I lurk! I lurk!

Busted.

Hi!

Room 12.

Hmmmm....

I find myself pointing out to people at least once a year that one of the definitions of "sinister" is "left-handed." I also trace the ability to keep "anachronous" and "incongruous" straight in my mind to all the snuggling with Word Power I did with you guys.

I floss every day.

And clearly I'm having trouble putting together a narrative. I'll start with my weekend.

This past weekend, I went to the Joshua Tree Roots Music Festival in an RV park near Joshua Tree NP (Southern California, in the Mojave and Colorado deserts). I didn't know I was going. Laura, my Australian girlfriend of nearly 3 years, is in town and decided to take me on a secret vacation. I thought we were headed to LA for the weekend to poke around the art museums, but instead she diverted us to the desert. We were going camping.

It really was a lot of fun. To be honest, however, my first thought was: ack! I have so much reading, research, and lesson prep to get through this weekend! How am I going to do this in the dirt?!?! But, by the end of it I was hula-hooping with the best of them.

How did I end up dating an Australian, you ask? Well, that's a good question. We met in Spain. (Oh, of course! you say.) Two years ago, right after graduating from college, I went to Spain to walk the Camino de Santiago. Some of you have probably heard of it. It's a thousand year-old, 800-kilometer pilgrimage across northern Spain. It takes about 30 days. Of walking. Just walking.

Before I went, I thought to myself: Well, this will be a fantastic opportunity for me to Think About Life and try to Figure Out The Future. After about 3 days, I was so sick of listening to myself think I thought there was no way I would make it through another 27. I started tagging along with anybody – anybody! – who walked by, just so I could hear them think for a while. I met so many interesting folks from all over the world, trying to hear other people think.

To cut a long story short (something that I've never been very good at), I made it to Santiago. This was supposed to be the end of the pilgrimage. The cathedral at Santiago is where you get to stop walking. Instead, while I was waiting in line to get my official plenary indulgence from the Roman Catholic Church, my self-congratulatory reverie was interrupted by an Australian woman, clearly traveling with her mother, and trying to pick me up. Shortly thereafter, her mother left us ("Ugh, I'm going to the bar"), and we haven't stopped talking since. Our "camino" – back and forth across the Pacific – continues as we struggle to find time to be together and a way for her to stay in the States while I finish my degree.

[insert long rant about Fortress America here]

As for how I feed and clothe myself when not living the life of a pilgrim, I'm currently studying for a Ph.D. in Modern Japanese History at the University of California, San Diego (hi, Emilie!). I have somewhere between 6-8 years to go, though I hear you get time off for good behavior. I'm a huge dork, and I'm still in shock that somebody will pay me to do something I would be doing anyway: reading books and talking about what I think. My particular intellectual hobby is the history of movement, focusing on the railroad system in pre-war Japan and the period of empire.

I never did Figure Out Life, or even manage to Think About Life, while on camino. But, hearing about all of your adventures, challenges, and successes has given me pause to reflect on what I am doing now, how I am living my life, and how our experiences in the classroom shaped us as people. Besides giving me my Word Power skillz, I feel like Room 12 opened up a whole world of emotions and relationships that have been a part of me ever since. It was intense, but I wouldn't trade it for anything.

(If any of you remember me in the 4th grade as a particularly angry or confused person, it's just now occurring to me that I was at this time first becoming aware of my "alternative" sexuality. Man, this blogging-thing is dregging up some memories...)

And, in conclusion, nobody believes me when I tell them I learned math while trying to calculate the volume of garbage that will be created in the next century by discarded tires.

Kate

P.S. If you want to learn more about the Camino, check out www.freehighway.org. You can watch the trailer to a fantastic documentary made about the pilgrimage and life as a modern pilgrim.