weekend

This weekend I did this strange thing called "work." Basically you hole up in your office for two beautiful sunny days and make a million photocopies, assemble your teaching portfolio, grade creative nonfiction flash pieces, prepare a week's worth lesson plans, organize your grade book, and take sporadic Internet breaks. Then you get home and make dinner and pass out on the couch watching Law and Order. You wake up once during Friday night--when your upstairs neighbor comes home violently drunk, and slams the front door, and then proceeds to throw up for twenty minutes in his toilet, which is directly above your bedroom--but otherwise, you sleep like a little teacher brick.

(p.s.: While you are a brick, someone walks on your car. Literally. There are size 12 shoeprints on the trunk, and two on the roof, and then more and a big dent on the hood.)

Then you come back on Monday morning and realize that for all the stuff you plowed through, you still have piles of paper waiting for your pen. But at least your dude took you out to breakfast. And you can watch the storm clouds roll in from your window and the rain wash the shoeprints away. And your planner is a blank slate. And this is the life you signed up for, the one you wanted all those months in Minnesota and Wisconsin, and most days it is totally worth it.