In the original spirit of this blog, I'm not sorry. The idea for the blog was to use it as a device to appear busy while I was working a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad job. That job ended. I wrote about half a dozen more posts and then realized, Hey! I don't have to be sitting at this desk pretending to look busy because no one gives a shit! I'm unemployed muthafuckas!
People looked at me like I was crazy when I told them I both quit my job AND had no real prospects for the future. Conversations with my American friends tended to go something like this:
Them: What are you up to?
Me: Nothing. I quit my job in March
Them: Why??
Me: Because I hated it
Them: Are you looking for a new job?
Me: No. I'm kind of enjoying doing nothing. Plus, we're going diving in Bali in two weeks, so there's no real point in looking for something now.
Them: (confused silence)
It took me months to shake off the feeling that my life was turning into some kind of waste. There wasn't any one moment that changed my mind. It was just a creeping feeling that I was actually living a life I enjoyed. Fun actually doesn't have to cost anything. You don't have to pay some awful price or work a soul sucking job to justify having a good time. The feeling went from being worried about waking up in the morning and having nothing to do to being excited about waking up in the morning with an entirely unplanned day ahead. The notion that sitting on the couch and reading a book for nine hours was not a wasted day, but rather a day spent doing what I want to do. What a notion.
In March of this year, Reyna interviewed for a job at The American School in Vietnam. All signs pointed to her being hired -especially when they called a week after the interview and asked her to fill an emergency position in the middle school. She went to talk to the head of school, and twenty minutes later my phone rang. They wanted to talk to ME about filling the emergency position. And that is how I became a middle school math teacher. It's true. Your tattooed, underdressed, foul-mouthed and perpetually sweaty vegetarian friend became a shaper of young minds. For three full months I convinced students between the ages of 12 and 14, and apparently a fair number of teachers and administrators, that I know things about math. I put on a tie for the first time in more than ten years. And dig this: I actually liked it. I can't remember ever being so busy, or so tired. I fell asleep at a dinner party like some kind of nodding junkie. I had actual stuff to contribute to the conversation when we went out with our teacher friends beyond things like, "huh" and "that must suck." I HAVE THINGS THAT SUCK! I HAVE BEEFS WITH ADMINISTRATION AND LOW PAY AND THE STATUS OF OUR IN-SCHOOL DRINKING WATER!
Discussions began about me returning for the next year. I started an application to enroll in a teaching certification program. THINGS WERE HAPPENING. However... things are not always as fabulous as they appear in the beginning.
Here's an excerpt from an email I sent by the end of the year...
In this play "Garth" is the head of primary. "Katherine" is the head of the middle and high school.
I started working at TAS and Reyna was forgotten. She never received so much as an email, much less a contract from the school despite nearly a dozen follow ups with Garth. As for me, Katherine wanted to offer me the full time math position for next year. In a meeting with the three of us, Garth said he thought I would be a good fit. Then a week later rescinded his verbal commitment to me by telling management he had concerns about my "math background." This is obviously a ridiculous claim, since I've spent the last 15 years of my career both in education and architecture applying the skills I have been teaching the students. When I finally confronted him about this he took back what he'd said [about my math background], but then told me that there were no math positions available for next year. A blatant lie, since there was (and still is) a middle school math position listed on a job search website (TIE online). The person running the school is not an educator, and frankly has no business running a school. He knows NOTHING about what any student needs in the classroom. Moreover, he neither wants nor cares to locate proper resources to fully understand why certain students math scores are so low. His only objective is to keep people coming back and paying tuition as long as possible. Education be damned. Make no mistake: TAS is a money-making venture for the owner and upper management and nothing more. It's been on full and stunning display since my arrival at TAS. In hindsight, it was a blessing that I was not offered a job for next year.
The day after I wrote that email, Katherine was fired and Garth took over her position. The following week I went back to being unemployed with no job prospects and no future plans beyond (maybe?) working on a teaching certification.
Meanwhile, Reyna was contacted by a school in Rio de Janeiro. She was offered a job right around the time I was realizing that things might not be as rosy as I'd originally thought at TAS. The day she received the offer, I left school and met her at the bar. Over a couple beers we agreed that it was time for her career to guide our decisions about where we were going to live. She'd clearly earned that right and it wasn't a difficult decision. She accepted the job and we started making preparations to move to Brazil.
That was two months ago. Now I'm sitting by myself in a hotel room in Dubai....
To Be Continued....
