Such goddamn word-squeezers.

Where we start is at 9:40 PM on a Tuesday. This time is important because I have to be up and hopefully out the door in about eight hours. The history is this (please excuse me if this seems laundry-list-esque): I have a prosperous upbringing behind me, really all the support that anyone could ask for, including financial so that I could concentrate on my (very expensive) education from an university with more name brand appeal than Vicks Vapo-Rub. My path was clear: study hard, create wealth, worry about the rest later.

But, obstinate girl that I am, I decided to switch the order of some of these things around. I studied hard, the better to get out of college sooner. I wanted nothing to do with a place that felt so smarmy and strange to my sensibilities, which leaned more and more towards wanting an expression of the heart, rather than the mind. Why was that, what with my straight shot into the stratosphere afforded by race and a cushy monetary base? Because I’d found something that, at the time, really resonated with me: working with kids, for almost nothing, 22 hours a day. I did this every summer for six years, and the effects of it rippled through me for the intervening nine months. I remember the satisfaction of my classmates as they completed a nine-hour binge of Marx, Hegel, and a few fiths, and feeling my own creeping disaffection. It all seemed a little pointless and strange, even when I was completely caught up in it. For what were all the works of Foucault and Vico compared to all the works of a nine year old who had never sat under a tree and acted out her own story? Or, to put more of a point on it, the feeling of being the only adult around to hear that story? The feeling of making a kid’s day complete by being sympathetic when they hurt their knee, to leave them patched up and cared for? To retrieve jackets when it was cold, to hold them up when they wanted to climb high, to play the game of convincing kids to eat (actually, I sort of hated that game…but when I won, nothing I could ever smoke or inject would top that feeling). What an amazing thing, to work and sweat and tramp through the cold to be a kid’s champion for two minutes! What could I then do when I went back to the world of reading theory for six hours a day and barely worrying about my own meals? Come the end of September, I hopped on a plane to the midwest, where it was cold, where my mountain-tan shrunk and my coat grew in length and opacity. I myself grew pale and by turns skinny and skinny-fat (the roundness of those who don't work that hard and who tend to survive on heavily creamed coffee drinks). I got back into the swing of things.




Tomorrow: why I loved school, in my own fashion.