Currently, my kids are reading Homer's "The Odyssey". It amazes me how much what we read resembles real life. I tell my kids that the word Odyssey means "a journey", and here I am on my own wild and bumpy journey. Odysseus faces monsters like Scylla, a 6 headed beast with bite, while I feel like I'm being ripped into 6 pieces sometimes by all of the work I have to do or places I have to be. It's not necessarily a bad ripping- I love being busy, love having work to do and places to be. This is all just very different from what I imagined it would be. They (being the lovely ed department) never tell you exactly how hard life is going to be, or how much you will have to do. Ignorantly, we as college students believe that life will get easier because we won't have classes to attend or homework to do, but we are still in class all day, and instead of doing homework, we are grading it.
Odysseus also finds himself facing Polyphemus, the cyclops with a bad attitude, and every day I find myself facing teachers or administrators or students who seem to have only one focus, and that focus cannot be changed. I stand in awe at those people who are ingrained in their ways, refusing to change despite the fact that an obvious change is necessary. They seem to literally only have one eye, and since they are so bent on looking at one thing, they have no other means to see a second or third option which is available.
There are, to my chagrin, one too many Circes at my school as well- women (and men) who are sorcerers or enchantresses, wooing people under their spell and spending all of their energy pulling people to "their side". They are absorbed in the politics or gossip of the school, and they seek to suck in everyone else around them or else condemn them as nothing more than pigs (if you haven't read "The Odyssey," please pardon my excessive references).
Speaking of gossip, enter in Charybdis, the eternal whirlpool of death, ever sucking people in to her bottomless pit. The students gossip, teachers gossip, administrators gossip. I admit to falling prey to the gravity of the gossip pool myself, and it really is incredibly difficult to pull one's self out once pulled in.
I could carry on with references to the cannibals or the lotus-eaters (which, by the way, I explained to my kids as being the same as today's stoners. They definitely got THAT reference), but I shall desist and spare you all a brutal monologue.
I shall say this- life is a journey full of lessons learned, and we all must face bumps in the road or storms on the sea. I sometimes feel as if I am constantly facing trials, but then, I do tend to place myself in these situations. After all, I moved here with little more than a car full of semi-important junk and a head full of hopes. I wish I had been better prepared, but looking back, I can't imagine how I would have known that I was lacking information or that I wasn't fully ready for life as an adult. Hopefully my adventures and mis-adventures will not be the stuff of epic poetry, but rather a story to tell to others to spare them some troubles (and inspire some laughter).
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