daily dose: a photo essay about this thing I did today

Tasks
1. recover from midnight shenanigans (more on that later)
2. final preparations for my very-first I’m-the-teacher course!
3. business and errands
4. reading for Thursday… when the courses I’m taking begin

Trappings

skirt — Liz Claiborne, thrifted button-up — Old Navy blouse (as vest) — Moth, thrifted shoes — Bare Paws, thrifted belt — vintage

Tales

You know how some folks say that a picture is worth a thousand words? Since I do, I’ll now present you with a photo essay I like to call “Before / After” :

Here is me this morning, before I taught my first class:

Look how tense I am! Look at my posture and my strained smile! You can practically feel my nervousness through the screen, can’t you? That is the picture of someone coming apart at the seams…

Now here I am mere minutes after finishing teaching my first class:

Look how giddy I am! Look at how ridiculous and honest my huge smile is! Look at my relaxed posture and how loose and thrilled I obviously am. Do you feel happy yet? Because that right there is a happy sight: the face of one joyful, excited, energized kid.

So. Now that I’ve given you all the pictures you could need, here are some more words. Today has been an absolutely insane day for me. Let’s start with point number one on my list of the day’s tasks: midnight shenanigans. You see, it all started with inclement weather in North Carolina. Now, usually the weather elsewhere has almost no bearing on my life. But not yesterday! Because you see El Boyfriend was actually in elsewhere this week, in NC for a conference to be precise, and so, through the magic that is modern airplane travel, he got repeatedly stuck, delayed, and stranded at a variety of airports until finally making it safely not to his intended destination (our local small airport) but instead to the nearest large airport in our area. Which is only “in our area” in that it is a two and a half hour drive away. And he arrived at 11:45. So I had a surprise 5-hour trip to Portland last night and arrived home after 2 a.m., bleary and more than a little dangerous behind the wheel but absolutely ready to go to sleep and get started on the day that became today.

Fortunately for me, the bags under my eyes, and my students, my class is held MWF from 4-5, so I slept in a little and had a more leisurely morning than I’d planned. It turned out that this was actually a good thing. Because once I got to campus, I nervously sat in my office, doing work and trying not to look at the clock every ten minutes, until it was time for me to go teach. Not horribly productive.

But then I taught college composition to a bunch of freshman (etc)! Successfully! For an hour! And without catastrophe or major embarrassment or loss of limbs! And I only went completely off script for nearly the whole thing! And they were nice! And there was occasional laughter and shocked faces and the raising of hands and participation in discussion and faces turned towards mine! It was pretty great.

And now the exhaustion has hit me and it dawns that I’ll actually have to do this every other day for a whole ten more weeks and there’s lessons to plan and grading to do and a thousand ways for me to fail all the time but that actually it’s okay to fail because, as I’ve said here before and as I told my students and as I keep reminding myself:

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho

p.s. is this a fashion blog? Oh, right: I love this outfit a lot. I love this blouse that I’m wearing as a vest because when I wear it without the shirt underneath the beautiful detailing kind of gets lost on against my ridiculously pale skin. I also love this skirt. And the shoes. And the fact that my friends kept telling me that I “looked professorial” all day, which was the ego boost my day definitely needed. And I love that I overheard one of my students say “She looks young, so that’s good” and wanted to reply, “yeah, you’re right: it is good.” Because I’ve got a lot more life in which to wear things like this and smile a lot and teach some students some stuff and now bike home and take a nap.

About these ads