I'm just-- I'm just--

...terrible at this game. I sit and scroll through all of your blogs, hypocritical and disappointed when nobody has updated. Everything and nothing has been happening lately, thus the paucity of posting on my end (excuses, excuses, she sighs and shakes her head).

I suppose I could start with the garage sale. Danny and I went garage saleing last Saturday when Heritage Hill had a neighborhood-wide event, and I went bonkers at the special used book table. I got a hard cover copy of The Island of the Day Before, a first edition (seriously) Gulliver's Travels, and a collection of Fitzgerald for a dollar each, plus a BASS from 1997, Camus' The Stranger, and another Dave Eggers book. I'm reading You Shall Know Our Velocity right now, and loving it like I haven't loved a book in a very long time, perhaps since college. I always hesitate to spend time reading contemporary books, because there's so much crap out there mixed in with the good stuff, but this one is substantive and subtle and complicated. Glorious! There were more, too, whose titles escape me at the moment. So my summer reading pile is now burgeoning to the point that I've run out of book shelves and have started making piles on the floor. I didn't take any cash with me on purpose, planning on a look-but-don't-buy kind of a day. But I had some spare change in my wallet, and I kept running into these fabulous items on sale for a quarter, so I also acquired a t-shirt making kit, a silver ring (is it weird wearing used jewelery? earrings maybe, since they go through holes...), and some shish-kabob skewers. (Danny loaned me the money for the books, and I paid her back with a drink at the roller derby, which happened that night. I cannot go into detail about the roller derby here, but I just want to mention that our evening involved a flask full of peppermint schnapps, which I'm ashamed of for a few reasons...) In sum, it was a supreme day.

And then my seniors graduated last night. I went and sat in the same church where I graduated high school, only now I was on the other side of the aisle and wearing fancier robes. I couldn't not reflect as I was sitting there while the cascade of warm wishes and advice from speaker after speaker rolled over me. Six years, and look at me try my hardest not to sound trite and cliche, but I didn't realize until many hours later that the strange feeling I had at the ceremony was not nostalgia or regret; I was proud - and not for my students, like you might think. No, this was a much more selfish, egocentric kind of thing. I was proud that only six years out of high school and two years out of college, I have a decent job and a place to live and a tiny little savings. Now, I know the point of life is not to race past all of the risk-taking and mistake-making and get settled down right away, but I've always been a security-seeking kind of person, so this is okay for me. In fact, I've been trying to convince myself that this is okay for the past twelve months. This whole year, as I've been struggling and striving and falling short of my own and others' expectations of me on a pretty regular basis, I have wondered if I didn't make a huge mistake in taking the steady job and committing myself to one path for years and years and years. How many people and things and ideas am I missing out on by planting myself here in Grand Rapids, and how short am I selling myself? But sitting there among the other staff members, looking at all of these kids going off to start their wanderings about, I suppose I finally let some of that go and gave myself permission to acknowledged that I am beginning to be a real, professional, adult-type person and all of those things the speakers were talking about - the bright future and the opportunities and all that - came true in a way, and landed me there in that chair. Anyway, our principal didn't hug every student like Mrs. Graber did, that's one of the other things I remember thinking last night. Besides that it was sort of a haze of processing in (do you people who went to high school with me remember the tunnel the teachers make for the students to walk through before going into the hall? I got do that! If I were the type to cry about every little thing, I would have cried about it) and sitting and standing and clapping and hugging.

So now my schedule at school is essentially reduced to part time, since two of my five classes were all seniors. It's amazing how much one can get done in the middle of the day when one is not wrangling eighteen-year-olds. And there are seven more days of class left and then three days of exams, and lots of friends and bbqs and patios and pontoons to fill in the gaps between school and sleep. Then I will be free and perhaps begin blogging again with a more respectable frequency.