First Day of School... Again

OK, I don’t want to sound like I am whining. That is my number one fear in all of this, but damn it all, sometimes a guy has to vent.

I love my morning commute to school. I get on my bike and ride down Kearney until I cut over to the Broadway Bridge (can’t remember the street I cross over on, but I know it by my nose because there is the sweet, sweet smell of freshly baked pastries coming from somewhere pretentious nearby) and then I take Interstate up to Willamette and before I know it I am at the University of Portland.

I have been timing myself each morning. This morning it was 34 minutes and 23 seconds. I will be timing myself each morning to look for improvement.

So, I don’t want to whine about my commute – because it’s lovely – it’s just that it is so dang early… I get up before I feel like I am human. As I have to be in class by 7:30 it means I need to leave my house by 6:55 which pushes back my wake-up time to 6 am. It is so early I can’t open my eyes all of the way. I feel like someone opened up every joint in my body and sprinkled in some sand. I creak more than my ancient floor-boards, and if you are Tom or Youlee and you live below me, then you know those things creak like a kid complaining. My alarm is set to this station that oozes feel-good grooves like honey, but even Aretha sounds terribly negative at that hour.

Why can’t everything just be island-style? We’d all wake up around 8ish and then kind of hang out in school until 2ish and then we’d all spend about three hours sitting around waiting for someone to decide to barbeque chicken. After we ate we’d sit around and nap or look through a 4-month old People.


I recently developed some rolls of film that had been lost in the corners of my luggage and looking through those pictures last night really hammered home how much I will miss that place (included in this blog are some of the choice photos).

When I first got to the RMI, I was in a bit of a panic. Suddenly things did not make any sense. I thought to myself, why did I commit a year of my life and a ridiculous amount of sitting in an airplane (although the movies were decent) to have a life that doesn’t make sense?

I am in the exact opposite situation now. I was just getting good at my life back in Majuro, and now, here I am, waking up too early, aching and feeling grumpy.

I don’t have a wrap-up to this. I don’t know if this is all going to ultimately be a good thing for me. I am not even 100 percent sure that going back to school to get my MAT is the right choice. All I know is that I have had flashes of giddy excitement thinking of a possible future in education and flashes of intense regret for dropping an obscene amount of money on an education I don’t know if I will ever use…

In an unrelated note, my transition back to normal, American food has not been easy (my girlfriend can attest) and I apologize for any unnatural or inconceivably foul odor emanating from me while I take notes in class.

This too will pass, and soon my stomach will be an old pro at fresh food. It will be something it is good at. It will be something it will miss when I leave again to eat something it doesn’t know.

And when I leave and eat food that makes me sick, I will whine some more.