Endings and transitions

With the road trip over, Lover's Lanes is going to update a lot less frequently. I did collect one love story that I hope to get typed up soon, but Blackbird has taken her last cross-country flight for a while. It's back to LiveJournal for a while with me! But first, this trip deserves an epilogue.

The night before I set out, I wrote this: "I don't know what's going to happen -- whether this will be one of the best or worst times of my life, or what kind of meaning it will turn out to have, or if it might turn out to have no meaning. I don't know. But that's the point."

Now that I do know what happened -- well, more or less -- I have the benefit of hindsight. These weeks fell squarely into the "best times" category. Viewed episodically, most of my time on the road ranged from average to fantastic. I had my share of hours, evenings, and even days of relative depression, but with so little of the mundane world to get in the way, I found it easier to transmute sadness into lessons and even pride. ("So I'm feeling threatened by Winnemucca, Nevada? Wow, that means I must be in Winnemucca, Nevada. What the hell kind of craziness made this possible? Wait, I got here by myself? Maybe I do have what it takes to step into a casino, then...")

Meaning is a trickier question. I can say Lover's Lanes was meaningless, or that it taught me about the importance of self-reliance or friendship or motion, or that it made me more of an American or an adult or a man. But the proof of any of those "meanings" is in the pudding. If I now return to my old routines with my old attitudes, Lover's Lanes was just an unusual vacation. And maybe that would be fine with someone else. But it's not fine with me.

The day before yesterday I applied to the University of South Florida's library science degree program. If they accept me, then next year I'll begin working towards an MLS. I've talked to a number of librarians and haven't heard one yet say "this is an awful job," or "I made some bad choices," or even "meh, it's a living." Is this the right job for me? Could it even be a career? I don't have the first idea, but I do know that by the end of the year I will have been in the business of tutoring for about as long as I was in college, and that alarms me. Tutoring was an experiment, an important and lucrative one, but it's an experiment that got out of hand. It's time to recork that particular test tube and try the next one. It's a big lab, after all, and time flies!