Hopes.

It is days like this that I am exceedingly glad that I am a school teacher (ugh, which does not sound sexy). Okay, momentary digression. Schoolteacher = school marm. Which invokes images like this one:However, I keep wondering if that's the idea that people have about teachers. Teachers started out as women who were simply trying to find a job until they could find a husband. They were young and prudish or old and spinster-ish. Even my grad school was 80% female. So, I keep thinking about how people think of teachers. I wonder if that's what they think. That I'm destined to become a woman like above and not going to do this as a career while still being a woman, a woman whose attractive and in love. I'd love to do a research paper on the history of teaching--I can add that to the list of things that I should do with my days off when I'm not teaching.

Instead, I come back to what I have actually been doing--a lot of watching 30 Rock (which, by the way, must be the wittiest and smartest show on television currently) and reading books. So far, I've finished the book Kafka on the Shore which has to be the most intellectual book I've read in quite some time. It's very different than the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle but so sexual, raw and also thrilling. I kept wondering how things were going to connect together. C has recommended I read the book The Meaning of Night: A Confession so I went to the bookstore the other day with ANR to pick it up.

I've been spending a lot of time with her lately; I realize how important her friendship has become to me. Not simply because we buy the same clothes and understand each other's fantasies and fears. But, mainly because she is there, she sticks through and by me. And she thinks my new iPhone is hot and not silly and superfluous. (It is both hot and superfluous. I get it, I'm NOT a lawyer, I don't need to be reached at any point. But, it makes me feel special.)

I've watched The Simpson's Movie again and loved spiderpig even more. And I've been looking at all the work I have to do and have not yet done any of it. I've also greatly been missing that guy. I received some money to travel and he said he could take some time off of work and hopefully we could go somewhere together in February. I like that security. I like that feeling. Mostly, I like his face.

I also found the gift-giving this year more guilt-filled than usual. I felt like I didn't deserve most of it--and between the earrings (I talk about them too much but cut me some slack, this is the first real relationship I've ever been in...) and the iPhone (totally, once again, unnecessary, but now I can look up inane information whenever I need it!) and the sweet doll from ANR (yup, 24 years old and still excited by a three-foot tall replica of Draco Malfoy, you want to fight about it?) I felt like I didn't deserve the things that I got. Either way, I hoped that the people with whom I am close enjoyed their gifts.

Mostly, I am excited for the New Year. NYE does not fill me with glee, but the idea of where I might be in 2008--that's the wonder. I was hoping 2007 was the year of stability, but I think it was leading up to 2008, the real time of feeling like someone's arm was around me, and that people were about to support me. Either way, I'm hoping it works out.