Magic Jewball

Subtitled: Got to be some more change in my life.

I had the title of this post in my head for months, maybe a year, but never the content. Despite all my tennis posts, this will go down for me as the year I couldn’t really pay attention to what was happening once the sessions I actually attended were over. I spent the last week and a half at my new job and each day got progressively more layered with “realness.” First, new staff orientation. Then the return of all faculty. Then the middle school kids started. Then the upper school students joined them. Finally, the lower school kids came, but just their regular classes, not mine. Finally, today, I begin.

I’ve spent a lot of time setting up my computer lab and getting to know my new co-workers. If last year was a total delight in terms of the fun school I was placed at, this year is an extension of that and yet different. It is utterly, utterly surreal to find myself employed in a school. The lab is my classroom and it replaces all the offices I ever had at record labels. It is so different from anything I’ve ever done, from any situation I’ve ever found myself in, that I don’t even know how to approach it. It really feels like those dreams you have where you find yourself called to the board in front of the class to do a problem out of nowhere. It’s like I woke up and I was in front of a class of children and I’m not wholly sure how I came to be here. Sometimes, when people knock on the door of my lab and ask me a tech question, I want to say, “don’t you realize I’m just a music business executive?”

The people I work with are mostly wonderful (no one’s bad! Just some are good and some are great) and finding myself with new co-workers in a new job are things I do have experience with. Even when I went around on the first day of classes to introduce myself to the kids I’d be teaching (“Hi! I’m Ms. Jewball, your new technology teacher. I can’t wait to see you in the lab next week!”) it echoed moments I’d had last year at my old school. But today it will be just me and them.

~breathe~

By the way, today is also the anniversary date of my Bat Mitzvah, so, today I am a woman and all that.

Both the title and subtitle come from this song, which I mentioned yesterday. The post title line doesn’t even appear until the second half of the song and then dominates it. The sweep that comes up behind it, at about 1:40, has always reminded me of a bird taking flight.
[youtube width=”420″ height=”345″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kPON3WmdRw[/youtube]