Since our classes ended, and the next session doesn’t start until next week, we have a full week without classes. I also spent several days in bed last week due to allergies knocking me off my feet. Sneezing, runny nose, sore throat, pounding headache, queasy stomach, tight chest, exhaustion…. I’m wondering now if maybe it wasn’t just allergies after all, since I now have a horrendous-sounding cough.

Anyway, all that is to say that I’ve had a lot of “down” time within the last week, and I spent much of it driving myself crazy by  obsessively looking online for job possibilities when I return home. Ahhh, yes. Job possibilities. That’s what I’m supposed to be doing right now: figuring out what I want to do when I return to real life. Up until this week it had been far enough in the future that I didn’t really feel as though I needed to think about it.

But too much free time leads to too much thinking. What am I enjoying here? What have I learned about myself? What kind of job do I want? Do I want to go to grad school? Do I need to go to grad school? If so, which one would I go to? Which one has a program I’m interested in? Which ones are close to Chicago? Would I have to take classes online? Should I apply for an internship instead? Can I afford to not work for another four months after I return home? What will I do about health insurance?

I drive myself crazy with all these questions, so my natural instinct is to research. Research, research, research. I pour over a zillion websites to fill my head with as much information, as many possibilities, as I possibly can. I think it makes me feel as though I’m accomplishing something, even if at the end of the day I’m still left with no clue.

I think I at least figured out how to talk about what I’m interested in. I believe it could be described as “environmental education.” So today I created an Excel spreadsheet for all the possibilities floating around in my head. Yes, that’s right, an Excel spreadsheet. To organize possibilities. For my future. I thought that if I could line it all up on the screen, the right move would just jump out at me.

Nope. But here’s what I came up with, for starters at least and in no particular order:

Working, playing, and discovering with kids. Educating in an informal setting through interdisciplinary curriculum. Encouraging kids to become lifelong stewards of the earth. Learning about local, organic, and sustainable food production and the ways that having access to nutritional food can improve the health and future of inner city kids.

All the positions above would provide valuable experience in either informal education or organic gardening, some in both. And then maybe next year I can apply to the graduate program I’m interested in, the one that I discovered just after the application was due. So it goes.