Is it Christmas yet?

I realized I am anxious for it to be the holidays. It's about 10,000 degrees outside, and while I am enjoying the last vestages of my freedom, I cannot help but picture how nice it will be to have a Christmas tree in my new apartment [which looks amazing and I will post pictures as soon as I can...]. I started scanning a fellow teacher's blog and reading about the fall season. It made me want to open up my sweater drawer, see oranges and reds and have it be October [which, shockingly enough, is not that far way--only about 2 months...].

I think there's something familial about the holidays, and comforting. There's thinks I think about already--like, will CA come to Thanksgiving with my family this year? What do I get him for Christmas? How does "Christmas" work at a Jewish Day School?--and then I think about making cookies with EPS in my apartment, watching Christmas movies on my couch and how great it will be to be in a relationship during the holidays. I think about "family Christmas" and bringing CA there. I think about the big present exchange with AR.

I should be describing my school; I remember in high school spending time with LSB and her favored APHistory students. We'd come in during the day to do tasks for her, help move things and set up bulletin boards. Here, it still feels strange to be in this place without students; it doesn't feel like mine yet. Maybe once I have keys, it will be different. For now, my classroom is not done and I sit outside HK's every day, because I am too nervous to not be the first to arrive. I'm discovering things, slowly. Like what it means to have a "secure network," where to go to get a giant rug for the classroom and how to get reimbursed for things I'll buy for the class.

The bathrooms up here are marked for teacher or student. I feel a strange kind of control and there's not even children here yet. There's specific areas where I can go and they can't. To think that only months ago, I was in the other position. The frightening thing is that I'm not entirely sure what's changed. I don't feel any older; I still own too many pairs of jeans and not enough dress pants. I'm still not fully paying for myself--not until I get a paycheck. I'm still the youngest one here. Someday, most of these things will change.

I think about the rest of the year and the things that will have changed. I remember, last December, when Guillermo buzzed the door and I ran down to get him, how nothing would ever be like that again. For years, I have been trying to describe those moments--where the light is soft and things feel fuzzy around the edges. Perhaps it is that those moments are easier to get during the holidays. Perhaps it is that I am trying not to think so much about how I really do believe I am in love. Perhaps it is all of these things.

Or maybe it's just that I hate the heat.