Wow. Have. Not. Updated. Blog. This is typical.
Well for one thing, I live in San Diego now. Mi padre, hermanito and I came out here on a three day road trip through amber waves of grain and Rocky mountains majesty. Or basically a lot of Iowa followed by a lot of desert with the occasional difficult mountain pass.
The moving company ended up not arriving until three days after promised, which meant I had to buy clothes for work and extend my stay at the hotel. I became fond of the Marriott, my home away from my home away from home.
Finally, things have settled into place, slowly but nicely. It turns out that everyone in the city of San Diego that I've met so far is just a real peach. That includes the lady that stopped to yell at me for cutting her off and then kindly gave me directions back to Garnet Ave. There are 120 therapists in the San Diego school district, so the first two weeks of orientation were a flurry of introductions - putting contacts into my phone along with a bit of trivia to jog my memory when I come across the name. Fortunately, there's a lot more people my age than I expected, so I won't have to reluctantly accept invitations to Tupperware parties to socialize. One of the girls even lives in my building one floor beneath me and just loves to drive my drunk ass around.
One of my concerns was that I'd move to this place and have no one to explore it with. Fortunately, that's definitely not been the case. I haven't had a quiet night to myself since I got here. We've hit up some great bars, met some crazy locals, and even ventured up the coast to the Del Mar race track to see Ziggy Marley. Incidentally, it was the fourth biggest horse competition in the country but we missed the races. Still, as we hiked along the suspicious dirt trail from the bus stop to the track, we did catch a glimpse of the horses being loaded into the gates for the final race. As for the rest of the evening - well, I can say that I recall buying french fries and standing in line for booze, but that's about it. You know, one of THOSE evenings. I've gone through pre-med and graduate school but the most impressive thing I've ever done is manage to get home from Del Mar after rasta fest with my credit card, ID and a plastic Jack Daniels cup that I clung to as a precious souvenir until the bitter end.
The next day was all about cleansing the California way. I biked to the CVS to pick up some Urban Detox - the label claims it cures hangovers and removes "certain pollutants" from your lungs. Sipping this, I continued biking down the beach walk until I got to Belmont Park in Mission Bay. The dinky and somewhat rickity wooden rollercoaster was a bit much for a detox day, so I went through Mission Bay park until I got to the channel where I was able to sit and watch the boats heading out to sea. It was Labor Day weekend, so the beaches were packed with all the vacationers that are having their last hurrah before going home. There was
a huge party at Wind-An-Sea beach that night to celebrate the return of the land to the locals. I was invited - of course, I am a local now - but partying was also not on the agenda for detox day.
The job is good, but you know - work is work. There's so much bureaucratic procedure they've had to spend three weeks explaining it to us, but at least I've got so many mentors and support staff, I can shut my brain off if needed. Like, for instance, during the inservice on how to turn our supplied Macbooks on and off.
My schools are "south of the 8" which is code for Upper Mexico. I actually prefer it. The ritzy schools are filled with litigious parents that bring advocates to IEP meetings to grill you into delivering a statement that they can build a case around. My little escuelas are beautiful - all the schools in California are outdoor, which means there are no hallways. Classrooms are held in trailers that are parked around an outdoor lunchroom and playground. You couldn't do that in Wisconsin without a snowplow constantly circulating the grounds and even then, half the preschoolers would drop dead on their way to art class.
So far I haven't had a chance to meet any of my kids. It's been chaotic. See there was a process of re-integrating special ed kids into general ed that was supposed to take three years, but they just decided this year to suddenly put it into effect like two weeks before school started. The result is that half of the special ed parents in this district don't know where their kids are supposed to be and the other half do know but aren't happy about it. A lot of the kids that ended up in regular ed really cannot be without a support person - for both behavioral and medical reasons. So kids are still getting quickly re-shuffled around and I feel like a bit of a detective, trying to investigate different school sites and try to track down the 55 kids I'm responsible for and the other 25 that have fallen into my lap after the shit hit the fan.
But like I said, work is work. It's hard to feel like I'm here for the job when every night I can sit out on my balcony and watch the sun set over the ocean. Almost daily when I get home from work I get on my bike and head out along the ocean. I got a great discount at a local gym I can bike to which is never crowded and has that Cheers atmosphere - everyone knows your name. In fact, almost every established I've visited in Pacific Beach has that same vibe. The major difference between here and Wisconsin is that people just don't take themselves that seriously. We're all here for the same reason - we're young or young at heart and we just want to have fun. There's an instant connection and acceptance between people.
I've been really focused on what I leaned in Costa Rica. The people there don't take themselves seriously either. They're poor as hell but it's all they know and they don't care to know better. They value the commodities that come easy but are so often overlooked by the rest of us. People, nature, time. When I was there, I learned to sense the world without anything between my body and the earth. No plastic screens, no delusions, no wives tales. I crawled through the mud, dove into rivers, climbed waterfalls, and did more than just drag my body around after me. I used it. It got scratched and bruised and weary and cold and exposed to giant spiders and jungle parasites, but it was purposeful and it was good. Not like stubbing your toe accidentally because you can't keep track of your feet. More like jamming your toe into a rock because it's the only thing holding you up over the river current.
I stayed in a camp in the middle of the jungle that had no electricity or hot water, but was the most comfortable place I've ever been. Every night after that instant darkness that fell after the sun set, we sat with our candles, a scant supply of table games and ample booze to increase the entertainment value of said table games. The fact that we were a team brought us together in a profound way - we'd depended on each other during the day, both to accomplish something exciting that couldn't be done alone, but also to be there for each other when things got hairy. But more than that, there were people I met there that I only talked to through the long hours of a single night that I will miss more than I've missed childhood friends I've known for years. I can't explain why, but I think it has something to do with the purity and simplicity of it all. We barely spoke the same language. In our conversations, I would teach a little English, they would teach a little Spanish, and we would misunderstand most of what was said. But through it all, it was just us and the jungle. There was nothing else and no one else in the world.
The Costa Rican's call it "pura vida" - the pure life, the good life. Relax. Recognize the social construct and use it as needed. At the end of the day, reject it. Question what is real. Do the thing which brings you closer to genuine experience. Take the stairs ten flights to feel your body working for you. Taste food that you have prepared by hand. Watch the people who pass you by and recognize that they are just one conversation away from being part of your life. Appreciate the irritants and frustrations that color your world. Rise above the human tendency to make mountains out of molehills and recognize that while you can't change what you have to deal with, but you can change how you deal with it.
We climbed a lot in Costa Rica - either across boulder fields, up muddy slopes, or up the rock face of a small cliff or waterfall. We didn't have any tools, just the strength in our fingers and the friction of the skin of our knees and toes against the rock. When you are bobbing in the white water at the foot of a water fall and you look up, it seems like an impossible climb. But I was never climbing waterfalls. I was moving my fingers from one crack to another, my toes from one hold to the next. I know it's been said before that every journey is a series of small steps, but I wish we all had the chance to experience that viscerally the way I did. There are a lot of things in life that just work better when you don't think about them, partly because it's futile to try and tackle something that's not measurable. You spend a lot of time jumping up and down at the foot of a cliff trying to reach the top.
Living here has given me the opportunity to continue being guided by the pure life. I've seen that when people stop thinking about fitting into the social construct, they stumble into the natural connection between human beings. I've learned that while my work is meaningful, it's part of a game that I choose to play. There is nothing wrong with placing value in your professional life. There is something wrong with letting your professional life devalue you.
There are a lot of people here who made a choice to come out and see what this place had to offer. But by no means is this the ultimate answer. Coming to California was not about moving to some utopia where I could happily spend the rest of my life. It was about consciously choosing to live a life of conscious choices. It's about sorting out those things that are stopping me from those things that I only think are stopping me. It's about recognizing that we only have one lifetime, but we can choose to live a hundred different lives within it.
So that's the updates plus a bit of tangent preachiness. I'll try not to get so dramatic every single time I return from neglecting the blog. People probably get annoyed with me for talking up how much I love it here. It's not about this place, so don't think that I'm selling the elixir of life as a plane ticket to southern California. That's ridiculous. I think there's something that makes each one of us truly happy. Some choice we've always wanted to make but never thought we could. Maybe it's going on a world tour, going back to school, getting a dog, taking up photography, investing in an old car, putting in a pool...
Here's my challenge to you. I don't care about the economic recession. If you travel around the world, your bank account is going to hurt a little but you're not going to come home and have to move into a cardboard box. Money will come back eventually - and go again, and come back again. As for your own capacity? Well, if you don't know how to work the fancy new camera or what to feed the puppy, there's always Google.
If anyone actually reads this blog and, moreover, actually made it through this entire entry - please post your dream in the comments section and promise me you'll at least give it a second thought.
