rainy day thoughts

Today is a holiday (la Festa Nacional d’Espanya) and fall has flown in with a huge tormenta—the tormented clouds are blowing about by huge gusts of wind, sheets of rain are whipping in from the ocean, and the shutters are shuddering! There’s a bit of sun poking out now, so I might be able to venture out per passejar, but for most of the day I have been reading, hanging out with Buba the Bulgarian Cat, and thinking (a dangerous pasttime, I know).

I only got to Spain 12 days ago, and I still keep jumping ahead to the near and far future: next weekend I’m going to Belgium--my family is coming in December--I’ll be home for Christmas--Joy is coming in April--I’ll be going home in May--where will I work in the summer? -- and what will I do next year? -- and what sort of career do I really want? … runs the constant inner monologue. I feel the constant pull and tug between living in the NOW and planning for THE FUTURE. On one hand, this life is far to short to spend worring about tomorrow, when today is slipping by. On the other hand, I need to apply for summer jobs, I need to apply for grad school, and I can’t do that by only thinking ahead to what I’m having for dinner.

(Dinner, by the way, is leftover pasta. When I go to Palma tomorrow—yes, I have another day off—sometime I’ll write about what I’m actually being paid to do here instead of what I do with my copious leisure time—I’m going to buy lots and lots of spices so I can really cook.)

Restricting my planning urge has always been difficult for me. I am happiest when I have all the little boxes on my calendar filled in with a plan—even if that plan is to be free, explore, and see where the wind takes me! When things do not go according to my plan, that’s all right as well; it’s the thought of next year’s blank calendar that really terrifies me.

What I’m really worried about now is grad school. I need to start applying, and I need to decide now what I want to study, and where I want to study, and who I want to study with. So far, I love my job here—the only frustrating thing is that I’m only the assistant, and not the teacher, so I make no decisions and I only spend parts of the day actually teaching—and, at the moment, I think it would be wonderfully energizing to be an English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher! In that case, I want to go to grad school and get an M.A. T.E.S.O.L. (Master of Arts in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages), and my choices so far are:

1) Portland State University in Portland, Oregon

2) Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

I love Portland and the West Coast, and I want to be in a place where I feel comfortable with the culture, the people, the surroundings, and the school: I’m afraid that small-town me would be swallowed up and eaten by Washington, D.C. Another part of my brain keeps telling me to buck up and quit snivelling about the traffic, the noise, the endless concrete, and the more aloof East Coast culture, and try something new! Who knows: I might even like D.C., if I give it a try! That part of me also whispers that it has of the best M.A. T.E.S.O.L programs in the country….But then my Mom’s wise voice replays in my head: choose the program, not the prestige. For that reason, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale have all been kicked off my list. They either have programs that focus on Psycholinguistics (yuck!), Technolinguistics (double yuck!) or they don’t allow enough flexibility in their program for me to take classes in Historical Linguistics (my real love).

Here come my real doubts: I think I want to get an M.A. T.E.S.O.L, but my intellectual interests lie in Historical, rather than Applied, Linguistics. I don’t want to actually do anything with Historical Linguistics—if I had a choice between spending my days with very interesting, but very dead, dictionaries, or spending it getting very much alive people interested in English, I’d choose the latter any day! It’s really energizing to be in a school setting, and so far I absolutely love it. What I think I want to do is get an M.A. T.E.S.O.L and take all sorts of wonderful classes, such as the History of the Spanish Language, on the side. To top it off (now I’m jumping way ahead in the future) I would love to be able to combine a winter-teaching career with being a Park Service interpreter in the summer, in which case I need to take the –ologies (biology, botany, zoology, geology, ecology, etc.). Before I started with this wonderful job in Spain, I had an even more wonderful summer job (see “at the workplace”, August 2010), and I’d love to go back and keep working there year after year, even as I pursue a degree in a completely unrelated field. What if I want to spend another year in Spain, and not go to grad school until the following year? What if I really want to pursue a M.E.M. (Master of Environmental Management), so that I can keep working in the Park Service? What if…? What if…?

And now I’m looking out the window, and the clouds have almost all blown over. The sun is sparkling, and I’m in Spain right now! I need to be in the NOW, and yet, deadlines are looming. Decisions need to be made. I am looking for balance right now, and I’m looking for ways to fill up my time so that I don’t spend it worrying about the distant future. Planning is good; worrying is bad. My current plan:

1) apply to PSU and Georgetown ASAP, and find a few other schools to put in the “just in case” column

2) soak up my time in Spain!

which involves:

A) eating paella

B) getting up the nerve to practice Catalan with people on the streets

C) planning activities to help the kids with their English lessons

Wish me luck and pray for me to have patience, especially with myself.