I sure hope not.

Professor Vallone keeps saying that I am a researcher, but I'm pretty sure that I am an old woman reading poetry on the porch of her cabin in the mountains. I must go there to meet her. Country road, take me home, to the place where I belong. Somewhere west. The whole world is west of here, but only half the universe– assuming we are in the center of the universe. I sure hope not.

not my own

When the toaster oven timer quit ticking, I paused from preparing a lesson plan for students I still don't have. Someday I'll find out if preparing lesson plans really takes so much time. I hear that I won't really find out what busy is until I get to "real life." Well, this is my life.

This is my life: eight classes, a lab called "teacher aiding," a job at the writing center and an endless drone of assigned reading and assigned writing. Sometimes this life gets interrupted to live a little bit– to share with roommates, to talk to my boyfriend, to cook something at my dresser-top kitchen.

I opened the toaster oven door on my supper: pumpkin bread with raisins, pears, and chocolate-chip swirls. It was still dough for the most part, but since the top was starting to burn, I had to take it out and eat it. Delicious. Not bad at all for a half-dead toaster oven that I bought at the thriftstore, that Lori brought home in her backpack, and that Bryna immediately started making plans for. I still call the toaster oven mine, but I'm not too possessive. Especially since only the top coils ever glow.

While I enjoyed the aroma of my almost-burnt-but-still-not-ready creation, I glanced at my watch. "Gospel choir soon," I thought. I looked from the computer to the open syllabus on the floor to the books sprawled across my bed. "It's going to be a late night."

Tonight I'll study for a quiz, finish that lesson plan, and write the rough draft for a twenty page paper. Tomorrow who knows what I'll do. I'm not worrying. I will keep on doing what I need to do each day because I know this isn't my life. Sure, I might always be this busy, but not this busy. And someday I'll cook in a convection oven… or in ember-covered earthenware. As long as I don't always cook in a half-dead toaster oven, I'll be fine. As long as things keep changing, I'll know that one thing stays the same.

I am being made whole and wholehearted. I won't always distract myself with half-cooked messes. I won't always feel so brain-fried and so undone at the same time. I'll find my consistency, but not for myself. No, this isn't my life. I am not my own.

Scars from a Semester

It's easiest to see the scars when it's cold. One is on my left hand, on the middle knuckle. Sometime while I was lugging my luggage from Heathrow to my hostel the handle of the rolling one took off a piece of my skin. I still have my London transit card that I bought that day. It's called an Oyster card and it's sitting on my desk. The jacket that it came in says, "Don't throw away your Oyster card, you can use it again and again." It's not the comma splice that bugs me. London can make up their own English grammar and I don't care. I just don't like it because it's false. I can't use my Oyster card anymore. But I still won't throw it away.

The other scar is on my right hand, on the middle knuckle. It is in perfect symmetry with the first scar, except that it is four-and a-half months fresher. The handle of my rolling luggage gave it to me on the day I left Spain.

In Spanish, notable sentences like questions and exclamations get punctuation on both sides. My body is making up its own grammar, where notable periods get periods on each luggage-pulling fist. The little round scar on the left let me know that something was definitely going to happen and the little round scar on the right let me know that it was finished. Now I hold my cold fists at my sides and try to read this sentence inside me. I question, I exclaim, I declare, and I hope these scars never heal lest I start to doubt.

Election Night

I promise to be in bed in an hour, which might work out to be right around the sugar low of the giant bowl of ice cream that I just ate. It was for the election. Ice cream is the extent of my political involvement. I didn't vote.

The week that my voter registration card proved useless and my car got donated to the Right to Life, I didn't really care about the government. It makes me sad– not that I don't have a permanent address and not that I don't have a car, but that I am less informed about the candidates than the average homeless woman. Whoever gets elected I better learn about, because I'm going to be teaching full time in a little over fourteen months. Somehow my students' president means more to me than my own. I don't think that's a sign of selflessness. I think that's just a sign of procrastination.