visions of 20% discounts dance in my head

In case any of you don't know, I quit my teaching job and still don't have a new one for the fall. But I'm not too worried. Maybe my unemployment hasn't seemed like such a big deal because it's still the summer. Or maybe it's the fact that I have a stable life with a lot of support and I know that temporary unemployment won't ruin my credit or make me lose a house or any other harsh reality that might befall other people.

Or...

Maybe it's the fact that teaching turns me into a complete stress case and I'm feeling the freedom of NOT having an impending teaching job. I mean, honestly, teaching in a public school makes me a little crazy. The amount of planning alone makes me feel a real heaviness. I actually fantasize sometimes that I get no kind of teaching work this fall and have to go work at Wholefoods full time. Am I crazy? I'm good at teaching, and it's challenging, and it's a stable job if you have it, with good benefits and opportunities for higher education and yadda yadda yadda. And part of me is dying to work at a grocery store.

Even in Guatemala, where I was only teaching half-hour lessons in the mornings...I started having my stress dreams. That's right, the teeth dreams. I haven't had a tooth-crumbling dream since my first year of teaching, if this blog serves as an accurate record.

In Guatemala, I dreamed that I was out to dinner with my first principal, and my teeth were loose. I tried to ignore it, but two or three of them eventually fell out. That familiar sickness set in, that feeling of wishing beyond all reason that you could go back in time and prevent what just happened. And then...I felt that there were new teeth growing in! The sense of relief was almost as good as waking up from these nightmares.

I choose to interpret that dream as stress and a loss of control, with the knowledge that it soon would pass. I wasn't trapped. I was just teaching for two weeks. But if I were back in public schools...

Do I really want to invite those dreams back into my life? Wholefoods surely wouldn't do this to me.