Mapping

The academic year is over. I have no major complaints. I’m still employed and most of my colleagues are still speaking to me. My night table is stacked with delectable goodies to read, and my TIVO is almost filled to capacity with the past year’s Masterpiece Theatres just waiting for me to submit my final grades.

I have no major complaints except one. I have become a miserably angry person.

I’m two-thirds of my way to tenure, and I think my latest incarnation as miserably angry person, or MAP, is probably fairly common at this stage in my career. The honeymoon is over; I’ve seen the future of my current job, and I keep mumbling to myself a phrase uttered by Mr. Wilcox in Howard’s End: “Oh, the uselessness of it.”

(Such a phrase applies to several situations, though certainly not to my students, who have kept me from going into a bathroom and opening a vein.)

It’s useless to think that I can change the course of the university’s trajectory, it’s useless to think that I can change my colleagues, and, ultimately, it’s useless for me to be miserably angry about it anymore.

This year, my MAP-ping has taken on several forms and more often than not, I leave the campus feeling like Charlie Brown with his forehead against a wall.

But lately, I’ve been seeing things. Or, as I like to think of it, I’ve been shown things. Several nights in a row, I watched five large raptors circle the tops of the trees on the university’s campus, which is just across the street from my apartment. From my balcony, I watched these huge birds swoop and glide above my head.
Jacek came over and declared them to be golden eagles because of the coloring of their wings. I loved watching them soar into the wind, riding thermals (as birders call it). The English professor in me couldn’t help but to see something symbolic in these beautiful animals flying high above my balcony, night after night. Their presence was telling me to fly to new heights and to take pleasure in the ride.

The symbolic birds reminded me of the summer after my first year here. After heavy rains, enormous rainbows perfectly framed the university two evenings in a row. As with the birds, I saw the symbolism and took the rainbows as a sign that I was in the right place.

Then I found out that the birds weren’t golden eagles. They were turkey vultures.

Try as I might, I can’t think of anything positively symbolic about the university and my balcony being swarmed by vultures.

And so, dear reader, I have decided to put my Mini to the wind and get the hell out of Dodge. I’m spending the summer far, far away from the university and the turkey vultures. I’m going home to Virginia.

When I asked my parents about a two-month long visit, they were surprisingly welcoming, given that I’m almost 40 and basically asking for free room and board. And though I’ve made this trip from the Midwest to Virginia more than a few times, Dad sent me his TomTom, a GPS system, for my car.

I’m not one to get caught up in gadgets (I don’t even have a cell phone), but I must admit that the TomTom is pretty cool. And creepy. As I sat in my car, powering up the TomTom, I thought I would have to reprogram it from my Dad’s location in Virginia to mine in Montana, but nope, within about three minutes, six satellites (according to TomTom) found me and pinpointed my exact street location. AND the little car on the screen was a blue MINI Cooper, just like mine. Freaky.

When some friends decided to take a spontaneous jaunt to Butte (about an hour north from Dillon), I packed TomTom with me to get to know him better. After I programmed him to take us to Butte, we hit the highway.

And then TomTom began to moo. I’m really not kidding. TomTom periodically mooed all the way to Butte.

At first, we thought maybe he knew that we were in cattle country and was alerting us to the possible presence of livestock on the road. We also thought since TomTom knew there were few other roads, exits, or communities around that he was mooing to keep us awake.

After returning from Butte, I googled “TomTom moo” and learned exactly why TomTom was mooing. Apparently, TomTom has safety preferences. It only took one phone call to discover the guilty party.
“Dad, did you or did you not program TomTom to moo when I go over the posted speed limit?”

There was only uproarious laughter on the other end of the line.

It turns out that Dad also downloaded the image of the MINI Cooper for my enjoyment, and I was a little relieved to know that the satellites tracking my every move didn’t exactly know what car I was driving.

Since then, I’ve been endlessly fiddling with TomTom trying out different routes home, discovering different POIs (points of interest) on the way, and learning that TomTom is default programmed to take me to any Shoney’s in the country.

As a visual learner, I’ve always loved looking at maps and tracing routes from one place to another. However, I’m easily weighed down by the big picture, the whole trip, all the states to cross.

What I like about TomTom is that he breaks the journey into parts so that I’m not overwhelmed by the whole. He’s helping me trade one MAP for another, one that helps me see the joy in the journey.