Yesterday was my last Sunday at home. Today is my last Monday.

Yes, I'm a little sad (I haven't turned on the faucet yet, but just wait), but I'm also getting really nervous. My excitement is typically channeled into nerves. I am looking forward to it. I'm taking cool classes, hopefully meeting cool people. Hopefully I can manage my landlord (and buy them off with some jewelry if it comes to that).

But then there's that pesky bit about the food.

I learned the hard way last weekend where a skipped lunch can lead me. Ed was right there, waiting to pounce. I mean hey- if I could skip lunch, why not dinner? And if you skipped lunch today and survived, then you must do so tomorrow. And then there's the fact of remembering that you liked the hunger, in a sense. That it relieved anxiety.

Of course, then I realized that this was digging myself in a hole, and as the cowboys say, when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. So then I got to face all of that displaced anxiety as I started eating normally again.

I look at the piles of stuff in my bedroom. In my brother's room. In the spare room. In the basement.

Holy Mary Mother of God- what am I going to do with all this?

And I look at the papers I'm supposed to be making a syllabus and teaching schedule out of. True, I got the first half of the class nailed down, but even then. I have to come up with lecture notes. It's like a baby trying to teach us EDers about intuitive eating. I have that look of, "You want me to explain what?" I know I was taught it at some point, somewhere long in the distant past, but even then, it was absorbed by osmosis. How did I learn to write? I copied the style of writers I read and liked. Ta-da!

But writing is messy and (other than journal writing) not meant to be private. So we're all going to share our shitty drafts as a group and look stupid and try to make sense out of it. I hope they can write better at the end of the class than when they started. I hope I don't cause any mass psychotic episodes. And I hope that none of them hate me. Too much.

I think those are the goals I need to keep in mind. I'm not out to create Pulitzer Prize winners. I'm here to get those kids through this class, teach them a little about public health, a little more about writing, give them a grade, and send them on their way. I have these fantasies about getting an email a year or two later from one of my student-elects saying how wonderful my class was, blah blah blah. Which is totally unrealistic.

I think I need to scale down my goals a little bit. Let's get through the class, the semester, the year. That's it.