Starting this fall for the next two years, I will be a high school social studies teacher in New York City. I signed with Teach for America a couple weeks ago and am confident once my two-year commitment is over that it will be one of the best decisions I've ever made. When I found out I was offered the position, I knew I wanted to accept, but I took my sweet time accepting the offer.

But as I was contemplating my decision, a friend’s away message sent chills up my spine. It said, “It's in your moments of decision-making that your destiny is shaped.” Such a statement is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, being free to make my own decisions is thoroughly empowering, something I thank God for a thousand times over. On the other hand, it can also be thoroughly terrifying. Finding the gray area is difficult, but I think I recently may have found an approach that makes decision making easier.

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I follow politics quite religiously. Despite this, reports that New York Governor Eliot Spitzer’s having paid thousands of dollars for illicit sex surprises me. There has been no shortage of sex scandals in politics, no shortage of wives standing beside their husbands as they confess to disgusting crimes of infidelity. But Spitzer was supposed to be one of the good ones; in fact, TIME magazine named him 2002’s Crusader of the Year.

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The race for the Democratic presidential nomination has seemingly gripped the nation. We have heard over and over again how important certain primaries were, and yet, despite many proclaimed do-or-die scenarios, each campaign rages on.

Last night, both Senators Clinton and Obama looked tired in their speeches capping Super Tuesday Deux (Senator McCain always looks tired). While this race is rightfully captivating, I find myself also needing a breather from the rhetoric every few weeks to regain perspective.

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For all but the first ten months of my life, I have lived in the same house. For the greater part of growing up, I had my own room while my two older sisters shared a slightly bigger bedroom adjacent to my room. They always yelled at me for having my own room, even though it could hardly have been my decision when we moved into the house.

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In case you haven’t heard, Senator Barack Obama is not Muslim.

As if this wasn’t already clear to me before trekking down to South Carolina to do what 13,000 other Obama supporters were doing, the Senator has gone out of his way to make sure this point was hammered home.

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