Today is the most successful I've ever felt as an instructor in a classroom.  The professor put me in charge of Deconstruction, Differance (intentional misspelling), and Jacques Derrida.  For those of you not familiar with Derrida, my being in charge of teaching Poststructuralism is sort of a big deal.  A Ron Burgundy kind of big deal.  Leather-bound books and mahogany and all that.  

My response to enormous challenges in academia is to over-prepare.  I took the three-day weekend to read and re-read "Differance" and I took meticulous notes on what I might say and what examples I might use.  Before my office hours this morning, I was on campus very early and teaching to an empty classroom for practice.  I even wrote on the board, asked questions, made jokes, everything, all to empty chairs.  I suspect that teaching is a lot like stand-up comedy in that a good teacher really needs to hit certain cues to be effective.      

And man, I was in the zone!  I'm going to ride this wave of success all the way to Postcolonialism, the strand of theory that this professor has also put me in charge of teaching.  If I have a specialty in this Masters program, it is Postcolonial Studies.  That's a funny thought, that I would have a "specialty." 

The class that I am "co-teaching" (the professor insists that I am not a teaching assistant--TA--but that I am a co-teacher) is a beginner's course on Literary Theory.  English majors have pretty varied responses to literary theory, which was an elective at Harding but is required at CSU.  For some, theory is at best vaguely interesting and at worst an irritating hoop to jump through before graduation.  Some students take the required class and then forget that Saussure, Derrida, Nietzsche, or Foucault ever happened.  I can understand this.  Western metaphysics is a cozy place, and I'm cradled by that tradition about 99.9% of the time.  For some students, this theory drastically changes how they think about the trajectory of their degree and life plans.  I suppose I waver between these two things, teetering on the brink of being a Serious Student of Theory.  

The main deterrent is that theory is challenging.  The main challenge is not even that the concepts are difficult--and boy is some of that stuff difficult!--but that theory forces a student to examine his or her life.  These theorists demand consideration and a long, hard look at the limitations of traditional thought, the impossibility of self-contained meaning in language, the ideologies competing within our bodies.  It's difficult to be an instructor in a class like that, almost akin to being the serpent in the Garden of Eden ushering in a frightening new self-awareness.  For some of them, you can see on their faces that the apple is, well, kind of mealy.  And just not worth it.

To be honest, re-reading Derrida made me nostalgic.  This is a shameful admission, because nostalgia is a dirty word for Derrida, evidence of my preoccupation with origins.  Who cares what I was doing when I first read "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of Human Sciences"?  Literature just has this power over me.  I see traces of my life history in every book I've read.  For good or ill (usually ill), re-reading takes me back.

I must have read "Heart of Darkness" twenty times when Austin and I were dating.  Joseph Conrad is that relationship for me.  As if Conrad isn't hopeless enough already, I've got it all bundled up with the happiest and saddest moments of my life thus far.  Derrida is the same way.  I remember struggling through that material while I was getting to know Austin.  I remember talking to him about Derrida as I was trying to work Deconstruction into my senior capstone paper on "Heart of Darkness."  I'm very afraid that I'll never be free of these associations.    

Gosh, I can't even begin to explain how bad this last year has been for my heart.  My mother says that I take too many emotions on, and I know she's right.  I don't know how to tell people what it has done to me to watch my sister's marriage fall apart.  It's there, this union, and then, with the filing of a legal document, it's just gone.  One day I have a brother, and then all of the sudden I don't?  There doesn't even seem to be any reason.  Just happened.  I was in love, too, really in love, and then--poof--gone, vanished.  Why did that love happen in the first place?  What was it for?

I used to want to get married and have children.  I thought that marriage was the best way to become the person God wanted me to be.  Frankly, at this point, that seems impossible.  Disgusting, even.  A stupid, stupid goal.

Now I just want to get this degree.  I'm lucky to have another year left to marinade before getting thrown back onto the work force grill.  

Anyway, yeah, Derrida.  I did pretty well today.  

I don't know what that down there is happening, or how to fix it.

I think I'm going to be posting on here with regularity over the summer, because I'm going to have a whole lot to say. I acutely understand how clichéd the term "finding yourself" really is, but I'm going to have to embrace that cliché. I used to think that was what my teens were for, then my early twenties, and I'm 23 now and have very little to show in the way "finding myself." I'm determined now in a belief that an entire lifetime is required for this effort, and I've comforted myself that, instead of trying to find something, I can just try to position myself as being a little less lost. Those are two different things. Really, they are.

I just emerged from the class I'm assistant teaching--E341: Principles of Literary Criticism. I am excited at the opportunity to teach this subject--so much of theory is learning how to think differently, learning to un-think what one has always thought, learning how to conceive of an alternate reality.

The professor I'm working with is letting me count this as a teaching internship, a course that can be billed to me in the fall after I qualify for in-state tuition. This favor is saving me nearly $2,000 in tuition, which is comforting in light of the fact that a used copy of the required textbook cost me $52.82.

What can I say? Knowledge comes at a great cost in absolutely every area of life.

For instance, part of learning is necessarily learning that one constantly teeters on being irretrievably lost. Said the teetering-on-being-irretrievably-lost 23-year-old blogger.

This year has really done a number on my heart and mind, even removing that binary altogether. "Think" and "feel" are the same verb, and I (verb) bad, folks. Young. Despondent. Lost. Blech. Bad.

I think teaching will perk me up.

Well, I finished my first year of school, an activity that apparently precludes blogging.

My life in the past few months has been a sort of unraveling and then coming together and then unraveling and coming together again. I think that may just be how everybody experiences life. If it is, I think we ought to be telling children about it. Really, people should know. Ellen and Josh filed divorce papers, Ellen's moving to Florida, and I'm continuing to work here in Fort Collins and finish up this degree program and just try to make sense of life.

I've been continuing writing about Joseph Conrad and Postcolonialism. That has included two papers about Battlestar Galactica, which is pretty fun. I met Edward James Olmos , the actor who played Admiral Adama on BSG. That was pretty exciting.

I'm a teaching assistant in an undergraduate literary criticism course that starts tomorrow.

I don't have the energy required to use clever language to describe these things, but I hope I will later in the summer.