Kathryn Ionata’s previous work for The Toast can be found here.

During my first semester as an adjunct instructor of English at two universities, I had come to dread Wednesdays. In the morning, I taught composition to a class of sleepy-eyed freshmen whose staunch refusal to participate in class discussions rivaled their unwillingness to crack a smile. After an interminable fifty minutes, I retreated to the “bullpen,” as a colleague referred to the small, windowless space packed with adjuncts gearing up for their next class. The room had probably been a supply closet at one point, and students routinely wandered in and asked for staplers, black ink, or help with the printer in the computer lab next door. One particularly audacious student even tried to use one of our computers.

After eating lunch and attempting to ward off a panic attack, I would teach my second comp class of the day, this time in a science lab whose blackboard contained no erasers. I came to rely on a left-behind plastic water bottle, stained green around the mouthpiece, to pour onto a paper towel to erase the board. This class found my lessons as entertaining as did the first.

Then it was time to leave campus and drive to a train station where there were often no free parking spaces. The train took me to my alma mater, where I taught a 2.5-hour-long fiction writing class. It was my favorite class to teach, and talking about James Baldwin and Sandra Cisneros with a group of engaged students would have normally delighted me, except that the timing of this class meant that I wouldn’t arrive home until 9:30 at night. This gave me an hour or less to see my husband of one month, whose job, which allowed us to maintain a comfortable standard of living, required him to wake up at 5:30 a.m.

None of this is unusual for an adjunct, of course: raise us four classes at two universities and we’ll counter with six classes at three universities. It’s not a new story or unique story, but the stress that came with the territory took me by surprise. My coping mechanism was another surprise: I started recording and watching Days of Our Lives every night.

Since childhood I’ve always been good at recognizing patterns. During a spelling test in second grade, I realized that my teacher was calling out the words in the same order they were listed in our English textbook, and was able to fill out the remaining blanks in advance, from memory. Walking between the rows of desks as she announced the words, my teacher noticed my completed test, accused me of cheating, and sent me to the principal. My argument (if it can be called that) was that I was just being smart. The principal countered that I was just being a smartass, and I was punished.

I’ve always wished that my second-grade self had not only recognized the pattern, but also understood what it meant — what it said about my teacher, her schedule, her expectations of students. Today my ability to understand patterns has caught up a bit with my ability to recognize them. Writing allows me to pin down patterns and see them more clearly. This clarity reveals not just the patterns themselves, but also my thoughts about them, which, until written, are often just as fuzzy as my initial glimpse of a pattern. Through writing I have discovered both the world and myself, and learned more about how both work. Some of these discoveries are pretty horrifying, since I often choose to write about race. Yet despite the horrors, writing — and all the reading and observing and listening and questioning and frowning it inevitably entails — keeps me alive.

I’d like for this sustenance to be more material than figurative, but that’s not an option. On March 4, 2015, I will begin repaying my student loans. I owe my loan providers $134,374.80. When I am feeling bored and meticulous, I view the patchwork of loans that comprises this behemoth total. There are no accounting errors, no misplaced commas; the number is eerily precise, as if I have been audited by a vindictive Ebenezer Scrooge.

In Colorado the lowest point is three thousand, three hundred and seventeen feet above sea level, where the Arikaree River finds Kansas, and the average elevation is just shy of seven thousand. Spanning from the Great Plains to the Colorado Plateau to the Rocky Mountains, Colorado is a floating quadrangle in the mountain west.

The summer I was twenty, I spent six hours a day in an empty back office reading people’s mail. These people were long dead and their son had sold their papers to the Harvard Theatre Collection, but it still felt partly illicit, and partly like I was solving a mystery–sifting through hundred-year-old clues to find out what had happened. Because something always happened–someone’s always being catty or evasive or finessing the truth (if not outright lying) or, as in this particular cache of letters, throwing themselves and their whole lives into the life and work of a man who almost certainly did not deserve it.

I can’t remember how many of the letters in this collection were sorted and recorded by me, but it’s over 2,000. I typed the date and description of each in HTML, then put the letter in an archival file folder. Knowing this was in store for my summer, I bought a discman, a cheap off-brand device that would play CDs of burned MP3s, so that I could put multiple albums onto one CD and be set for the day (which would have been cooler if I’d listened to more than Sondheim and Dave Matthews Band and Ani DiFranco and Eminem, but still felt pretty cool). That summer, I drank at a bar for the first time. I wore a bikini onstage for a play and felt okay about it. I watched Christian Bale’s entire oeuvre on VHS on a 13-inch TV and went to see Reign of Fire on its opening day. I met my future husband. It was fantastic.

And this was a fantastic job, and I loved it, even at its most tedious. I had a wonderful boss who quietly commiserated with me over the repetitive nature of the job and trusted me to work independently. The Theatre Collection was a rare book library, and it was located in an out-of-the-way basement, so we would have at most two or three visitors a day in the whisper-silent reading room–but I helped mostly in the even quieter back room and sub basement, helping to go through new material.

That new material? Often people’s private things. Banker’s boxes full of photos of silent film stars. A flat box stuffed with vaudeville posters. Playbills and typewritten scripts and, once, many copies of the sheet music for the Rolling Stones’ “Wild Horses,” which I kept finding in every folder of a certain donation, and which subsequently stayed in my head for the next, oh, dozen or so years.

I could see the appeal of becoming a librarian–imposing order into chaos–but I was always more interested in inventing stories to go with the donations and accessions, rather than finding out what really happened and filing it away. Only, this summer, the real story proved much juicier than anything I could’ve made up, and the sheer volume of letters I read made it impossible to imagine different versions of these people, despite how much I wanted to.

You can still see the evidence of my data entry online and you can go look up the letters themselves if you visit the library. The bulk of the letters dated from around 1907-1930 and they had been sent to a woman named Dorothy Nevile Lees, who had lived most of her life in Florence and who had dedicated herself to the work of a theatre director/philosopher Edward Gordon Craig. Craig had “modern” ideas about staging and lighting, lots of high-minded thoughts about how actors were marionettes and directors were the geniuses of the theater, and an overabundance energy and drive.

He also was a total asshole.