Status Update: G is Stir-Crazy

My life is a bit of a dichotomy. In the summertime, I hardly sit still. This past summer was especially action-packed -- as you probably noticed -- so much so that I took my cat to my parents' house in June and didn't pick him up again until mid-August. I took over 2500 photos in four countries over the course of those three months, and I wrote nearly 200 pages, including personal journals, notes on traveling, bits of fiction, and of course, this blog. This is my idea of a rewarding summer: every day worn threadbare and something to show for it in the end.



If I could live this way twelve months a year, I probably would, but the bills don't pay themselves -- even those sneaky "auto-pay" ones -- and I've yet to find a creditor who'll take a story or a photo in lieu of a check.



So when autumn comes, as it invariably must, I turn to the other half of my existence. I dust off stacks of novels, inventory boxes of ball-point pens, and attempt to find my glasses. I dig my dress clothes out of the back of my closet and polish my boots, and the transformation is complete -- from rootless amateur travel guru to studious, sensible, state-certified literature teacher. Camera for dry-erase marker; plane tickets for ID tag; travel brochures and maps for Browning and Shelley, Miller and Vonnegut. My seat-of-the-pants lifestyle vanishes in a neat stack of syllabi, the regulated chiming of bells, the daily comings and goings of my students -- each face in its assigned place at the appointed time. Even when I don't tell them where to sit, they establish their own routines and cling to them stalwartly. They arrive not just at the same time each day, but in the same order like clockwork: Labrina, Ethan, Taj, Kelsey, Tyler... David arrives two minutes late with a pass from the office.

This is what I do from the first of September to the end of May. Not a bad gig, really.



... But if you know anybody who takes stories and photos instead of checks...