in my end is my beginning....

Woody Allen is credited with the quote, " If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans!" So, here you go, Lord...my plans.
As my beloved T.S. Eliot stated, "To make an end is to make a beginning..." My end was the job I just left, a job I toiled at for 4 years. It ended, not because I wanted it to, but because there was no other way to begin. It had to end.  I had planned to start the day after my last day of work, but was too exhausted from the whole sorted ordeal to even attempt a smirk out of the Almighty. Losing a job is like having your leg removed. There is a phantom job left in your head, one that you still wake thinking, "Did I finish that report?" or "Should I have left instructions on how to maintain the adjunct list?"  You check your emails thinking that someone is going to ask you where something is, or could you do this on Monday. You are still connected to it, still feeling responsibility for it and still anguishing over things that you never quit mastered, and things you did very well. My phantom job was still clinging about me like the dust left from shaking of an old blanket.
But it was not meant to be and I was dismissed after a stressful six months of feeling like the operation was a success, but the patient died. I struggled through each day with that heavy stone sitting in the pit of my stomach, waiting for the end that was inevitable, crossing off the days in my trusted date book until the final week. I woke each morning thinking about the last time I would shut down my computer, the last time I would shut my office door and the final exit out of the Art center, where I could no longer enter as my magnetic key card was deactivated and my ID card turned in to HR (heavens, what did they think I was going to do with it? Pose as a fake Administrative Assistant and get a deal at Office Max?) I was erased, eradicated, not a trace left that I had ever been there.
So, in those last days, I pondered what the heck I would do with myself with the eternity of time I had stretching before me. I spun tales to those around of plans to finish my masters thesis, of attempting to go into teaching, but in reality, I was looking at just trying to make it without falling into a downward spiral of panic. When you take away a routine, and one is not replaced immediately, there can be a sense of drowning, or the sensation of stepping off a very high cliff, hoping madly that there is an unseen bridge to catch you. It all depends on YOU now.
So, I decided to tell God my plans. To give him a good belly laugh, and in the process, to chronicle my adventures. Here is a list of those things that will be tried in the next few months:
I will make cheese
I will make bread...these two arising from finishing Barbara Kingsolver's book "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, A Year of Food Life"...as I live in an apartment with no place to own a goat, grow my own veg or reap the bounties of my harvest, I will try to make goat cheese and bread, a small step into the wider world of self-sufficiency.
I will paint...paintings, not walls. I will pick up where I left off so many years ago and begin to paint again.
I will write (oh how many of us in our autumnal years have decided to be writers...you can spit and hit one of us). I have so may ideas and some of them are quite good, if I do say so. I have been writing my whole life, so this is just making it a habit instead of something I squeeze in when possible.
I will go to Paris...soon, and this is a fact. The very second thing I did, after leaving my job, was to ask my french friend if I could stay with her in Paris, and she said yes. So off I will go to write in Paris for a couple of weeks. Ha...eat that old job!!
And of course I will finish my masters thesis, and go for that teaching certificate. Then...who knows?
Is this it? I don't think so.  Wait and see.