being an adult
Is not all it's cracked up to be? Duh, I guess. I guess I don't know that many adults who come home to roommates screaming into their computers about killing zombies (Soren's playing Left4Dead, anybody who reads this is a video game addict? Probably not).

I started my "real job" this week. I like it. Weirdly, it's a lot easier than my fill-in job, with the SF Unified School District. This week I worked M, W, F at the Exploratorium (www.exploratorium.edu) and T and R at two different schools (Jefferson Elementary, in a 3rd grade room, and James Denman Middle, in a mixed "ED" room).  

And I find myself once again spread out across the board, with little to tie the things I do together (this is something we actually discussed at my Exploratorium interview) besides the fact that I do them.  Working as a substitute teacher's aide (being a teacher's aide is about as glamorous as working in a tollbooth, and being a substitute, well... I guess emotionally it's like working in a tollbooth without your respirator) for an understaffed, underfunded, and underorganized school district versus working in a relatively cushy position at a well-funded, well-infrastructured (I won't go so far as to claim that the Exploratorium is "organized", nor would any of the other staff there, I'm sure) and well-established museum of really neat shit, where there do happen to be a lot of kids running around, but my job requires absolutely zero interaction with them.

And the question is--are either of these things what I'm "supposed" to be doing?  There's plenty of pressure from the teachers who I meet, work with, and abandon after a day to get my teaching credential and master's degree in special education.  I could probably be happy doing that.  But my idealistic, theoretical, (selfish?) side thinks maybe I can do something grander--work this Exploratorium thing, get in on some badass projects, meet some famous scientists and do something interesting and unique that a few academics really get a kick out of and maybe some kids at this museum will run around and pound on an exhibit about it.

Can I do both of these things?  Special ed (this includes students with emotional and mental "abnormalities") is as foreign to me as the places I was visiting a year ago (yeah, that was a YEAR ago...) because I was always that annoyingly smart kid, latched on to school and learning and perfection as my coping mechanism... I wonder if I'd be more well-balanced (less neurotic?) if I'd acted out a little more when I was a kid, gotten in some trouble every once in a while...

Anywho, what to do, what to do.