Some of you may think that I dropped out of this place. Well, while this is not totally true, I don’t come around here often anymore. Prose just isn’t my thing anymore. It’s too long. It’s too hard to read anymore for me. I think you all need to know what I’m up to again, sure, but it’s hard to explain why I haven’t written here on SD. I'll be back, though, I promise, after this entry is done. This Winter Break, I had a revelation. Those of you who know me or read my diary know that I love teaching, and that it is my only true occupational passion in life. I love teaching people, I love seeing people learn. I love the screams and the smiles on their faces when they revel in a moment of, well…revelation. These moments are sacred and they make me feel alive. But not everyone gets to experience these moments. Some people live eternally in that darkness, the darkness of no knowledge, no learning. Yet, everyone is entitled to feel that way, to learn. It is not what I want to be my job, but I feel that teaching is our duty. We all have a duty to teach one another, and my duty started one week ago. I applied for Teach For America. The website is http://www.teachforamerica.org. I could go one of many places, but wherever I go, it will no doubt be like teaching in another world. If I am accepted. If I am accepted, I will be one out of nine, or one of two thousand, selected from eighteen-thousand. If you are curious as to what I’ve been up to over the past few months, take a mosey on over to http://sirmink.deviantart.com. I have gotten back into my poetry hand and it feels really good. It’s a form that has been lost for me since high school, a form that feels more complete than the prose I write now. And although I don’t write poetry often, when I do, it’s orgasmic. It’s fulfilling, it’s complete, it’s a cold Coca-Cola on a warm February night in the face of an approaching storm. It’s lovely, and thank you, Tammy, for the journal, it now houses the rough stuff of what you see at deviantart. I posted a 3.67 GPA last semester, while working nearly full-time at RadioShack. This comes in the face of three courses: Feminist Theory, which is a bear of a course in philosophy and feminist discourse, a course that the professor thought I was unprepared for. British Women’s Literature, a course that refreshed my love for literature and poetry, my love for form over function. Women, Health, and the Environment, home of deadly silences over even deadlier material, home to the knowledge of the world that no one wants to hear. 3.67. That’s all that’s important. So, that’s what I’ve been up to. I graduate and get married in May. Life can’t get much better. As far as SD, well, I’ll be around, but I’ll also be living. I don’t write much, but when I do, it’s orgasmic. I’ve said that before, I know, but I realize that a couple of you really wanted to know just where I’ve been. Just what I do. I’ve been living, and it’s been so fast, I hardly have the keystrokes to catch up. Well, just remember that I am around, and living and breathing and dying until my very last death, and living in the process. It’s poetry under a strobe light, counting change on my desk and waiting paycheck to paycheck like so many others do. It’s killer, the feeling that so much waits for me. It’s all unexposed film, it’s all free and clear of dust and grime. Just bear in mind that while I’m wading through, I haven’t left you all behind, or forgotten about you. I just do so much and get so distracted, it’s almost as though I exist in too many spheres, and there just isn’t enough time in a day, or energy in the food I eat or the water I drink. I have not forgotten you. Any of you. From the neighbors I left in third grade, to my baseball friends in San Diego. To Washington, and to memories of my relatives, and the friends who never were my friends. To Texas, to memories of band, and Chris and Sarah and 1706 Village East Drive. To Bath, Maine, and to band and theatre. To Erin and the ‘D’ in the glow in the dark tape, to Kelly and my worst mistakes that were never your fault. To Tammy, to Ashley, to Shannon, who has won my heart (and my humor and my soul and my sanity). To Maine Maritime, to the sea and to the ship and to lines and to formations, to chastity and how much I longed to hold onto it, for whatever reasons I might have had. To Orono, to the release of a man who never really learned that living involved faith in absence. I have never forgotten any of you. You have been with me, if not in body, then in spirit, for as long as I’ve known you. I may be silent, I may be absentminded, and I may be infected with an incurable wanderlust, but I do not forget. Have a nice night. There is someone waiting for me, and she waits for no one.