I have been feeling a little untethered lately and I suspect the feeling is the cumulative effect of my experiencing several overlapping periods of adjustment. After spending nearly eight years in the comparatively urbanized Southern Tier of New York, I now find myself living in rural Iowa. This is not an unwelcome change, but it is a change nevertheless. Over the course of the eight years I spent shuttling between the Binghamton, Ithaca, and Elmira area, I grew accustomed to living within a few minutes' drive of countless chain restaurants, shopping malls, cineplexes, twenty-four hour diners, and other similarly commerce-oriented diversions. No matter how bored I felt, no matter what hour of the day or night I felt bored, I always had somewhere to go. Now, I have considerably less immediate access to such surfeits and, addict-like, I am experiencing withdrawal.
Similarly, I am adjusting to the distance that separates me from the friends in whose company I have spent so much of the past several years. Cellular telephones, Facebook, and Skype-facilitated chats have, of course, made it much easier to maintain long-distance friendships, but loneliness remains a challenge, especially when I realize I can't just fend off ennui by heading out to the shopping mall.
Then there's my new job, with all the new faces and places with which I have had to familiarize myself. It's been wonderful, but the change has meant pulling myself out of my comfort zone, which has been challenging at times, too.
Furthermore, after working my way through a doctoral program as an adjunct instructor at several different institutions, I now have a full-time teaching position. This is an exceedingly positive change, but one that has required some real adjustment. While my commute for past several years took upwards of ten hours a week, my current commute time is barely ten minutes. Having so much extra time has completely altered the feel of my work week and I am only now, halfway through the semester, getting used to it.
In addition to these larger-scale shifts, I am adjusting to life without paperwork. I have spent much of my new-found free time over the past two months filling out what felt like an endless pile of paperwork. Now that the bulk of that work is over, I find myself craving some additional "productive" work to fill out my day.
Throw in the shifts from Daylight Savings Time to Standard Time and warm weather to cold weather and you've got one seriously untethered Erik.
This blog post, which I hope is the first of several, is an attempt to re-tether myself. I'm hoping that, in an effort to write a bit more regularly, I will provide myself both with a stabilizing activity that will act as an anchor when I feel particularly adrift in the world and a motivation for greater productivity.
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