Waiting

So far I think tropical storms qualify as the most boring natural disasters ever (ok, excepting a drought, I suppose).  You get 3 days notice of something that is coming for you at the speed of a recreational biker, and then, finally, eventually...it rains. Not super hard like a thunderstorm or anything, just consistently  .My apologies to anyone harmed in this Irene business, I'm sure being in a coastal location or in a Cat 3 hurricane is an entirely different (and terrifying) story, but so far...yawn.

So I'm waiting for this tropical storm warning to turn into something worth staying inside all day for.

After  7 weeks on the road this summer, suddenly I'm doing a lot of waiting. Some of you may know that waiting is not a skill I'm particularly good at.
We traveled all of July in Europe (Slovenia, Venice, hiking in Switzerland, Milan, Copenhagen, Berlin, Budapest, and Belgrade...hopefully we'll get some photos up of those lovely places in the next few weeks, but here is a link to Hanna's nice blog on Slovenia, and we went with her) before packing up our life in THIRTEEN checked bags and flying home to the US of A. Once back in the US we visited friends and relatives in Colorado, Montana, California, Minnesota, and Michigan before ending up here in Massachusetts.  It was a busy few weeks.
First things I noticed about the US during my reverse-culture-shock: sad to say, but it's fat people. Lots of really, painfully, morbidly obese fat people, like the the guy at immigration at the Denver airport, sweating profusely just standing still in the heavily air-conditioned room (I was wearing my long-sleeve). There are overweight people in Europe, but nowhere near as many or as large. Some of it is certainly genetics, and lifestyle choices, but I have to believe there is something systemically wrong with what Americans call "food,", how much of it we eat, and our options to do otherwise.  [Not to mention our car-dependency that limits options for daily exercise.]  I also noticed the acres and acres of mostly-empty parking lots that we've put up around all of our big box stores and strip malls. Maybe only on 5 days a year are these parking lots ever more than 1/2 full, but think about how much good farmland is now under asphalt, about how it makes it impractical to walk from your average suburban dwelling to anywhere useful, without having to cross the asphalt wasteland on a hot August day, about how many more miles of sewers and roads and street lights we need because everything is so sprawled out on account of having sufficient parking, and about how damned ugly they are. Blech. Some things need to change.

After a day or two spent de-jet-lagging at Shannon's parents in Colorado, we got to spend some quality time loading the rest of our belongings, the stuff the didn't go to Bulgaria, onto a shipping container to be sent to Massachusetts. By American standards, we probably don't even have that much stuff, as it pretty much fit into one average shed. Still, we hadn't used it in two years, and with the exception of furniture, I'm not sure we will use it in the next two years. We half-heartedly tried to start culling our pile, but decided to procrastinate, determining that it would be easier to do at our new place, once we had a better idea of what we would need and what we wouldn't. Most of the problematic goods aren't even sentimental...just stuff that is not broken, but not currently useful, like extension cords and DSL modems. It seems wasteful to throw it away, but also wasteful to carry it around.

Perhaps I'm pondering these issues of waste and need and structural problems in society more than I otherwise would because of my new job. I'll be teaching environmental science at one of the top high schools (a boarding school) in the country. I'll also be the "campus sustainability coordinator," which is a new position that no one really has figured out yet. It's a little bit intimidating.
This is a campus full of talent and privilege. Some students were born privileged: the sons and daughters of kings, presidents, and titans of finance have gone here for two centuries. Others are privileged simply by being here. About a 1/3 of the students are on financial aid, some even getting full ride, which is quite a gift from a school that charges almost $50,000 a year (for high school!!!). The campus is beautiful, with exquisitely manicured green spaces and buildings (like the one I'm typing in) that date back to the Revolutionary War. The teaching and recreational facilities look like a nice liberal arts college at first, until you look closer at the iPod-connected-touch-screen treadmills in the gym and figure that most colleges don't have equipment this nice. The faculty that I have met so far have been uniformly talented, warm, and helpful. The few students I met last year during my interview were friendly, hard-working, and sharp. It is on all accounts a wonderful learning environment, but also at times a bit like the Truman Show. Is this place for real?

Right now, in addition to waiting for Irene, we're waiting for our housing. We've still got 10 days before students arrive, and I would love to get physically settled so that I can figure out my classes and the rest of my job. Unfortunately, we'll be living in the trailer park, excuse me, "modular dormitory" known as Chapin II (it's important to say it with the right looking-down-your-nose accent), and they haven't finished it yet. They're doing some construction this year so we'll be in the temporary housing (as new guy here I'm low man on the totem pole). There are 18 dorm rooms (all boys, all single rooms, mostly 9th/10th grade) plus three faculty apartments in our nascent trailer park. Our shipping container is parked next to the trailers, and we've got excellent temporary temporary housing, but it still would be nice to get moved in for real.

Home sweet home (soon to be), with shipping container in waiting in the foreground.

Half this week was spent in new faculty orientation, which was a bit of a blur.  They did a  nice job mixing social events (like dinner at the dean's and a canoe outing) with your usual anti-harassment trainings (favorite quote from the dean, "[the boys in the dorm] spend a lot of time naked"), but there was still a whole lot of information to take in. I don't think I've really scratched the surface yet of figuring out how the day-to-day life of this boarding school works. I guess I've got a few hundred pages of manuals to look over today as it continues to rain. (I've got extra batteries for my headlamp so I can keep reading in case the power goes out!)

New faculty plus some administrators, kids, and dogs. This is the view from "The Rock" above campus.

Spending 2 years in Europe was somewhat like an extended vacation. It was plenty of work, but I never really felt like I "belonged" in Bulgaria. In fact it made me come to terms with my own fundamental "American-ness", like it or not. 7 weeks on the road heightened our need to be settled somewhere, to dig in, to make a home. Now that we're here, it's frustrating that we can't start that process here. I hope this will feel like home. There are a bunch of free-range faculty children and lots of folks out walking their puppies; no one seems to lock their apartment doors. It's a friendly place, a bit like really expensive grown-up summer camp.


So now you're waiting, I suppose, for an ending to this rambling blog, but like any good literature these days, you won't get one. So there.