A Hood, Panic, and Various Sundries

I think that they should really sell grad students on the part where when you graduate, you get a totally sweet hood to wear with your ridiculous graduation ensemble. I mean, I know that pretty much the only thing I will enjoy about that ceremony when I make it there is that I'll be rocking a hood like some kind of cultist.

Like many rituals that used to have greater meaning and which we now do mostly by rote, I don't really understand it. I guess we make graduates wear silly garments in order to distinguish them from the adoring hordes or something, or at least that's why we still do it. Hoods and other regalia are beyond me, though. We don't dress up for any other part of school, but at graduation it becomes expected. Either way, I'm digging the concept of the hood, because then I can play like I'm a super hero.

Graduate Girl will totally correct your grammar!

...Maybe these are the reasons the second-year students thought I was an uncommitted spaz. Hey, at least I know how to have fun.

Sometimes, anyway.

Which brings me to the next part of things. I have never, ever, lived truly alone. I have always at least been in a building full of people. And living alone for the first time, homesick and without a local network of friends... that is Hard.

I will try and keep the pity parties here fairly brief and painless for readers, but it's true that I've spent a lot of the last week or so kind of panicking about being on my own. I lost a beaded hair accessory Mom brought me back from Alaska sometime in the move, and the discovery that it doesn't seem to be anywhere in either house had me in sort of a tailspin of frustration and homesick and panic. It became like a Great Holy Quest for a while, where I thought that if I could just find it, everything else would feel better, like a giant psychological bandaid.

And then I looked at the quilted wall hanging that Mom spent hours making for me, and the needlepoint bookmark she handmade this summer, and I realized that I have the most important things, and that my angst is not going to be suddenly fixed with a trinket. And all mush aside, I really should be doing something better with my life at those points, like unpacking, or repainting my great Grandpa's fence.

And so here I am, trying to figure out how I will be feeding myself on a budget that consists of kind donations from family and my own savings. My assistantship doesn't pay me until the very end of September, and so I will need to be creative. What bugs me most is the way that eating as a single person poses challenges that I don't know how to overcome, like how the heck to eat a loaf of bread before it goes bad when I don't want a sandwich every day.

My last piece of news probably should have been my first, but that's just not how my mind works, guys. I'm totally in classes and teaching now. Holy crap, I'm a teacher of freshmen. I'm adapting lesson plans and talking about rhetorical theory like I know something about it. And that's cool, and scary, and I have no idea if I'm doing it right. Luckily, I have a mentor.

Okay, all the Graduate Assistants have mentors, but I lucked out and got the cool one, the one who said funny snarky things all through our training and who swears and who wants to hold our mentorship meetings in the bar in the student union.

Oh yeah, the student union has a bar. You go, Cowpokes.