So long, SoCal

Living in a place, any place, for any length of time will eventually cause you to form some form of attachment to it. As much as I hate and gripe about California, a part of me is still upset at moving. The list of things I will miss is very small, and center almost entirely around the high school I taught at. I made some very strong connections with the students and the faculty there. I started a successful recycling club (4,430 pounds of paper recycled), planted trees on campus, and we even made t-shirts. Then the my students threw me a surprise party which completely caught me off guard, and then one of my favorite students made me a giant two-sided poster about how much she liked me as a teacher, and now they're writing awesome things on MySpace... jeez it can be a bit much for a guy to just walk away from that. I invested a ton of myself there, worked my ass off for two years, built some great relationships, and now I gotta start over somewhere else.

But anyway. I think that nowhere you live is going to be perfect. There's always going to be some gripe or shortcoming - the people, the city, the weather, the traffic, the whatever. But you find something that you like doing and makes you happy, and you can find that anywhere you are. Even if it's just a small happiness, it becomes what gets you through the other shitty things, no matter how numerous they are. You make friends. The closer I get to moving back, the more I think about why I left in the first place, and start to wonder if some of those things won't resurface to bother me again. I'm worried that they'll begin to bother me so much that I'll be tempted to pick up and move again.

Teaching, I've found, definitely lends itself to a certain degree of permanency. You become the solid rock upon which students are shaped and molded. You get to watch them become complete, real people. And if you try hard, you can help them become better people. Or at least influence them to some degree. Truly, shaping the future. But if you're only present for a few years, especially less than the four in high school, you're limited. You're cutting short those strong connections that make teaching so worthwhile. You limit yourself to a pure academic instructor, not a true teacher.

And so with that in mind I'm realizing that I need to find one place to be, at least as long as I'm a teacher. And I need to recognize that nowhere will be perfect, and that constantly moving to find one will in fact damage me much more than staying in one "imperfect" place. At least where I'm moving to has family and friends. And Waffle House.