3rd

Coming here on a daily basis makes me want to gouge my eyes out with escargot forks.

“Just be happy you HAVE a job.”

I hear that shit one more time I’m gouging their eyes out with mine.

Look.   I appreciate having a steady income and medical insurance.  I do.  I fully freakin’ realize that portions of the world most people have neither.   HOWEVER….

I’m literally a salve for this place for the foreseeable future.   I can’t leave.   Trust me mightily when I say I want to, and am trying to…I just CAN’T. 

Once you have a family If you’re any kind of respectable person you have to provide for them.  Walking home and saying, “well my job pissed me off for the last damn time.  I quit today.”

If I were single, that’s EXACTLY what I would do.  If I were single I’d make more, because I wouldn’t be paying a grand each month so we can have medicine.   That would mean I wouldn’t need to work more on weekends so I could have more free time to relax and enjoy.  I can’t, nor do I want to get rid of my family…so that means I get to endure.   I have to provide for them no matter how much I get dumped on here.

I’ve said this a lot, NOBODY goes into a career they want to hate.   I never went into education thinking, “Man with any luck this will suck so bad I’ll hate my job and my life in 15 years.”   I went into a career I WANTED to enjoy and that would provide me a decent retirement.  I planned on teaching high school for 30-35 years. 

When the alarm goes off each morning my first thought is….”OH *$%$… This is happening.”

I listen to the radio hoping some kind of natural disaster has befallen my building.  We’re in forest fire country….DAMN IT LIGHTNING DO YOUR JOB!  I usually just get the occasional news blurb that one of our ex-students is now in jail for doing something retarded, which we already knew was going to happen.

I kind of envy those dumb bastards.  Jail is kind of like reject retirement.  They don’t’ have to work, they get fed, a place to sleep, some exercise…and maybe some  not so sweet lovin.’ Granted it’s not ideal sleep, food, or lovin’….but they don’t have to go to work.    They kind of won.

I spend the rest of the drive forcing my hands to make the correct turns to get to work.   I have to FIGHT my urge to keep driving by the exit.   When I’m at work I get to deal with a 20% group of kids who ARE decent, but I can’t really deal with them because I don’t have any budget for adequate materials, and I have the other 80% of the kids waiting on their early retirement plan to kick in by making my life worse.

It takes me at least 3 hours to unwind after work and be relaxed…but those hours can’t start until at least 10pm and all the family obligations take place.   When I can finally start to decompress it’s late, and I don’t want to go to sleep…because that mean the next thing I hear is the alarm jolting me back here again.