chasing myself

Blue Jays on the radio. It’s night now. It took me almost two hours to mark students’ papers. Then I made soup for lunch. Then I went online to see check the requirements for teachers college. They state very clearly that they would not even look at your application if you had a ‘C’ average in your university grades. That does it. I wasn’t furious or anything. It was expected. I didn’t know what I wanted to be. I was going through a phase in my uni years. I had to. It had to happen. I was lucky I even graduated. I didn’t know I wanted to be a teacher. I didn’t even know I can teach the way I’m teaching now! I didn’t even know I could walk out in society, have a job, face people, kids, let alone making a difference. I had no fucking idea. So how was I supposed to plan that I’d go to teachers college upon graduation and in my undergrad years plan it so that I’d get high grades so they’d accept me for teachers college? No way. There was no way. I was not prepared.

It felt like the world is made for the ‘prepared’ and I’ve always been the ‘unprepared’. But to ask me to prepare is too much to ask. I didn’t know. I wouldn’t have known.

Breathe in. Breathe out.

I was never prepared. In my nineteenth summer they asked us to register for courses in university and to decide on major. I wasn’t prepared. I was not set up for it. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I didn’t know I would run into a cloud. I didn’t know I’d turn out the way I’m now. I didn’t know I would turn out to love reading, reading books, novels I never read while I was in high school! I didn’t know I would want to be a writer, a teacher.

And I wonder if other kids ‘knew’ it. Maybe I’m the only one who’s out of the loop. Maybe everybody ‘knew’ what they were to do. I know friends who knew what they’ve always wanted to do and they haven’t changed. But for some reason, I get suspicious when I hear a highschooler tell me how they’re fixed upon becoming an engineer or doctor or whatever occupation, or when I hear an elementary kid say they know for sure what kind of program they will enter in university. Nothing is fixed, I want to tell them. We change.

Still, maybe I’m alone on this one. I wish I am.

The truth is I miss the university. I never imagined I’d say this, but it’s how I feel tonight. I never really experienced it, what it’s like to study what you enjoy, what it’s like to be chasing the dream you’ve always had. I spent my uni year chasing after myself.

But had I not done that, I would not be where I am now. I love the way I am now. Yes I have my regrets, but at least I like the way I stand now, out of the box, and free, at least in thoughts, freer than before, freer than most people I think.

Take Catcher in the Rye for example. I was never ready for that stuff when they gave it to me in Grade Ten. I was only fifteen or sixteen. I had no idea. Why da hell do they do that? Make me read it and expect me to write essays on it and enjoy it. I had no idea what it was talking about. No idea. I was never prepared to understand that stuff by age fifteen. No way.

Tonight I revisited Catcher, for the first time since those hazy highschool years. This time it resonates. Maybe that was the plan, they’d plant it in me so that I might revisit it years later and learn to appreciate it then. I doubt they planned that, but I’ll think it, just to be fair to my teachers. But I wonder if any of my friends have revisited.

I’ll go make dinner now.