What you've missed.

To bring us up to speed, a brief recap:

This past spring, while some of my college friends bemoaned their lack of job options, or work ethic, or both, and some others kicked back, assured of thier spots at top I. Banks or Important Consulting Firms, I was working up a practice lesson and interviewing with principals and programs. The first job I landed was a yearlong, all expenses paid position teaching third graders at a private academy in the Dominican Republic.

Let's pause here an imagine me shepherding well-behaved eight year olds across a white sand beach, enjoying my comp-ed apartment, working on my Spanish and my tan, and question my sanity for what I doubt will be the last time. Go ahead. Question it. But teaching wealthy kids English didn't exactly serve my recent-college-grad idealism, so I said, "Gracias, pero no," to the Dominican school.

I also turned down an offer from Teach for America that would have sent me to a high school in Newark, New Jersey. I nixed this job mostly because I'd already been accepted to the New York City Teaching Fellows program.

I was taking a gamble - hoping that the NYC Fellows would place me in Brooklyn rather than the Bronx, either of which, frankly, seemed preferable to Newark. My bet paid off when I was assigned to Region 5, a large swatch of purple on the educational district map encompassing East Brooklyn and some of Queens - mostly places I'd seen on the subway map but never visited.

People kept telling me that Teach for America was a more prestigious program, or that it offered more support, or that the Dominican was certainly beautiful this time of year, but the restless Southerner in me had her heart set on a first real New York City apartment.

"I can't really explain it," I told a friend, "but I get the feeling that if I'm not living in New York, I'm not really starting my life."

Joan Didion explained this feeling best in her essay Goodbye to All That:

"Was anyone ever so young? I am here to tell you that someone was."