point of this post. My latest identity crisis.

I don't like subbing. Day to day, it's ok: the kids can be good, I occassionally actually get to teach stuff when the teachers realize it's me who will be in for them and not some random who can't control a classroom, and I don't have the planning or marking to do. When the kids aren't good, I get to go home at the end of the day and thank my lucky stars that I don't have to be in that class the next day. But I still don't like it. I don't have a sense of community, I don't get to set the tone of the class or plan what to do or get the respect that I deserve. Essentially, I get to babysit. Awesome. (Not really.)

So for the past few months with all of this going on.. no real job, relationship floundering, struggling to make ends meet.. I have been fairly depressed. I've really tried not to be by really trying to keep my brain active - I've been reading a book or more a week lately (expensive habit, but it could be worse) but things have still progressed to the point where I've begun questioning my life's goals. Do I really even want to teach anymore? Am I a good teacher if they won't let me teach? If I'm not a teacher, who am I? That kind of thing.

I think I'm struggling with this more than most people who find themselves in my situation because I was the type of kid who ALWAYS knew what she wanted to do. You could ask the 3 year old me what I wanted to be when I grew up and I would have told you that I wanted to be a teacher. I had my stuffed animals and occasionally my baby brother lined up and I taught them their ABCs. Today it isn't stuffed animals or the ABCs that I'm teaching, but you get the idea. I never really considered anything else.

The soul searching really started at the end of January, early February when it became clear that I wasn't going to be getting a term job for second semester. I applied at a billion different places (well not really, because if there were a billion jobs to apply for, I would have gotten one), had a few interviews, but was turned down or overlooked for all of them. I honestly don't know what it was that lost me the jobs. It could have been any number of different things: I'm young, I look even younger, I'm female (and don't tell me that doesn't matter to a principal trying to find someone to teach a bunch of kids who think they're all "gangstas", because it does), and I'm far from intimidating. And what's more, is that I don't want to be anything other than who I am. The one thing that I do have that you'd think would be an asset for a teacher, but doesn't actually get you very far, is a brain. I'm an academic, but apparently you don't need to be to teach high school. Actually, it's probably preferable if you aren't - lower expectations means less frustration. And in the classes they let young teachers teach, you only need to be able to intimidate a class into submission and hopefully be able to cram some curriculum down their throats. Oh, was that me being cynical? Sorry. But at least you see where I'm coming from.

Students have been asking me for as long as I have been teaching, "Miss, if you're so smart, why did you become a teacher? Why didn't you become a doctor or something?" My usual response to this is to gesture to the class, "Because I like this... the interaction with people, getting to teach you all the stuff that I know.. I like that." And I do. But it's getting more and more rare for me to be able to do what I love about teaching, at the level that I enjoy.

So I started thinking: if I'm not happy, when was the last time that I was happy? And the answer wasn't the last time that I had a teaching job. The last time I was happy was this summer when I wasn't teaching (and bookstore cutie and I were super close but that was beside the point).

If I'm not allowed to teach (because I can't get a job) and the last time I had a teaching job I wasn't all that happy anyway.. what would I do if I wasn't a high school teacher anymore?

So I thought some more. What makes me happy? Drama. Reading. Shakespeare. Teaching kids who WANT to learn. Learning new things. For about a week I played with the idea of going back to school and taking drama so that I could finally have the qualifications to teach drama, but then I realized that it wouldn't really help me get a job any more than the qualifications I have now. Sure, I would be qualified to teach a drama class, but drama jobs are harder to get than English ones and those are few and far between. Not to mention the fact that doing that would require several years and thousands of dollars in tuition that I couldn't afford. I wish I had known, going into university, that it was possible to do a double major because I would have taken both English and Drama when I had the chance. Oh well.

With all of this in the back of my mind, knowing that I wasn't happy, and getting to the point where I wanted to do something about it, I went over to my parents house on Sunday. My darling brother (and roommate) who had just returned from a trip to the Dominican (expensive) had approached them asking if it was possible for him to move back in for the summer. Without telling me. He's in a bit of debt (not really bad, but enough that he can't pay it off) and he's planning on moving out with his girlfriend in September. My sister, my other roommate, is going to be in Ottawa for the summer and was intending to still pay rent so that we could keep our apartment.

What Mike's request to my parents did was turn my entire world upside down almost immediately. So here I am, faced with having no roommates in a three bedroom apartment that I cannot afford by myself, with no teaching salary to carry me through the summer months. Not to mention the fact that my parents might be moving to Ottawa in the next few months and they've already asked me and my sister to move into the house until they decide to sell it.

My mom's response to this? Sure Mike, you can move back in. Lisa, you should move back in too.

My response? NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'm 27 years old. I DO NOT want to move back in with my parents. Living at home SUCKS! It is so hard to have privacy, freedom, a life? But what other choice do I have, if I've already agreed to stay in the house while my parents are gone? I can't just get another roommate, not that any of my friends are in need of roommates right now either.

So we agreed on some terms and conditions that don't require me to surrender the freedom that I've become accustomed to and in the process of all of that I broke down and cried. A lot. The source of the tears came from my unwillingness to surrender a lifestyle that I enjoy and that I've worked really hard for, and from not actually being completely happy with my current situaiton. So we talked and I mentioned the idea that I didn't know if I really wanted to teach high school anymore (We've gone over how hard that admission is for someone like me, right? Hense the identity crisis). I mentioned the idea of possibly going back to school and I guess it must have been in the back of my mind for a while, because suddenly I was telling my parents that I wanted to continue on with my original "backup plan" for when I was trying to get into the education program - if they won't let me teach high school, I'll teach university.


The last few days have been occupied with me acting on this plan. (Honestly, I don't think my parents really expected me to do anything about this "plan" that I had announced.. but when I'm serious about something, I'm serious.. I'm going to do it!) Monday I procrastinated but I thought about what I was going to say in my email to the English department and how this not-so-sudden sudden decision was going to change my life for the next little while. Somewhere between Monday and Tuesday I decided that I was definitely going to do it, if it was possible. So Tuesday I emailed the department, got a response back right away that was incredibly positive and set up an appointment to meet with the head of the department on Thursday.

Thursday I went to the Mount and sat down with the chair of the department and discussed what I had to do to complete the Honours Certificate in English (I already have my BA, this just adds the honours to it). Apparently, it's pretty easy to get started. All I have to do is fill out a form and give it to the registrar's office to get my student number reactivated, find a professor who is willing to supervise my thesis, and write a letter to the department requesting admission to the honors program. They then sit down, look at my letter, talk to the professor about whether or not they're really willing to help me, and then approve my application, at which point it then gets processed. Then I start researching. I'll have to take 1.5 or possibly 2.5 courses next year plus my honours thesis which is considered another class in itself, and I'll be done by the end of April to graduate in May. The only thing is, it won't be possible for me to substitute teach for more than 1 day a week while I'm in school. That makes the money situation a bit difficult, but if I'm going to have to move home anyway... well.. that's just something that I'll have to think about as soon as everything gets a little more solidified on Tuesday when I go back to the Mount for the info session and to meet my potential thesis supervisor.

I'm excited about this. It's scary, and I'm really nervous because I'm out of practice and I'm sure my research and writing skills are a little bit rusty at best, but I'm excited. It feels like I'm on the edge of something great and that I could possibly be something great. Who knows. But everything happens for a reason, right? Maybe I wasn't meant to get a job this year, because I need to do this.