On the brink of vacation

In the middle of the desert, in one of the most arid climates I have experienced, somehow I manage to get water everywhere. Washing dishes, I am constantly assaulted by puddles of water I have created improbably, near-impossibly where no water could logically appear unless someone actually intentionally dumped it there. But somehow, I have a unique skill for transporting large amounts of water to parts of the kitchen, nay, the whole apartment, even while I have not ventured there in the act of doing the dishes. Really, though, this could be a highly sought after skill! Consider, it costs nothing for me to transport almost a liter of water mysteriously from my kitchen sink to the middle of my living room (really!), imagine what I could do for African countries in drought! I'll consider this calling.

Aside from working on solving world drought issues, I've been mired in Mid-Semester Assessments, a set of surveys, classroom observations, and focus-group type activities intended to assess how teachers here teach and how they can improve. Peppered throughout this has also been myriad lectures, conferences, discussions, meetings, all focused on the central idea of teaching (broad as that is), but which have all coalesced to provide with a lens through which I have intensively and acutely examined University, not just at the classroom level, but also its structures, mechanisms, people, goals-- such a mass of information about the system as a whole as I have never had before in so quick and intense a spurt.



I feel like I am holding between my two arms and balancing a brimming, dynamic, globe-shaped web of information (that is ever-swelling and might soon envelop me as it grows) into which I peer and glimpse the successes, failures, intentions, limitations, everything-- all the data points as they sit in infinite planes. In short, it's amazing and overwhelming. Now I need to figure out what to do with all this.


And now, I go on vacation to Luxor, a place I've always associated with the artifice and gilt plaster that is the city's namesake in Las Vegas (which displays a kind of human magnificence, not entirely estranged from that of the Ancients, perhaps. We still dream big.) I really have no idea what to actually expect though. This is the first really, thoroughly tourist endeavor I'm embarking on so far, and I'm very excited to just let go of the responsibilities of being settled somewhere, of having to know the right prices to pay for vegetables, of having to clean everything all the time (we just thoroughly scrubbed our apartment and it feels amaaaazing), of having to look like I know where I'm going all the time so I don't feel prey to curious eyes-- half of this battle is all in my head, all about wanting to fit in so I can get the same treatment as anyone else who lives here. But regardless, I'm ready to be open and excited about going somewhere I've never been to before, and it's wondrous.