Clearing the dust

What's it been? Six weeks or so? I'm a bit too lazy to check the date of my last entry, so you can do that yourself if it tickles your fancy. What's a fancy, anyway? I really want to know. Answers would be appreciated.

Annnnnnnnyhoo, I just bullshitted my way through my last paper for the summer semester for my international politics class. Insert me puking right here. What a horrible, horrible way to spend the first six weeks of summer vacation, splitting time between two boring as fuck classes, being on-call, and watching a whole lot of rain fall down and make everything smell like earth worms. I'm glad that it's over because now I can do more important things, like attempt to get laid.

My summer goal was to have a lot of sex. So far, I've had none. Not even a teensy bit. Not even a hand up my thigh. Oh, wait, that did happen, but it was my pudgy, 55 year old gynecologist's hand that was smothered in about a pound of KY Jelly. Isn't it just a bit depressing that the most action I've gotten recently has been from my cooch doctor? How disappointing.

Although my sex life is at a stalemate, my professional life has shortly become very eventful. Although I'm not a certified teacher yet, I'm helping with a summer academy program at a local high school that helps incoming freshman who need a little academic booster transition from junior high to the real deal. The teachers that I'm working with have been very encouraging and insightful and I'm beyond grateful for their patience and willingness to let me participate in their classroom. One teacher in particular has really helped me to entirely solidify my choice to enter in the education field. He's one of those rare people who can relate to anyone and completely light up a room just by standing in it. The way he works with the kids is nothing short of amazing and it is because of hearing about teachers like him and wondering why I never had any that made me want to become a teacher.

Being on the other side of the classroom is kind of awkward because I still feel like a 15 year old most of the time. I never realized how much teachers can hear and comprehend of hallway talk during passing periods. Yikes, what my teachers must have thought of my potty mouth when I was a kid. It's also amazing how complex a teacher's job is. Not only does a teacher instruct the required curriculum, but if they are a good teacher, they learn about their students and pick up on what is working for them and what isn't. One student in my class has recently lost her mother due to breast cancer and her father has started dating again, making her very upset, but she feels that she can't talk to him about. Sometimes when the kids are doing a worksheet or doing small group work, I look at her and see her kind of staring off into space and I wonder what she's thinking about. I wonder how any kid can survive high school with only one parent and I feel a strong urge to hug her and try to convince her that everything will be okay when even I'm unsure that it will be. She's very quiet and timid and I often think about if she was this way before her mom got sick. She's very busty and dresses very modestly and I wonder who will take her shopping for her first homecoming dress. Will they know what dress type will flatter her? Another student is deaf in one ear and can hardly hear what you say to him, but he is so intuitive that you mostly forget that he's using all of his effort just to hear what you're saying to him. In an essay assignment where his peers were writing about generic things such as baseball, friends, love, music, etc., this kid wrote about eternal suffering. He did a damn good job of it, too, which almost makes it worse because in doing so, it made me wonder what he's gone through to know what eternal suffering is.

I can already tell that I am going to love my career, which is a relief, of course, but it also feels like I have a newfound purpose in my life, kind of like the links are all being connected and that it's going in the right direction. It makes me sleep easier at night knowing that I can enjoy going to work each day and feeling that I may be making a difference to a kid who really needs it in their life.