Here Comes the Anger

Holy fucking shit. 

My anger is like taking a clone of myself and creating a whole different person made of angst and disappointment and frustration.  I am so fucking angry all the time.  When I’m not angry, I’m debilitated.  I’m useless, because the anger overcomes me at such velocity that I can’t even control my brain.  I’m angry at everything and everyone, simply because they exist. 

The question is … why?

Let me tell you.

I am so fucking sick of people pretending to care.  OR kind of caring and sucking at it.  Here’s the thing:  if you care, SAY IT OUT LOUD.  And then do something about it.  Don’t sit around like a fucking pussy and say nothing.  Don’t IGNORE me, because there is literally nothing worse for me, as an individual, than not acknowledging me.  Does that make me needy?  YES.  But if you like me, or (god forbid) love me, then don’t fuck around with my feelings.  Don’t leave me hanging.  Don’t get so caught up in your own shit that you can’t spend two fucking seconds recognizing the fact that I am a human being who needs love and acknowledgement.

YOU are not more important than ME.  I have spent the better part of 20 fucking years letting someone else be “more important” than me.  And I’ll tell you what, it sucks. 

I want to break up with humanity.  I fucking hate the way other people make me feel.  No one gets me.  No one understands what I need.  No one cares. “I am the dog who gets beat.  Shove my nose in shit.  Won’t you come and save me?”  (Alice in Chains)  No one is coming to save me.  I have to save myself, and I have no fucking idea how to do that.  I have a severe deficit in that capacity, but no one cares enough to help me through that obstacle.  They prefer to ignore it – easier, right?

No one is going to save me but me.  And I can’t save myself.  I am drowning in my own shit.  I inhale, and I get a nasal cavity full of anger.  I am angry at everyone, because no one sees me.  No one gives a flying fuck about anyone else, except when it makes them feel good to “help” other people.  I’m tired of that shit.  I don’t need anyone’s pity.  I need to be loved properly and with careless abandon.  How did I end up so alone and with no one who cares enough to fight for me? 

Maybe I’m not worth fighting for.   That’s always a possibility. 

Fuck the rest of that apathetic bullshit.   I deserve more and I deserve better.  I deserve to be loved truly, madly, and deeply, all the time.  I don’t deserve to be marginalized. 

I wish I believed any of the bullshit I just spewed into this void.  

Things I Love (A Counter to All the Angst in This Blog)

1.        A certain farmer, who, even though he makes me want to pull my hair out in frustration, because I can’t see him, shows me that love is possible.

2.       A certain Filipino, who is the kindest, sweetest person I know, and who is just as fucked up as I am (thank god).

3.       A certain girl from Oregon, who reminds me that having friends is important.

4.       A certain Eskimo, who truly understands who I am and accepts me for that every day, all the time.

5.       A certain Future Famous Person, who showed me a side of himself today that makes me absolutely certain that people will remember who he is, because his talent and wisdom is far beyond his years.

6.       A certain teenager, who makes me understand that I’m not done yet, and helping people become who they are is essential in life.

7.       A certain old man, who is just like me, and scares the living shit out of me, because he is who I will become (excepting the being-married-for-my-whole-life part).

8.       A certain guy who used to make me happy, but who now shows me that I deserve so much better than just someone who goes through the motions instead of living life out loud. 

9.       A bunch of teenagers, who both make me crazy and keep me sane, because they refuse to ignore the fact that high school is bullshit (most of the time).

1.   And probably some others, but I’m tired now, and I just want to go to bed.  

On Being Alone

I always thought I wanted to be alone, but as it turns out, I really just want to be alone with the person I love.  I want US to be alone TOGETHER.  I want to have someone to come home to and to wake up with and to go to bed with and to make meals with and to make love to and listen to music with and to wander around with and to sit and just be still with. 

I don’t want people to intrude on the intimate moments of my life.  Not the sexually intimate moments, but the moments when I just want to be surrounded by my backyard or engulfed in my music.  I don’t want neighbors who stare at me when I’m outside, and I certainly don’t want to be guilted into spending time with people who think they can impose their idea of “friendliness” or “family” on me simply because social norms indicate that people should portion out their time to others in a false sense of “togetherness”. 

Life is so short and yet so unbearably long.  The good times fly past, and the painfully boring and tense and work-based times stretch themselves out over eons of time and fill my brain with vast sinkholes of anxious WAITING.  Waiting for a good moment, waiting to spend time with someone, waiting to FEEL something solid and strong and beautiful. 

You see, I’m very bad at making the time which I spend alone in my head productive.  I want to play the guitar or work out or nap, but my brain won’t shut off and it won’t shut up.  My thoughts wander to “what if?” and “why not?” and when?”.  I have a hard time just BEING.  If there was a drug that gave me inner peace, I’d inject it every day, even if my life span was subsequently shortened by a dozen years.  Better to spend my days reveling than to spend them worrying about things I can’t really control.  But my brain actively works against me in this capacity. 

I want to build a fortress in my backyard, so I don’t have to see or hear anyone who lives around me.  I want to be actually, physically alone, without interference from people who have not been invited into my life.  I want to live in the middle of nowhere, so long as I have the one I love living in solitude with me.  No one else – except by invitation. 

If only he wanted the same thing.  But I guess we can’t control how other people feel or when they will act or how they will respond to us.  People are strange, and I am a stranger.  Even to myself.  

Ghosts, And Other Things I Am

Today is going to be different.  I will not drink too much.  I will not smoke too much.  I will not think too much.  I will not worry about things which are beyond my control.  I will spend quality time with myself, rather than berating myself for failing at not doing all the things I just listed.  I will work on being WHOLE.  I will HOLISTICALLY heal myself, rather than synthetically altering my mental state. 

I will exercise.  I will read a book for pleasure.  I will take a nap.  I will clean the house.  I will engage better with my children.  I will visit my parents.  I will play the guitar without telling myself I suck.  I will make a proper, healthy dinner.  I will start writing another novel.  I will not wander around aimlessly without accomplishing anything of relevance. 

So many statements … all incorrect to some degree.  Some days, some times, in some moments, I may almost or accidentally achieve one of these goals.  While it’s not very likely, it’s still possible.  One of these days, I will quit trying altogether. I’m almost there.  I’ve almost given up.  I have to remind myself that I’m not dead yet, even though I feel like a ghost, haunting myself.  I am still alive.

The day is darkening outside, and with the fading light ebbs my sense of purpose.  Night will come, and I will take a bath and drink some cocktails and go to bed, just to end another day of senseless and aimless wandering.  I will send this note into the vast internet void, knowing that anyone who reads it will not care, or they will care for only the series of moments needed to get to the end and judge my words according to their life view. 

I don’t care what other people do.  I don’t even really care what I do.  Apathy is a practiced skill.  I am getting better.  I have to practice every day, because my inner idealist screams at me to make life interesting and relevant again.  But I wonder if my life was ever interesting or relevant, or if people just delude themselves into thinking that they have an impact on anything.  My words might sound defeatist, but my thoughts are almost hopeful.  One day, I won’t have to fight with my own mind about who I am and what I’ve become and why things are the way they are. 

Mental distance is reassuring.  While breathing life in deeply is beautiful, sometimes a series of gasps is enough to keep a person alive.  This note is a gasp.  I will write another later.  I will intake air and water, and (if I’m lucky) a bit of love, which is the only thing that brings color to an otherwise ordinary life.  I would like to love again, properly.  It’s the unreciprocated and/or unattainable love which burns. 

So I won’t let love burn me again.  I’ll throw metaphorical water on my feelings until they sizzle back into ash.  At least the ash, unlike the angst, is organic and useful.   

Inservgice Days, and Why They Blow

I love being a teacher.  Let me repeat:  I love being a teacher.  (About 80% of the time.)  What I don’t love could fill a book, but today I want to explain the “quality” of an Inservice Day.  I find it ironic that my computer is underlining that word in red, because it’s not a real word.  I suppose the phrase should be “In-Service Day”, because teachers are expected to be “in service” of the school in which they work.  Ironically, I was of no service to anyone today, except maybe THE MAN. 

Let me break it down for you …

8:00 – Required breakfast.  (shitty coffee and fattening donuts).  We spent almost an hour in a “Team Building” exercise during which groups were made to build something creative out of pipe cleaners.  What in the bloody hell?!  As an added bonus, this breakfast was REQUIRED, and the administrators were walking around taking attendance to see which teachers weren’t there.  

8:45 – Staff Meeting.  This is essentially a listing of various clubs, sports, and activities and what they’re accomplishing.  This listing was followed by an extensive conversation about CLOWNS (because people are currently trying to scare other people by dressing up as clowns), and why it’s SUPER-IMPORTANT to preempt any clowning around by our students (both literally and figuratively).  Example:  a student Photo-shopped a picture of a “clown” standing next to a car in our school parking lot, and he was summarily arrested and suspended.  The administration considered putting the school on LOCKDOWN because of this incident, because it was “so scary” for both students and parents.  

Still the staff meeting … We were told how to “Weed the Garden”; in other words, how to eliminate those things which are preventing us from effectively doing our jobs as teachers (aka “In-Service Days”).  One of those “weeding” things is (obviously) NOT having a series of useless meetings which impede my time to do anything productive as a teacher. 

9:15 – Department Meetings.  This is the only meeting which would have (potentially) benefited me as a teacher, but those were cancelled, because so many other “important” things were on the schedule. 

9:45 – Marzano Share Fair.  I’d explain, but the details are irrelevant.  This was a mandatory exercise of walking from one 15-minute presentation to another, listening to my peers share things from Robert Marzano’s books.  Things like, “Hey, if a kid smells, he might have a hygiene problem.  You should talk to talk to him or refer him to the nurse.”  And “class time is better spent if the teacher has a plan in place”.  

            I’m pretty sure we all have college degrees, so … yeah.  Unnecessary.

10:45 – Kognito Training.  Essentially, this is “intervention training”.  “If a student threatens self-harm, you should do something.”  Really?  No shit?  I thought we should just ignore them.  (Jesus H.)  As an added bonus, the video took about 45 minutes, and at the end of it, I was unable to print the documentation, so I’ll probably have to do it all over again.

12:00 – Lunch.  Oh wait, I couldn’t go to lunch, because I had to actually to do some WORK to be prepared for school tomorrow.

1:00-3:30 – Central Office.  The whole meeting was about how to grade student writing, according to arbitrary rubrics, and was “taught” by a person who the district brought in and PAID to tell English teachers how to grade English papers. 

            She said, and I quote, “I’m here to throw some pebbles into your pond.”  What in the bloody hell does that mean?!  Make a ripple??  The only ripple I got from that meeting was digestive angst.  After the first hour, she sounded like Hunter S. Thompson on an extensive ether binge.  Thirty minutes after that, I was literally praying for a natural disaster, so I had a legitimate reason to leave.  

            These people are citing research from people who USED to be teachers, but they found that writing (and selling) books FOR teachers was more lucrative, so school districts buy 1000s of these books (and their bullshit theories), then force teachers to sit through ass-numbing hours of brainwashing and mental numbness just so the district is on the “cutting edge” of whatever the hell kind of Kool-Aid is currently in fashion.

            The primary function was to “decrease our paper-load” as English teachers.  Here’s a thought:  if I didn’t have to sit through three hours of a lady who sounds like the annoying adult voice in the Charlie Brown shows, I could have been managing my paper load by actually GRADING PAPERS.  (yes, a shocking and revolutionary idea…)

So, yeah.  Good times all around.  I’m definitely a better teacher after today …