First day of School!

I'm in Back-To-School mode for the first time in years...at least where I'm the one going back to school! I even did some back-to-school shopping (it's about time that I replaced my nearly holy sneakers & boots - and I got some sporty new jeans! woohoo!).

My parents threatened to take a picture of a lunchbox outside their front door (we used to always take first day of school photos on the porch, lunchbox in hand)...so I took this photo. I don't have a lunchbox, and besides, they fed us for all five days of exhausting orientation!! Yum!

Orientation was utterly exhausting and a day or two too long, but now classes have started, and that's exciting, and daunting. The reality of school, of homework, of writing, hits me at different points --how will I do this? how will I do the reading? grapple with the torturous process that writing often is for me? bring my authentic, whole self to class day after day? Most of the time I'm confident that I will find a way and it'll be fine.

Then there's the politics. I was drawn to Starr King because of its commitment to "Educating to Counter Oppressions and Create Just & Sustainable Communities." It's a deep, genuine, and hard-won commitment -- but I'm trying to figure out how much it extends to the world beyond the school's walls, to organizing, activism, systemic change that's the other half of the justice struggle from the internal work on countering oppression that's infused in this mostly white school.

I have many more thoughts - and I'm sure they'll change...but it's late, and my wrists hurt from writing this--something that scares me given that I'll be writing many papers. So I must sign off for now.