my life is weird

Little-known fact: if you buy $5 worth of groceries at Sentry's on a Sunday, they give you a free Sunday paper.

Now, granted, the Wisconsin State Journal is mostly useless to us, since we don't have a birdcage to line, but we do sometimes need to get the grill or fireplace going, so it does come in handy to pick up one or two copies a year.

Oh, and, as it turns out, there are classified ads in the back. Last Sunday Rebekah suddenly tossed me one of those finely-printed pages and annouced, "hey, I found you a job."

An apparently well-respected and well-funded organization called "Operation Fresh Start" is hiring teachers to help its 16- to 24-year-old participants get their GED's and/or any other educational support they might need, from basic literacy to community college prep.

At a glance it seems like an almost-perfect job for me. I like working with students with significant challenges and helping them see, believe in, and realize their own potential.

Plus, there's a whole procedure and system and team designed specifically to meet these students' needs; it wouldn't be like swimming upstream in public school trying to get anyone to give a shit about the students who struggle most.

Plus, it's four days a week, ten hours a day. (You put in ten hours at public school anyway; might as well get paid for it!)

On the other hand, the students are older than my preference, and GED prep could be pretty dull/frustrating for students and teacher alike...but as Loopy says, don't talk myself out of a job I haven't gotten yet.

So anyway, I'm filling in the application and I start feeling really weird about my life. It asks what honors I've received so I start writing, "Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude, Hoopes Prize for Outstanding Senior Thesis"--and it's just so weird. I worked really hard for those things and for what.... ?

It's like another lifetime, another planet. I look around my room and see a Japanese teacup, a random Moroccan flag, a socialist bumper sticker. My life feels weird and disjointed.

I spent the first, uh, 22 years cramming so much in, like if everything I did was extreme and superlative I would win some kind of prize. And what? And nothing. It didn't make any difference.

Sure, I could try to be someplace where it would make more of a difference--grad school, the Council on Foreign Affairs. But I have no desire to go anywhere near those places or communicate with the people who think all those things are important. So why do I even care? Why did I?

I just feel so different from my younger self, it feels like I must have taken a wrong turn somewhere along the way, and yet, I don't want any of the things I turned away from.

OK, so, I'm not even able to express why I'm having this existential angst, so, back to the application.

On a more practical note, will they think I"m a huge snob for putting down Phi Beta Kappa? Jeez. I hate these things. Who knows what anybody will think about anything? Will they think it's a grammatical error if I capitalize my bullet points, or if I don't? Argh.