For a few days, I am back in my old stomping grounds of Normal for a guest speaking event at the CTLT, my former place of graduate assistant employment. I am a visiting guest at the Future Professors workshop, an event I used to help facilitate. My job today is to share thoughts on what it means to have completed the transition from graduate student to first-year faculty. I'm still trying to figure out what exactly I will say, but it's only for 45 minutes, so I don't think it will be too bad. I'm hoping that the participants will ask some good questions that will lead into a fruitful discussion.
Yesterday when I arrived in town, I treated myself to a burrito at El Porton, one of my favorite places when I used to live here. Sadly though, I discovered that it didn't taste as good as I remembered it, and I couldn't figure out why. It looked the same as it always did though the rice and beans did look a little different. I just couldn't figure out why it tasted somewhat different, less good, than I remembered. As I drove away feeling a little saddened by my lunch experience, I started thinking about life's changes and how much has happened in the past year. After all, it was just one year ago that I was living here (or had just left here) and was wrapping up the past 5 years of my life as a graduate student. In that year, I graduated, moved back to Iowa, started a job, experienced a tornado, got engaged, left a job, started a new better job, got married, and sent a husband off to war...again. Now here I am coming back after all these things happened and for some reason, here I am actually saddened by the fact that a burrito I used to love tasted different. Really significant, right?
In the end, I think it was really just my way of saying good-bye to who I was when I was a graduate student here. Perhaps I have different tastes now or maybe it's just a matter of remembering things in a different way from a different time. I don't know. I guess I'm not being super reflective here about life's changes, but in the end, I think it was just symbolic of moving on. My life as a burrito --now how's that for a metaphor?
