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>Yesterday, I took my snowboard & boots down to the Play It Again to see if I could trade them in for a pair of cross country skis.

I started snowboarding when I was fifteen, on one of our then-yearly family ski trips to Colorado. Cousins, Aunts, Uncles, Grandparents, Parents and Siblings all packed into a small rental condo for a few days, half of us sleeping on couches, every TV blaring a different station at all hours, four people trying to make a sandwich in the one-butt kitchen, three people arguing over politics and religion, someone always bundling up to hit the lifts or shops, grandfather snoring through it all, sunk deep and oblivious in an easy chair. I escaped the chaos at a tucked-away diner halfway between the condo and the slopes, the only cheap place to eat in a tourist trap of a town. I’d order cheese blintzes and hot cocoa and sit at the end of the bar watching the ebb and flow of regulars. This was where all the ski-school instructors came through after work. This is where all the raccoon eyed mountain bums inhaled black coffee and a bagel before hitting lifts. This is where it dawned on me that skiing is not what the cool kids do.

It is hard to get good at something one only does once a year. But I tried hard. I took lessons and then rode the mountain until I could hardly stand up. At night, I would soak in the hot tub, slip into a painful coma on my assigned couch, struggle awake before dawn to limp down to the lifts as the opening line formed. I nodded nonchalantly at knots of snowboarders in the lift line, copying their mannerisms, the way they wore their goggles, the way they surfed into the lift chute like they owned it. I tried to make eye contact with them, drinking my morning coffee at the diner waiting for the lifts to open. I pretended not to know my family of loud, embarrassingly inept skiers falling over one another, plowing into strangers while shooting home-video, sporting glaring neon bibs from another era. The snowboarders never gave me a second look.

When I was nineteen, we took our last family vacation to the mountains. On the third day, I caught an edge and slammed down hard, spiral-cracking the long bone of my left foot. I finished the run and did another, teeth clenched, before finally admitting defeat. I spent the rest of the winter on crutches. The next year, I got a snowboard and boots on sale in the spring, hoping desperately that ownership might be my ticket in. I have hauled that board with me from Chicago to Alaska to Utah to Texas and now back north again. In those six years, I have ridden it down a mountain once.

Now we live in the Interior of Alaska, on the edge of a town sporting a thousand miles of cross country trails. Half a mile from our cabin, cars line the road on the weekends, loading and unloading sleds, skis, snow machines and dogs. The sun is back and life here is good. The trials beckon. They are, after all, much of why we came.

But when I hauled my board and boots onto the counter at Play It Again, something inside me broke. That snowboard was my ticket, unredeemed. And I was about to scalp it for some skis. Why is it so hard to let go of a dream that never had any substance? I have never been a snowboarder, and I have certainly never been one of the cool kids.

But I do know what these things are worth. When they offered me less than a third of the value of my gear, I walked back out and put them up on Craigslist instead. Maybe some young girl will stumble on the listing, and learn to surf into the cool crowd like an old pro.

Ultimately, these are the facts: The board is beginning to rust. Skis will see a lot more snow. And given the propensity skis have for trails, they may actually help me get somewhere.

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>I have complained here and there about having to take advanced math classes in order to secure a teaching certificate. I am in the final round of courses before my stint student teaching, and this includes, among other things, a class called “Functions of Calculus.”

Let me pause here to clear something up. This is not a calculus class. It would be dishonest of me (however tempting) to allow my readers to think I am capable of such a feat of mental acuity. I am not. “Functions of Calculus” is the misleadingly named course referred to as “Pre-Calculus” in high schools across the nation. But I guess the kids are in college now, and Functions of Calculus sounds so much … smarter.

But smarter I am not. I have struggled with math as far back as school memories reach. In fourth grade, I was pulled from the math period to attend some special class (gifted or remedial, I have yet to pinpoint) in another building. Somehow, the educators there thought it made sense to take us out of math and use the time to teach us more about literature and history and science. We certainly didn’t complain. I certainly never caught up.

In consequence, I now have the interesting experience of suffering through debilitating emotional flashbacks of ineptitude every Tuesday and Thursday evening, for two hours. Peter can attest to the numb, edge-of-tears creature that crawls through the door on these nights, deflated and secure in her utter failure as a student of mathematics (and, by neurotic extension, as a person.)

In the moments when I can take a step back and look, it has been an interesting peculiarity to observe. I am a competent student. I got good grades in high school and college (except, of course, in math,) and am doing a solid job of hacking through my Drexel classes towards this MS. I procrastinate inexcusably, but I turn out good work when the clock is ticking. I passed the national teaching exams with points to spare. Yet twice a week I become completely, irrevocably convinced that a) I have a smaller brain than a lab chip, therefore b) any educational success I have achieved thus far has been a spectacular fluke and c) I am moments away from being given a permanent seat in the Dunce Corner of adult life.*

Fascinating how incredibly irrational the human mind can be, isn’t it?

I don’t know how much of this paranoia stems from page-wide inequalities littered with fractions, imaginary numbers and free radicals, and how much is fed by my continuing reservations about a career as a teacher (fueled most recently when a stranger walked up to me in a coffee shop last weekend, pointed at my text books and decried, “I’m a teacher, and I can tell you right here and now those are worthless. Don’t read them. Throw them out. Those people don’t know the first thing about education.”) In the end, it doesn’t really matter.

The truth of it is I know what is tripping me up; all the basics I missed sitting in the back of math classes in middle and high school scribbling out short stories, plotting novel chapters, sketching characters in the textbook margins and perfecting the use of my TI-82’s free-drawing function (to me, nothing more than an expensive etch-a-sketch.) I probably shouldn’t be in this class at all, but I am not going to drop another $500 and five months on the remedial math. Instead, I am looking for a tutor and trying to muster the psychological wherewithal to maintain a realistic perspective on the bi-weekly meltdown that is now sewn into the fabric of my life.

In the end, that’s probably a valuable enough exercise in itself.

>I got the call this morning around ten. Tom was very gracious – he said that the decision had been a hard one, but that another applicant had an edge in farming experience and they ended up going that way. I saw it coming – I had a feeling that my lack of concrete hands-in-the-soil farm work would count against me in a close race. I am still planning on volunteering at the farm this spring and summer (to rack up some of those dirt hours, for future employment … but mostly because I love watching unsuspecting ten year olds bite into sorrel.)

This week has been so full of other unexpected things (most of them bad, none of them unmanageable) that this just runs with the swing of it, and I’m taking it in stride.

Looking at the bright side, I will be able to get through more of the masters program quickly and will also be relatively free this summer to enjoy all the crazy wilderness we moved up here for. Maybe now I can justify getting that Cape Horn. At least, that is what I am telling myself this afternoon. The reality is we’re back to Plan B. Substitute teaching. Ick.

>Last November, I put in an application at a place called Calypso Farm & Ecology Center. It is a little CSA farm outside of town, near the old goldrush-camp-turned-trendy-hamlet of Ester. I have avoided writing about this application, for fear of somehow jinxing the process. However, now that interviews are over and I have (purportedly) made peace with either decision on their part, I am breaking the silence.

When we first arrived, we spent quite a bit of time trying to get our bearings in this busted-up, beat-down city (University and Farmers Market, excepted.) The name Calypso kept popping up, and when we finally found free WiFi at the library, I looked it up. Turns out, they needed volunteers for their fall field trip program. I called, and was immediately conscripted to help kids make goat cheese and harvest chamomile. It was hard to contain my joy!

The current educational coordinator is leaving the farm, and when her position officially opened up, she encouraged me to apply. In light of my many misgivings about a possible role in the traditional education system (and by extension my current graduate pursuits) I thought this might make a pretty good match. Because of Fairbanks’ brutal winters, the farm is shut down for two of Drexel’s four quarters, leaving me open to take a heavier load of classes and complete my student teaching over the cold months. Also, we get lots of fresh, free produce all season. Also, there are goats. Need I say more?

Peter and I debated on what one wears to an interview at a CSA farm in the dead of winter. After some discussion, we landed on: Snowboots. Clean Jeans. A sort-of frayed red sweater. Also, I went to town and showered.

I arrived at the farm happy for the snowboot decision. The “office” is about a quarter mile uphill on a very snowy (not drivable) road, smack in the middle of the 20 acres of developed farmland. The office is in a yurt. Thankfully, a yurt with a rather large and well stoked wood stove. Inside, I met the farm co-owner Tom, who was wearing a pair of busted up work carharts and a Grateful Dead T-shirt over longjohns. All of my misgivings about the frayed sweater were immediately dismissed.

The interview went well (as well as a follow up phone-interview with another farm employee.) My favorite question – one I doubt comes up in most interviews – was “If you could be a vegetable, what vegetable would you be?” (Sorrel. Looks like plain old lettuce … but bite into it and you get a lot more flavor than you bargained for!) The rest of the interview questions were predictable: What teaching experience do you have? What large-group-of-unruly-kid-herding experience do you have? What ages have you worked with?Organizational experience? Programs facilitated? Ad Nauseum. Regular interview stuff. But it was a very relaxed experience (lulled, no doubt, by the roaring wood stove.)

I know I made the first cut, but I haven’t heard back about the final decision yet. I have my fingers crossed both ways. The job is pretty huge – they run a lot of field trips for a lot of kids throughout the farm season, and are expanding – which is (I hope) understandably overwhelming. Especially since I haven’t had a ‘real job’ (does this even count as a real job?) in over a year. But it is also exactly what I am excited about; it is experiential, hands on learning that brings the community – kids and adults – into a closer relationship with the land they live on and the food that feeds them, ultimately with themselves.

More than anything, the process of thinking through and applying for this position has solidified the kind of education I want to be involved with in the future. I know that for all the slogging I am doing at the moment to get through the MS degree, this kind of thing is what I am doing it for. Focusing on this possibility (even if it doesn’t turn out) has given me a lot more focus to keep slogging.

So I am waiting for that phone call.