Practicum is over and all of a sudden, it seems everything is just falling into place. It has been a good three years almost since I graduated and the wait to enter the working world is finally over! Maybe it sounds insane, this euphoric drive to begin a career, but I mean, those three damn years have felt like an eternity spent in limbo, in a time capsule of barren infertility. I've been doing my National Service. I'm a trainee teacher at NIE. Finally, I'm actually gonna NOT be in transit anymore. I'm clearing customs, gonna step out and step up, and I feel pumped. I am well pleased with the school I've been posted to; I've got relatively more freedom to develop my own curriculum than a lot of my peers going to other schools, and while I don't mean to snivel at the standard of work in the school I'm headed to, there is a lot of work to be done in the fullness of time, and I'm well up to the job. In the meantime, I'm having a break now... well, technically, I'm skipping a compulsory course on how to teach Civics and Moral Education conducted by a tutor so vacuous I cannot even be bothered to attend and therefore destroy her... and my head, my head is just so clear. All the tension, the stain that's been bludgeoning my mind into arrant exhaustion is dispersed, and all that is left is this clarity of mind, distilled into five things- art, music, literature, my professional potentiality, and my beloved nephew. Nothing else matters, couldn't matter anymore if I wanted it to. I've two books to read- Alan Hollinghurst's The Swimming Pool Library, which is, thus far, exceptional, and Michael Cunningham's A Home At the End of the World. I am also trying to piece together a programme on visual culture, its definitions, concepts and contexts for teaching next term, I've got Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach keeping me company in the evenings, and yesterday, two splendid buys at HMV. And most decisively, the nadir of this newfound clarity... I don't feel like I am thinking when I am painting. I have Milton's Paradise Lost Book 1, and a large wooden cog my dad picked up from a dump and I've primed it and there it is, for my empty, empty mind, I've pined for long for it, to take its long-awaited leap of faith.
