You admonish yourself for having neglected them until you needed them and wonder why you have also for so long put up with a job in which you are forever making up for the incompetence of others…
With less than a week left in the year, and with less than a week left for me in my thirties, I am feeling an uncharacteristic sense of hope and optimism.
To my left runs a long row of houses. To my right is a chain-link fence, woven and fringed with weeds. Beyond it, a profusion of railroad tracks.
A walk and a comedy podcast on the quiet back streets between the school and the station.
When you realize that a dream, one that once compelled you into focused action, has all but totally withered away over many years of difficulty, you have a decision to make.
If it weren’t for the fact that I like the people I work with and I like the kids I teach, I’d have run for the hills a while ago.
Almost nobody gives them permission, let alone a push, to question authority or to push against the structures to which they find themselves subject but from which they rarely benefit.
Not a fish out of water, but a fish temporarily in the wrong body of water. I’m a trout in a tide pool.
Across the table from me is a blue plastic chair, 26cm tall at the seat and 49cm at the back. It weighs about 1kg. Weighing in at about 16kg is the small boy sitting in it. Let’s call him Ira.
Yesterday was my last day of work at the English-teaching Job I’ve had since May 2015. Or, it would have been, had they given me any classes. Instead, I got my farewell, a final middle finger, in the form of an empty schedule.
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