You Should Be Happy

On paper I am living the dream. Like, literally. I dreamed of performing at the _______ theatre since I was twelve years old. And yesterday, I did.

You should be happy. This is what it is all about. But I couldn't have known when I was coming back from that summer mainstage on a school bus fulla kids who got most of the jokes but not all of the jokes that when it happened, when it really happened, it would be at the end of the longest week ever. The week I was sick to the bone. All my parts heaving and mucus, a clogged ear and too much lost lunch. I don't get paid enough to lose that much lunch, I thought while I was yakking in the bathroom on the floor above my classroom. I didn't want one of my students to see me wipe the slop off my face. It has been a shut-down week. Too tired to even respond to text messages week, certainly too tired to write, half-functioning just enough to sludge to the bus stop and cradle the stacks of copy-machine minted syllabi up the escalator.

You should be happy to have this job even though you need another if you want to do anything besides pay your rent this semester. You have to buy your own dry erase markers. Adjuncts are only administered two per semester, and yours haven't arrived yet anyway. Meanwhile there are all these new papers with all these moldy sentences and all these fresh faces who deserve a good education.

The show was okay. Just okay. We've all done so much better. But it was late and actually stunningly non-magic considering dreams and such were coming true. I walk out the doors of the best comedy theatre in the world, get in the car, snatch a chunk of toilet paper, blow my nose. This is the way it ends.

This is what dreams are for? To arrive at. To see the next mile post down the highway. "Maybe once I am there," you think.