The 10-Day New Year's Challenge - Day 9

 January 9. Forks in the Road, by Jedidiah Jenkins

Your prompt for today:
Identify two turning points in your life. Describe what led up to them, why you chose the path you did, and how it led to now.

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A Spork in the Road

A fork implies clear, sharp, separate tines, each one a distinct path forward.  A spork is a little more nebulous.  Choice seems illusory.  Will this lead anywhere, or will I slip right back into the bowl where I started?

That's how I feel about many of the diverging paths I've come across in life.  Choosing something just because it's different, not because it's a clear better option.  Choosing something else because, as sporks are wont to do, that tine snapped right off and will probably lacerate your mouth if you keep trying to make it work. 

One such choice presented itself 7 years ago.  We had moved from Utah to South Carolina for Andy's job.  I left behind cold air and dry skin (enthusiastically) and a burgeoning career as an academic librarian (regretfully).  Without many viable options, I ended up with a dead-end, low-paying job in a certifiable loony bin in a library department at a university that I coyly will not name but will suggest that this university has a very popular football team and their name rhymes with Blemson.  

The least weird thing that happened in the 10 months I worked there was learning that my cubicle neighbor, a woman in her 50s who had never lived anywhere outside of her mother's home, had filled her work hard drive to capacity with pictures and videos of Benedict Cumberbatch.  The most weird thing was also the reason I left:  Some pretty epic sexual harassment that involved a lot of hentai (Google it if you must) and capitulated with a butt pen.  Let your imagination fill in the blanks, but just know that at no point was the pen in my butt.

About 45 minutes into my first day of this job, I was already scheming about other career paths.  When I wasn't discretely streaming episodes of Sons of Anarchy on my phone while pretending to organize boxes of Strom Thurmond ephemera (which felt like punishment for something I did in a past life) I was scouring job postings.  

One day, I opened a box of love letters from "Pitchfork" Ben Tillman, written to his wife on mental hospital stationery.  It was time.  I was finally desperate enough to look into a program for an alternative route to K-12 teacher certification.  "Kids are awful," I thought to myself.  "But when they try to access porn on a school computer, at least you can actually yell at them."

I was relieved to get accepted to the program, and found a job as a school librarian right away.  My paycheck doubled overnight (which says less about how much teachers earn and more about the astonishingly low salary of the other job) and my will to live increased by about 37%.  My new coworkers - I could have hugged them all.  They were so normal, or at least they were weird in all the good ways and none of the icky ones.  The kids...were...it pains my younger self to admit...kinda cool?  Okay, fine, the kids were great.  It turns out I like 'em.  Not enough to invite them permanently into my home.  But I'll take them in small doses, and 7 years later, I still actually like my job.  

So I chose to leap.  I climbed out of one mutant-shark infested cesspool and jumped blindly, into what, I wasn't sure at first.  There could have been more sharks!  But at least they would have been different sharks.  I got lucky, though.  

The other choice was just now, choosing to excuse myself from probing any deeper to find another pivotal moment.  It's cold outside and I have a series of other important choices to make.  Ginger tea or lavender?  Which book will I read, and which cat is gonna colonize my lap for the rest of the afternoon?  Anything can happen.