“I never go out anymore,” I say to my best friend Selena.
“There’s nothing to do in Tampa.”
“I remember
you complaining two years ago – I gotta get out of Miami! I’m having too much
fun and not getting any work done.”
“Really?” I
ask. “I said that?” How quickly we forget the past.
Two years
ago, I was applying to MFA programs and living it up, Miami style. I was
between house-sitting gigs and a tent pitched in my mom’s backyard. I spent
most of my day working in my food forest and hanging out at the botanical
garden where I volunteered as an environmental educator. My afternoons were
spent hustling around town from one tutoring job to another, maneuvering
Miami’s crazy quitting time traffic and teaching everything from French grammar
to SAT essay writing. In the evenings, you might find me practicing my salsa
moves with the Salsa Craze dance club, getting down at Vixen, or owning the
streets of Miami with my bike posse. Every now and then, I took on an extra
shift as a waitress with a fancy catering company, mainly to hang out with my
friends who also worked with the company, but also for the gourmet freebies. In
between volunteering and dancing and tutoring, I stopped by the beach in the
middle of the week for long swims along Virginia Key’s shallow shore.
These days,
my life looks nothing like it did two years ago. Each day is eerily similar to
the last. I wake up early and go to sleep late. In the mornings, I meditate,
make my lunch, water the garden, eat breakfast. I bike to school and am sitting
at my computer by 9:30. (My friend Sam says – “Carmella’s got a cubicle? The
world must surely be ending!”) Weekdays are some amalgamation of consulting at
the Writing Studio, teaching classes, attending classes, and doing homework. I
eat lunch at my desk or by the pond across the street from my office building,
although the benches are usually too full of duck crap to find a safe seat. At
the end of the day, I try to make it to a dance class or the swimming pool
before biking back home, where I’ll stay put until the next morning (writing,
presumably).
 |
| My muse, hard at work |
A few days
ago, I got an email from Graduate Assistants United (our union) inviting me to
their monthly social at a local bar.
“Ugh,” I
told my co-workers. “Is it terrible that I really don’t want to go?”
“You should
go!” one of them said.
“Going out
is risky,” I said to my roommate later that night. “If I go to my dance class,
I know for sure that I’ll have a good time. But going out – you just never
know.”
“You should
go!” she said.
I did end up going, and I had a nice time. But still, the
whole situation made me laugh. The girl who used to triple and quadruple book
herself in one evening can’t summon up the energy to go to a bar for an hour?
My professor says that people are
way more productive as they age because they just don’t want to do all the
things they once did. Their knees hurt and they’d rather stay close to the
hearth. Plus, there are cats at home, and what’s better than kitty cuddles?
 |
| Kristyn + kitty cuddles = happiness |
Perhaps this all part of the
natural aging process. I’m nearing thirty, after all! Or maybe grad school is
getting the best of me. It’s also possible that this strange phenomenon is
simply temporary… Who knows? You might find me in a year and a half, a fresh-faced
bushy-tailed MFA graduate, back to my old restless ways.
