Don’t Know Just What To Do With Myself

Posted by beth on September 4, 2009

Well, it’s Labor Day weekend again (cue the music)…

LABOR DAY! LABOR DAY!
SCHOOLS ARE CLOSED AND POOLS ARE OPEN!
LABOR DAY! WHAT’S THERE TO SAY?
DO ALL YOUR SHOPPING…
AT WAL-MART!!!!

My sister just left to drive down to Charleston to see my parents. My other sister will be there too, and I could have gone except I feel like I have about a million things to do before I leave for Italy, and I don’t know where to start. Rather, I don’t really know what the things are that I need to do. If I did, y’all know a to-do list would serve me just fine.

I feel like it’s more mental/emotional preparation than anything else. Packing is easy. You just roll and cram. But there’s sort of an identity crisis that comes with this sort of thing, and I hadn’t really noticed it until just now. I mean, I quit my job – What the WHAT? I quit. I don’t teach any more. I actually subbed this morning, and it was both completely normal and completely weird. My mind is just in this weird limbo between my life a month ago, my temporary life for the moment, and my life in two weeks. There’s not enough time to establish a new “normal” before everything changes again, so here I am, just waiting to get to Italy and figure out what’s “normal” there.

But in the meantime, I still have a week and a half of life to live here, and I don’t want to waste a second of it. I’m already getting weepy every time I think about saying good-bye to everybody, not having an overly excited Dooley gallop toward me with his mouth open for a butt-scratching every time I walk into the Joshes’ place, not sitting around with the Joshes being ridiculous, not playing Rock Band, not hearing Deanna’s weekly “drinkin’ and sexin’” reference, or not going to church on Sundays.

I know, I know. I know we’ll all still chat online, and we’ll keep up via facebook, and I’ll still blog, and I’ve left places before, and it’s only temporary, and I’ll be back in December, and I’m totally being a hormonal girl right now. I guess I just wanted y’all to know that as excited as I am to go, I’ll be sad to leave. And I guess I’m sort of figuring out right before your very eyes that what I need to do to prepare for this trip (in addition to laundry) is hug everybody a lot and re-evaluate where my identity lies…because it’s the sort of thing that ought to be able to go with you no matter where you go and what you do for a living.

So it’s a good weekend to have the house to myself – for reflection, contemplation and perhaps a movie night??? Not all at once. And I promise to put on pants if anybody comes over.