a poor woman who since childhood has been counting her heartbeats and had run out of numbers

Recent revelations:

1. I don't like Manic Street Preachers despite repeated recommendations from one of the teachers at South West. I mean, they're catchy, but come on.

2. Apparently people have been secretly in love with me. Or in like/lust/etc. I'm talking about my manager at Borders who sent me his phone number. Alright alright, so it's not like I didn't know there was something weird between us, but I just thought it was dislike. So chalk that up to another glaring example of my inability to read people.

3. After eight weeks of a constant state of URGENCY in terms of what I had to do and OVERWHELMING PRESSURE-- things have bottomed out. I feels like someone stuck a yardstick down my spine and told me to grow up. I'm still somehow plucking out those stitches. I can't explain how I felt more than that my hands are reaching for some reigns dangling above my head, which my fingers would desperately grasp and graze by.
I feel my guts unraveling a bit, between yesterday and today. But somehow I'm chasing that teaching high. I mean, honestly, when a class went amazing there was nothing like that (for lack of a better term) afterglow. And for the hours of work and the lessons which dragged me behind them face down for 80 minutes, where all inexplicitly meaningless in the face of one student telling me that they told their mom to read the short story we just went over.
I'm excited for 7th grade, but I'm more excited to get a job and have my own class.
After these last eight weeks, I couldn't imagine a job more noble than teaching. More worthwhile, or a better way to spend your life. There's this pressing desire to be better because I owe it to my students and myself. I think I'll do a whole blog entry about this, but this can be the INITIAL thoughts version. Which is messy and dramatic, but there it is.

4. I spent a long time concealing the fact that I was a vegetarian, for fear of being judged by it. Being judged in a way that just wrote me off as some sort of silly easily-misled youth. But now that I'm older, and I have some sort of authority I realize it isn't the same. One of my students wrote a note to tell me that she's also vegetarian. I can't even tell you how much it would have meant to me, growing up in South Central PA , to have an adult around me who was also a vegetarian. So I guess what I'm saying is, my fear of alienating myself from others, has prevented a connection from those like me. I'm still sussing this out.