I'm realizing that in less than a week, I'm going to stand up in front of a room full of mostly 18-year-olds and be their professor. Teach them (I hope) how to write, or at least keep them marginally entertained for the semester.

My class is the most popular, the most requested, and has such a long wait list they would offer two sections if they could.

Yikes.

I was aware of that going in, that in a school that specializes in public health and medicine and course featuring these two subjects would likely attract a crowd. My write-up isn't bad, but it's not like the guy who's featuring Borat as a character study. Seriously. We're studying Typhoid Mary. Who is actually an interesting person, and it's a sad story at the end of things. She doesn't try to buy her way out of imprisonment with Khazakstani pubic hair a la Borat, however. It would have made for quite an interesting interlude, if nothing else.

I do think it's an interesting class. Sure, if I were dealing with students with a larger public health background, I might be able to do stuff that I personally would find more interesting. But all in all, I think I've actually created a good course.

I'm still scared shitless.

I know that's normal. Who wouldn't be nervous at starting something entirely new and foreign? I've never taught, never even taken a formal writing class until now. I suppose I'll have one writing class under my belt by the time I start teaching, so I'll be one class ahead of them. This class is also with the senior science editor for Time magazine, which in my opinion should count for two or so. At least.

Today was a good day. I took a preliminary class in rock climbing at the wall in the rec center with one of my classmates. It was so fun. I had mild vertigo at the top, but I didn't barf or panic. I take my final test tomorrow (or next Thursday). I got paperwork and annoying-ness out of the way. My apartment is still a pit, and I am going to take care of that now. I'm literally drowning in paper and cat hair.

Lovely.

So here I am, comfortably ensconced in my ridiculously overpriced yet quite nice hotel room. I spent my day in teacher training, learning all sorts of things about what I'm going to be teaching in the fall.

And all I could think about was: what the hell was I thinking??!!!

My other two fellow classmates (i.e., those people in the program with me) have resumes that simply blow me out of the water. One left a position researching at Columbia University. The other turned down a position at MIT to come. Both are around my age (mid-20s-ish). All I could think was: I left a toxic work environment! Yay me!

I am trying to calm myself down and say that they wouldn't have accepted me if they didn't think I was at least marginally qualified. And I do have way the hell more writing experience than either of them. But they're so freaking smart. Ditto with the rest of my colleagues preparing to teach various versions of this class. I'm just sitting there going "uh-huh, uh-huh" and trying to scrape my jaw up off the table. They talk about their own teaching experiences. I'm thinking: I haven't taught anything. I haven't come close to teaching anything.

And there remains this one teeny, tiny little fact: I've, um, never taken a college English class. I spent way too many hours writing for the school newspaper, but I learned from falling on my face, looking like an idiot, and taking steps to not look so idiotic the next time. Teaching someone how to construct an argument? I don't know. How do you do that? And how can you not do that?

Maybe that's a little arrogant of me, but I've been writing for so long that I've kind of lost touch with the beginning stages. It's like asking Lance Armstrong to teach a 5 year old how to ride a bike. And he would probably be frustrated (I would be) because it's so hard to get beyond that thought of: sit your arse down on the seat and start pedaling.

Duh.

But that's kind of the way recovery was for me. You just pick up the fork and put it in your mouth. Easy as pie. (I don't know whether that pun was intended or not). But I didn't remember how to do that. Yes, I remembered how to use a fork. However, it was the very act of eating, the act of being hungry, the act of deciding that you were in fact hungry, deciding if you were going to eat, what you were going to eat, how to prepare it, and how to disable the smoke detector in time so your burnt toast doesn't mean your high-rise apartment will have to be evacuated.

I think that, actually, is giving me a good metaphor for how to approach this class. These kids (and they are kids to me...those little fresh college freshman faces...how I shall change thee) are assumed to know how to write. They had to write essays to get into college, so that they can reasonably construct a sentence is assumed. But how do you teach someone to write?

How do you help an anorexic relearn how to eat?

The plain answer is that I don't have a frigging clue. I will likely get frustrated with my students as my parents and treatment team have gotten frustrated with me. Just do it already. It's not that difficult. Just do it.

Break it down. Step by step. When I wrote my first book, I didn't think I could do it. In fact, I set about writing it just to prove my professor wrong. I didn't write a book. I wrote a sentence, a paragraph, a page, a chapter. Assembled the damn thing. Edited it. And so on. You don't write a book. You don't recover from an eating disorder. Those are your end results, but they're NOT the process.

Damn I'm getting profound. And here all I really wanted to write about was how my feet were ground into hamburger by ill-fitting clogs. So now I'm blistered and have reeking feet. Lovely.

That's me: waxing philosophic with really bad foot odor.