A Day I Needed

This is not a complaint, but rather just a brief consideration of the contrasts between stress and reward, constant work and the payoff.

Change is hard, and I've been doing a lot of it lately, most notably getting settled into a new state, career, job, office, apartment, health plan, retirement plan, e-mail account, class schedule, syllabus to teach, &c. &c. &c. I had maybe a little bit taken for granted how much work this would be.

But!

Today was one of those "this is why I do this" days, which are in many ways the dry rocks in the rushing river that allow us to hop from one side to the other, enjoying the view along the way.

I just taught Hamlet to two groups of absurdly bright-eyed and engaging eighteen-year-olds, and damn was it fantastic. Thoughtful discussion, new discoveries about the play that I hadn't considered, hilarious side comments by students, a student-generated modern-day American English translation of the "To be, or not to be" speech that included a certain twelve-letter word that begins with "m" and ends with "r", and a five minute chat after class with a student who was asking if an interpretation of the play might be staged in which Gertrude knows she's drinking poison at the end. (Sorry for the plot spoiler.)

It's not that life has been unbearably hard, because it hasn't. It's just that when things seem a little stretched, a little tense, a little run-down, it is good to have days that remind you that the choices you've made are great ones. A big damn boulder of Hamlet to stand on.