Posts Tagged → Teaching Life

Three dollars times five days a week times four weeks a month is sixty dollars times twelve months a year is seven hundred and twenty which it turns out is too much

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what it means to be “Put Together.” (As in, “Let me put myself together,” or, “That’s a guy who really has it all together.“) It’s a feeling that I like and I assume everyone else likes it, too. Otherwise, why would we all have dress shoes?

Anywho. When I think of being “Put Together,” I always think of Haruki Murakami.

Author of books like 1Q84, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami has become a bit of a literary staple. I had a furious love affair with Haruki Murakami’s books in the 2010s, when I was in Korea and shopping at What the Book, which carried all his Vintage International Editions with covers by John Gall. (I read them all, collected all the different editions. I even had a few written in Japanese, which I couldn’t read but admired.)

I’m a Murakami nut.

Murakami has a few tropes that appear in his works, and one of them is the (usually male) character who loses his current life for one reason or another and is forced to rebuild his life from the ground up in a whole new setting.

Like, a guy has an existential crisis, gets dumped by his wife, leaves his house and job, and then moves out to the countryside where he works at a small-town library. Once placed in his new surroundings, Murakami describes how the character wakes up, how he cooks breakfast, how he gets to work, etc., etc. Murakami might describe the steps involved his getting dressed, how he unwinds after a long day, the restaurant he goes to for dinner, or the turn-by-turn route he takes in going home from work in the evening. All of it is so meticulous and minute and it just scratches some kind of itch that I have. I can’t get enough of it.

I think that itch I feel is the desire to be “Put Together.”

A few years ago, when I first started teaching at my current school, I was trying to set up a routine that would work for me. Sarah and I had just moved into the house we rent and things were … tough. We’d been overseas for so long, we didn’t have any furniture, knew hardly anybody in town, the pandemic had just happened, and both of us weren’t making very much money.

Things were decidedly not “Put Together.“

Back then, I thought I’d stop in the mornings at a gas station for a quick cup of coffee like I did back when I was student teaching, which was the last time I’d been a teacher in a U.S. classroom. It was a silly thing, but I liked stopping at a little place before the sun came up for a quick cuppa. I liked the silly little interactions I had with the gas station attendant. I liked walking into the school building with a warm paper cup in one hand and my entry badge in the other. I liked to take a little sip, smack my lips real loud, and go, “Aaahhh!” so it echoed down the hallways. Frivolous? Sure, but you’ve got to take pleasure in tiny, pointless, everyday activities. Otherwise what’s the point?

After a few days, though, I did the math, and I realized that I wasn’t making enough money to buy gas station coffee before work. With rent, utilities, gasoline, insurance, groceries … I just couldn’t afford to stop at a f*cking Casey’s for a bullshit cup of coffee every morning. And while having a gas station coffee isn’t necessarily a big part of being “Put Together,” it felt like I was trying to build for myself one of those minuscule Murakami habits only to be told, “Sorry, the coffee from our gas station is for better people than you.”

I’m still bitter about it. Dark and bitter. And aromatic!

Fruit is just a dream

Welp. My day yesterday went from me wondering, “Why do I feel so exhausted?” straight into my having to leave my first class to go throw up in the teacher’s bathroom.

Turns out I have the flu. Huzzah!

I managed to find another teacher to cover class for me and headed straight home to vomit in my own bathroom.

Then I took a bunch of Pepto and slept and slept.

I’m staying home from work today to rest, rehydrate, and eat toast with butter. If my stomach can handle it, I might upgrade the toast to fruit. At this point, though, fruit is just a dream.

I’ll see if I can finish up A Court of Thorns and Roses (10% to go!), but I don’t know how much I’m going to feel like reading. Today’s more of a “Watch Wes Anderson films while I writhe around in bed” sort of day.

Every hose has its corn

A Court of Thorns and Roses is almost finished. I suspect that the “Rose” is the main character, Feyre, and the “Thorns” are the boundaries she’s had to put up that prevent her from forming long-term relationships until being whisked away to a magical world allows her find the courage to open up and experience true love, which, so far, seems to consist of people doing tonsil inspections and ripping off each other’s underwear.

Perhaps I’m wrong, though.

(There is a literal court and there are some literal thorns and literal roses in the book, so maybe the title is referring to them instead of being metaphorical.)

I’m also soooooo close to finishing Twelve Months that I stayed in bed this morning just a little longer so I could listen to more of it. The plot lacks the urgency of previous books in The Dresden Files. Whereas the Hero, Harry, used to pretty consistently work against a ticking clock, a lot of chapters in this book start with transitions like, “Three weeks later I was at the gym again when X happened,” or, “My next date with the succubus wasn’t until February…”

It gives the book not quite a cozy vibe, but something like it. Plus, I think it is doing a fantastic job of representing trauma. It’s not easy to capture a such a laborious recovery process in a book that still holds your attention, but it all goes with the slower-paced plot.

It’s February now and I am tired of this weather. It’s not even bad where we are — the southeastern U.S. is apparently getting hit by some hefty winter storms while we’re just sort of vaguely chilly.

Sarah and I went to Costco today and discovered that the world needs another plague. Either that or a better system than crowding people into aisles to wrestle with big boxes and huge shopping carts and telling them, “Have at it!”

There are only a handful of times that we are able to get to Costco during off-peak hours, but it makes a huge difference. If you go, say, early Tuesday morning, it’s easier to get around and you can get out of there a lot faster.

It’s one of the up-sides of summer vacation when you’re a teacher — the ability to go to stores whenever you want. (The down-side, in case you were wondering, is the slow, inescapable descent into madness.)

Jolene, our cat, just got spooked by the sound of my PC turning on, tried to run, bumped into my cup of tea, and then fell off the desk. Poor blind kitty!