funally!

This morning the perfect metaphor for my life happened. I woke up at 6:30 a.m. because there were birds at my window.

Let me back up. I bought a bird feeder at the beginning of my time here in New Orleans. I filled it up and hung it from my roof outside my window, hoping that I'd get some company that would help make me feel a little more at home. Of course, the birds never came. And that was six months ago. They never came and never came and never came and I figured the bird seed was going to start to rot pretty soon, but I wasn't about to do anything about it. I just let my bird feeder sit out there, and wished the birds would come.

And then this morning, for no reason at all, they came. Dozens, if not hundreds. Just like that, for no reason at all, except that time had passed.

That's exactly what life has been like lately. For some reason, everything seems to be falling into place, and I'm happier than I've been... for a long time.

So I've been very neglectful of my fun blog. Blogging about being happy and thinking life is great and enjoying one's job is kind of boring. No surprise element. No selling point. Just boring old sanity.

In the last week, some updates: CRUNKICAL MASS bike ride around Prospect.1 last Sunday, with some of the greatest people currently living in New Orleans, was beautiful, exhausting, cold and moving; someone is putting my a cappella cover of "Whatever You Like" in a film; we won a major battle for our students with disabilities at my school. I'm teaching my own class now, with a 25-page unit plan that follows the whole P.1, P.2, P.3 formula; we have a new student, Tracy (as always, not her real name), who I have gotten to know very well and who Avery's consistently tries to get to marry him; Avery has grown four years in reading in one semester, which is kind of unheard of in the world of teaching; I am co-heading Adventure Krew (you know... camping club, hiking club, whatever you want to call it) -- actually, we're going on an MLK hike in less than an hour -- and I feel like once I'm done with this I'm going to have to lead a Girl Scout troup. I'm proud of New Orleans, and I feel like I watch it change every day. I can now do the Wednesday New York Times crossword all by myself. I shampooed my cat (without using a toilet). I'm painting like crazy, my room smells like vanilla, I have read more wonderful books in the last six months than in the rest of my entire life. I keep meeting people I want to know forever, and the learning curve on relationships here is fast.

This is an Avery video. I don't know where he heard the term "I'm strippin'," but he pulled it out during his resource period yesterday and it was ABOUT the funniest thing I'd ever seen. And of course he decided that him being naked was a good reason for girls to marry him. WIN.

The only thing is that now I am going to have to start buying birdseed. Oh well. There are worse things in the world.