All the ladies that loved Toronto...

Monday came just in the nick of time! No, I haven't become a workaholic or anything. But I was in a lousy mood and needed a hug, and, well, spending every weekday morning in a room full of five-year-olds has its advantages. I knew I liked this job for a reason.

Why, you ask, was I in a lousy mood? Last night a few of us teachers got together for dinner, and one of my colleagues loaned me a Rolling Stone magazine featuring their annual list of the richest stars in rock, which we had talked about a few days before.

The magazine also featured an article on the tenth anniversary of Kurt Cobain's suicide. Now I've always been lukewarm about Nirvana, then and now, but you couldn't go to college in the early '90s and not have some memories of the band or its tragic ending. So, of course, I read the article, complete with a text of his last interview and a blurb about their very first show, back in 1987. But the bulk of the article was about the sad anniversary. A classic "everyone remembers where they were" moment if there ever was one, the magazine said.

Sure enough, I do remember where I was. I was hanging around the lounge of our college's Spanish House, waiting for a friend who lived there to get dressed so we could go to a stand-up comic show that was appearing on campus that night. Another friend happened to start talking about Cobain and his condition, and at first I thought he was referring to the coma he'd been in in Italy a few weeks before that, but at some point I heard the word "shotgun." Oops. Even though I wasn't a big fan, I knew it would be a memorable moment all the same.

As it happened, that was a memorable time for me already - at least in retrospect. It was just past spring break, junior year, and I was lovesick for a buddy's soon to be ex-girlfriend (they broke up about a week later) and also coping with a roommate-from-hell situation. But I had also just landed a coveted internship on Capitol Hill, and was nearly done with the first really good research paper I ever wrote. I think it was around that time that I started thinking maybe there was a place for me in grad school after all. From that summer onward, my plan was to move to DC as soon as possible, get a few years' work experience to beef up what I considered a so-so academic record, and then give grad school a try. All of which is exactly what happened, except that it took me about a year and a half longer to get to DC than I had hoped (and that year and a half seemed about five times that long to me).

All this came to mind last night as I lay on my couch reading about ol' Kurt. Memories of college in general tend to make me melancholy. Not because I didn't like college - I did, after a bumpy start - but because I think I entered into the experience with ridiculous expectations. Anyone who went to a small, private college knows the drill: it's supposed to be four years of pure intellectual bliss, the first chance ever to be yourself and share your time and space with others who are like you and respect your differences, the polar opposite of high school. Sometimes it was like that, of course, but there were also times when it was basically high school with beer. Nothing is hearts and flowers all the time. The fact that we were all led to expect so much made it rather bittersweet for me that it wasn't quite what I'd thought it would be. Sometimes, therefore, it's easy to forget how many good times I really did have there.

But there's another reason why I have mixed memories of the college years: they were followed immediately by the most depressing year or so of my life, in which I stumbled through a long string of false starts and was on the outs with my family most of the time. Like it or not, that memory is unavoidably associated with the ones that preceded it immediately. My only real regret about college is that I was so set on a career in politics and government that I didn't really prepare at all for any alternatives, which didn't leave me many options when I graduated or for a while afterwards.

One of several options I did consider briefly was - get this! - teaching English overseas. I had nearly forgotten that until I decided to try it again last fall, which is perhaps a reflection that I wasn't all that serious about it back then. It would be a few more years after that until I rediscovered my childhood love of international affairs, which has been my bread and butter since then. So it was that I applied to exactly one ESL program in Prague, was rejected (even in 1995, that market was saturated - I hear it's a real nightmare these days), and then turned my attention back towards domestic politics. I chose a path that probably got me a lot farther in the long run, but was often kind of unfulfilling and frustrating in the short run. Thanks to my living arrangements when I finally got to DC, I had the chance to live with and befriend people from all over the world, but I never really did any exploring of my own in those days. Money was pretty limited in the jobs I was working at the time, although they did pay off pretty well when it came to applying to grad school. I had some great times in those years, no question, but I also came away from them feeling like I hadn't really accomplished all that much.

Since I've enjoyed my experience in Taiwan immensely thus far, I can't help thinking now and then of what it might have been like if I had pursued this line of work more aggressively back then. I wonder if I could have avoided the year and change in the wilderness just after college or the scraping by in entry level jobs in DC once I got there, or if I would have gotten around to going back to school sooner than I did. There's no way to tell, of course, and I do have a habit of imagining everything would be infinitely better if just one thing had been different somewhere along the line, which of course is usually a lot of nonsense. No doubt I would have had some good times and some bad times if I'd gone expat years ago, just like I did back in the USA. But it got me down all the same.

Which is why I was happy to see Monday for once. While making my way into the classroom, I can count on being mobbed by adoring children who are always happy to see me even if I made them stand in the corner for throwing blocks last week. It's hard to be depressed when you have three or four kids fighting over who gets to hug you first!

So I guess the lesson is, don't cry over spilled milk. It's never really too late to start over.

By the way, if you were wondering about the title line, it's from an obscure Bob Franke song whose protagonist sounds like he's in a similar mood to how I was feeling last night. The line in question has nothing in particular to do with anything I've written about here, but it often comes to mind when I'm having bittersweet memories, probably because of a fantastic road trip I took to Toronto with some friends once just before I went back to school.