Tuesday, November 18, 2008

A long Tuesday in November

Ayyayyay. Tuesdays and Thursdays. Up at 6:30am, shower, dress, brush, eat. Remember to taste what I'm eating. I'm really not hungry at seven in the morning.
By this point in the Fall, the sun is not really rising until I'm already in my car on the way to school. (By this point in the Fall in Seattle, I can't very often see the sun anyway, regardless of whether it's rising :) I get to the E1 parking lot on Montlake, hike up five (or 62--it feels like 62) flights of stairs and make it to Music Building, room 216. 8:30am. My first section of the day. Suddenly I forget what time I woke up, what my breakfast did or didn't taste like, how many stairs I just climbed...I even forget to yawn. It's all forgotten because I'm so happy to be in this room. Not that 'it's Christmas and I'm four years old', kind of excitement...no, it's more like that, 'I'm having a good conversation that I don't want to end', kind of excitement. I'm teaching! Ok, well I'm a TA, which basically means I'm a discussion facilitator, but it still means that for 4 hours a week I'm leading a classroom of undergraduates through theories of politics, economics and religion from the year 1250 through 1914. yeah--exactly. Exciting. I LOVE this stuff. I love my students, love the discussions, love office hours--don't love grading, but still get so into it that I lose all track of the world, which in some way is a very good thing.
Another of the best parts? I'm learning too. Combine all that I'm realizing about politics, economics and religion over the span of 800 years and compare that with what I'm learning in my Religion core class, and almost daily I have some kind of new epiphany about the world. I've got all sorts of new thoughts brewing about the relation between science and religion and the general Existence of Everything. Obviously that is a big one. You'll have to ask me sometime what my epiphany is for that given day.
Between all these epiphanies and forgetting about time and smiling as my students try to convince me that the French and British are evil colonizers, life is insanely hectic and I get exhausted. But it's a rewarding kind of exhaustion.