El Burro Volador

So yesterday was my birthday, which I suppose is as good a fodder for blogging as anything.  I tend to be very morose on my birthdays, contemplating my future in terms of my impending mortality and my past in terms of failed ambitions.  This can make throwing me a birthday party a somewhat unrewarding endeavor, as my heroic wife Rebekah has discovered over the past two years.  Yesterday seemed to go fairly well, however, and I found myself grateful, yes, but also interested in why I was not quite so melancholy as I had been previously.

I think it might have something to do with the dramatic changes that have occurred in my life over the past year.  Y’see, for each of the past two years I have been up to my eyeballs in our nation’s failing public schools, working ridiculously hard to become a teacher of the “language arts”.  I have been exhausted and unhappy, but trudging steadily toward a fixed goal for my life: rewarding career, financial security, children of my own.

Earlier this year, much of my projected future came crashing down as I entered, then almost immediately left, the world of professional teaching.  In the aftermath, I was left with thousands of dollars of debt incurred for a degree I might not even use, a perception of personal failure, and perhaps most troubling of all, a lack of direction.

I think I shall gloss over the next few months in the interest of getting to the point, which is this: by the time my birthday rolled around this year, my wife and I had reevaluated our place in life and in the world, and made a new plan.  While it may not be as conventional as our previous plan, I feel that it suits the two of us much better – and notably, was drawn up with a lot less input from our parents than was our last set of marching orders.  I finally feel as though I’m getting comfortable in my own skin.