rambles and brambles on my New Mexico adventure

Well, my life in New Mexico is winding down. T-minus one month until I go back to Indiana to start my PhD program. I'm gonna spend my remaining time focusing on grantwriting, so I won't be working with the kids as much.

In general, this has been a good experience for me. It reminded me that adventure is important and needs to be pursued with deliberation. It showed me that natural beauty is a really nice addition to everyday life. And it greatly re-enforced my existing presumption that most of the things that I value in life cannot easily be purchased. It engendered a desire to meet my needs as much as I can through my own skill and effort and as little as possible through purchasing goods, services, and land from others. I've made a lot of new friendships, some of which I'm confident will last, and I cemented an old friendship. I've got some new interests that might last a while too, like gardening and river rafting.

It hasn't all been great. I was hoping to have some romance, but that didn't happen. I think my contribution to the organizations I'm serving has been less than stellar, partially due to my failures and partially for other reasons. I was hoping to make more progress on my health/weight loss goal, though I have made some marginal gains.

I think I've been able to really think about the trade-offs that life's various paths present. These tensions are often rooted in my schizophrenic personality. I'm a sensitive emo sap and an objective depressed realist. I enjoy community, but I'm so sensitive to criticism that I also crave solitude. I want to serve others, but I also want independence and freedom. I like being busy and engaged in my work, but I also love being able to pursue my own interests, including doing absolutely nothing. I hate being bored and left to stew in my own juices, but being left alone and doing nothing is precisely what I crave when I get stressed or irritated.

Camp is concentrated utopia. It shows you what community can be when it works. But even then, there are aspects that make me uncomfortable. There's this whole ethic of "positive peer pressure" as well as a constant drumbeat of protestant work ethic, and part of me definitely endorses both of those things, but part of me is skeptical of them as well. The positive peer pressure has a cultish tinge to it that bothers me a little, and preaching about "work ethic" makes me a little uncomfortable when the protestant work ethic has never really taken hold in my own personal life (see previous paragraph).

Working with kids, you're always up against the specter of hypocrisy. How can I tell kids not to cuss when I've been cussing like a sailor since I was 10 years old? How can I tell kids not to smoke when so many people I know do all the time, and do it responsibly? How can I tell kids to whistle while they work when I have such trouble doing it myself?

Well, this is long enough. I hope my sparse posting hasn't lost any readers...lord knows this blog doesn't have many to spare.