So... at the end of my last post (MANY months ago!) I gave myself a list of three goals for the immediate future: Finish my Fall semester classes, get a different job, and finish my Capstone. Two and a half out of three ain't bad!
A great deal has happened since I last wrote on this blog. I did finish Fall semester, and in so doing managed to pull off an A in both classes. It was only a surprise in one of the classes.
In December, my friend Deb called me up and told me that her school (where I once worked as a Special Education Paraprofessional) needed a .4FTE Theatre teacher for the second semester. My first interview didn't go that well (mostly because I was practically dying of a cough, and could barely get a sentence out without hacking up a lung. It put me off my game!) but the second one went better, and I got the job. It's been a crazy semester, and I've learned as much as I've taught. I've got a lot of good eggs, a few bad eggs, and a few great eggs. I'm about a month away from being unemployed (my least favorite thing in the world!) but this has been an awesome experience for me.
Capstone... not finished, but I filed for an extension, so I have until December 15th to complete all graduation requirements. This makes finishing that damn Capstone my summer project... that, and finding a new job for the fall.
I usually tie these things into a movie or television show, or perhaps some song lyrics. Well, as I type this I have one song on loop... that I originally heard from a movie.
Waiting for Forever is a... romantic comedy? Maybe? I first watched it on a whim a couple of months ago. I saw it on Netflix Instant and decided to give it a go. While my first impression of the film was upper middling, it has grown on me, and I've now seen it a total of four times. The soundtrack is phenomenal, and it drives me nuts that most of the best songs aren't available on iTunes OR Amazon. Grr. Managed to get the two best songs, however. Thank you, internet.
Anyhow, one of the best songs is played at the beginning of the film, and again at the beginning of the credits. It is "Worlds Apart" by The Mostar Diving Club.
The first chorus has some words that give me a feeling of hope for the future, but as I go further I find that hope mixing with a bitter melancholy for the past:
"There's a world in your eyes. I can see it getting brighter.
All the hours that we turned into days.
We were young; seemed like life would go on - last forever.
All I had was you by my side."
The world I see getting brighter is my own. While this semester has been baby steps, I have been moving closer to the things that I want from life... slowly.
The bittersweet comes from the second half. It makes me think about my failed marriage. We remained friends after the divorce, and tried to see each other at least once a month. My students recently performed their in-class production, and in the days after the performance I started to realize that I hadn't seen my ex-wife since before rehearsals began. It's been nearly three months!
Anyway, it did seem back then that we had forever to make our dreams come true. Turns out I had considerably less time... just over six years. I failed.
The second chorus of the aforementioned song drives the melancholy home:
"That's the way that it was in the past you remember,
When we ran through the winds and the rain.
We were young; seemed like life would go on - last forever.
...Now everything has changed."
It has changed. Some for the better, some for the worse.
Side note: The female friend I talked about so much in the early entries... she stopped talking to me after she got evicted from the place she was living. Don't know how that's my fault, but whatever.
