Weird Stuff That Happened to Me During a Five-Day Study Marathon

I have spent the last five days days living, breathing, and fantasizing about teaching. I've literally been surrounded by piles of books and papers representing the various projects I'm working on. I've read, I've thought, I've written. What a sense of fatigue I feel right now as I realize all the hard work I've done isn't enough--I still have so much to do and so little time. Oh, well. Now that I have reentered the land of the living, and look back at the last 5 days, I see some truly weird and wonderful stuff that happened while I was away:

1. I went from knowing nothing about rocks to now feeling confident about my knowledge of sedimentary, igneous, and metamorphic rocks. I fell in love with the rock cycle and even designed a game for science students. In it, each pair of students starts out as a certain type of rock and then things happen and they get transformed into other types of rocks. Once they take their journey through the rock cycle, they immortalize the trip through writing their memoirs.
2. I rekindled my love of how transformative literature can be and how it can be used to teach, to give hope, and to heal. I've begun to wonder if I should ditch my plans to become a middle school math teacher and instead pursue humanities.
3. I learned that gardening is really not about plants. When I hit the wall on Saturday afternoon, I went out for 3 hours of gardening. I don't know what happened, but it all seemed like a religious experience. Maybe it was the music I was listening to (Beethoven piano concertos), maybe it was the fact that I was chopping things down, maybe it was the fact that dusk began to fall. I don't know exactly what it was, but I suddenly became so aware of how much I ached to help kids, to empower them to see themselves as capable and able to impact the world in a positive way. Please, oh please, let me get a job when this is over!