“I’m an obtuse man, so I’ll try to be oblique.”

Orientation began today. First on the agenda was, according to the schedule we were given, “coffee and beagles.” This was either a typo or a lame pun alluding to a famous Twin Cities native. But the session itself was informative and very low on time-wasting chatter. I got to know a few of the other people in my program and was reassured to learn that we’re all more or less in the same (leaky) boat: we’ve been out of school a few years, we are intimidated and overwhelmed by all of this, we want to write but aren’t sure exactly how. The recurring message of our TA training thusfar is: “Remember, your students will be more afraid of you than you are of them.” That’s reassuring, but I’m pretty sure they’re thinking of bears.

A good friend reminded me yesterday to view this as merely a step in a larger process—I am not always going to be this overwhelmed, this confused, this disoriented, or this lonely. Any time we do something new in our lives there is an inevitable and necessary period where we don’t know a damn thing. Every time we relocate we are bound to spend a few weeks, if not months, as auslanders. I tried to keep this in mind while parsing the bus schedule this morning, flustered by a system that seemed Byzantine compared to the CTA I could negotiate blindfolded in a city four times the size of Minneapolis. Then again, I was at least this clueless, probably more, when I first moved to Chicago. But there’s really no way around that period of acclimation. Unless you plan on spending your entire life on the same square mile of turf where you were born, you are going to face many transitions and many stranger-in-a-strange-land experiences. I’ve never been very good at leaving my comfort zone. But I’d like to think I’m getting better.

That is my wise zen teaching for today. Now on to more important things:

1. I got a bike today. It is blue.

2. Minneapolitans get the best sleep in the country.

3. Today’s college freshmen were born in 1987. That just might cause me to lose enough sleep to negate the previous item.