Home Again

I think I need to take a two week vacation at the end of every semester. Somehow, removing yourself from your own reality for a little while really helps you focus - trudging through the day to day, it's hard to see the forest for the trees. When I come back from a lengthy vacation I feel renewed and optimistic. Though those feelinsg don't last, some of the decisions and attitude changes I make while under the influence of those feelings do.

I was hoping to post pictures from Hawaii, but in the short time that I was gone our neighbors seem to have put a password on the wireless internet I've been using for almost a year now (shhh, don't tell), which means that my internet access is inconsistent, and getting pictures and internet in the same place is slightly more of a challenge than usual. But since my blog has been quiet (again) for a couple weeks, I did want to post something.

I have told most people that I went to Hawaii, but that doesn't account for a two-week absence and so I generally have to do a little more explaining. My trip was a bit complicated. I flew into Utah and spent one day there, then drove to California with my sister, then spent a little time there at home, went to Hawaii with Kelsey and my parents, flew back, and took a three day road trip back to Michigan. Great fun.

Provo was fun for seeing people - Beth, Athena, and a couple others I didn't expect to see. Beth's kid (Alex) is almost a year old, just as cute as he was at three and seven months, and a whole lot more fun.

I also spent an hour or so on campus. This is the second time I've been back since my master's degree - last time the math ed department treated me to lunch and it was a bit strange to realize that, just one year out, my former professors were starting to treat me not as a student but as a future colleague. This time the future-colleage vibes were even stronger, and I got introduced to the powers that be in the teacher education department over on the other side of campus. Although it was nice (and, as always, a bit surprising) to find out that I am looked upon as a desirable candidate for a future job, even despite all the rough spots I've gone through out here, the valuable part for me was coming to a few realizations about what I'm doing now. First off, everyone has emphasized that grad school is just a step on the way to something else. I am not here to be here, I'm here to get done and get out. I don't need to find a dissertation topic that I love and feel passionately about, because no matter what it is I'm going to hate it by the end anyway. I might as well not choose something I love because I'll ruin it for myself if I do. And I need to get on top of making those changes that I talked about making at the beginning of the semester but haven't done anything about. In fact, I'm already working on putting those into action.

Moving on, Hawaii was great. When I was younger I always kind of thought of Hawaii as a place where you go and lounge about on the beach, all palm trees and white sands and blue water. This is not the case at all. There's an awful lot to do, and in fact Hawaii doesn't even look like I imagined it. Yes, the water is blue - bluer than any ocean I've yet seen. And there are palm trees. But I also saw desert and I saw pine forests. It's a pretty diverse place, and all within a small area of land. I think my favorite scenery was the Iao Valley, although it was certainly rivaled by points on the Road to Hana, or the cliff we walked up to on Lanai. And then there was snorkeling on the coral reef, which was a pretty incomparable experience. I will admit that I spent a lot of time on that trip feeling motion sick, whether from bouncing on the waves in a boat or sitting in the backseat of a car on a winding road. But all the in-between parts, and even some of the views from the motion-sick parts, were worth it.

But one thing I can say after this trip is that, while first-class is awfully fun (heated nuts, white tablecloths, lots of leg room even when the person in front of you is reclining), red-eye flights are not. This is especially the case because, while I can convince myself consciously that air flight is perfectly safe, my subconscious doesn't quite believe it, and it's your subconscious that takes control at that point just as you're starting to drift into sleep. This meant that every time I was about to fall asleep, my body and mind suddenly became hyper-aware of every little bump and dip and altitude change and I would jerk awake with annoyling little "we're going to crash!" butterflies in my stomach. So by the time we arrived back in La Crescenta at six in the morning, I was tired, so tired that I didn't even undress before climbing into bed for what turned out to be a two hour nap.

Later that day, we went to REI for a bike rack, and my dad and I spent most of the late afternoon assembling the rack, with some help from mom and Kelsey. I really like putting things together. Last year when I bought my desk at our new IKEA, I think I was more excited about putting the desk together than I was about actually owning it. There's something very satisfying about these little projects - they may not be particularly creative, but they're about equal parts logical and physical, and there's a known outcome. For the record, we put the rack together and installed it very nicely, and it wasn't a flaw in our installation that caused the little bike wheel fiasco on the 210 the next day.

Other than the bike wheel fiasco, the road trip was uneventful. Kelsey and I decided that the southern route (through Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana) is more fun than the northern route (through Nebraska), not just because it was all new to us, but because the freeway is lined with all sorts of kitschy little tourist stops. We saw outposts selling Indian wares that looked like they came straight out of the fifties, dinosaur statues (one of them moved!), a leaning water tower, the largest free standing cross in the western hemisphere ("A spiritual experience you will never forget!"), and another giant, but unadvertised, cross that we thought rivaled the first. It was a pretty trip, too - May is a beautiful time of year in almost any climate zone. By the third day, of course, we were tired of driving, tired of fast food, tired of hotel rooms, and ready to be home.

So here I am. It feels good to be back in Ann Arbor. Kelsey is settled in to her apartment (and I'm hoping and praying she got more sleep there last night than she did the two nights before) and even has a bed awaiting transportation as soon as we can find some. I'm unpacked, my laundry is done, my room is not quite clean, but getting there, and I'm back on campus being productive (except for the writing of this blog). It's always nice to get away, and it's always nice to get back. I'll try to post pictures of Hawaii sometime soon, if someone else doesn't beat me to it.

And now, back to real life.