"Do what I please, gonna spread the disease, because I wanna!"

I've been listening to commercial radio this week. I pretty much gave up on commercial radio entirely when we moved back - after 2 years of constant CBC Radio One, commercial radio seemed boring, stupid & offensive. Plus, the music sucked! I mean, I know I'm getting old, but really. Some of these bands suck so hard that I'm positively bewildered at their popularity. We overthrew Milli Vanilli for this?!

Anyway, I have very little patience these days for commercial radio. The only reason I'm giving it another go is that we had such a good time on Friday that I want to hold onto that glow by any means necessary. And if that means sucking up a little Blink 182 to get at The White Stripes, than so be it.

One of the things I noticed about hanging around with Grey Owl is that there is a vast, vast difference between 22 and 26. Like, I know that I was 20 when I started this journal, so all of my youth is on display. It's not that I'm looking down on 22. But I still understood popular music when I was 22. And watching Grey Owl & his friends dance to some of the current crop made me feel...well, old.

I mean in between the ironic headbanging to Metallica & the unironic shimmying to White Zombie, that is. Those two bands happened before I left popular music behind.

All together now...

I USED TO BE WITH IT! BUT THEN THEY CHANGED WHAT 'IT' WAS! NOW, WHAT I'M WITH ISN'T 'IT'! AND WHAT'S 'IT' SEEMS WEIRD AND SCARY. AND IT'LL HAPPEN TO YOU!!!

Crappy, crappy day. Grades go in tomorrow, which means that the kids are either complacent because they're passing or pissed off because they're not. I was somewhat heartened to find out that I wasn't the only one experiencing difficulty: every teacher I talked to today felt stretched & sore, not just the newbies like myself. Of course, I think I take it a lot more personally than they do.

I dunno. Days like today make me seriously wonder why I'm in public education at all. When did I decide that my life's mission was to communicate Shakespeare to the very, very resistant? Maybe it's the kids at this school. Maybe it's my personality type. Or maybe it's my inexperience. But honest to Christ - this is excruciating. It's like being tortured full time, with evenings & weekends thrown in for good measure.

I was trying to explain all of this to my dad last night. I was in B-ton for a counselling appointment, and of course I had to drop by the house. (This chain of logic is obvious to my parents, no matter how time-consuming it may be for me.) During this visit I loaded up the car with a significant chunk of the library I've been missing for 2 years. Over dinner my dad practically begged me to let him follow me to Gomorrah and help unload the books. He's really really bored with his job these days, which is always a bad time for me because it makes him restless. And when he's restless, he always wants to visit. And during these visits he wants to talk about all of the tasks I have yet to accomplish, like paying bills or lighting a fire under the Boy so that he can get his Ontario licence.

This makes for a very harrowing couple of hours.

By the time he left last night, I was exhausted from all of the questions, not to mention the lengthy explanation of my expansive workload. For example: on Sunday I worked for 11 hours (just marking, no lesson planning). He doesn't get the idea that if I spent 3 hours working on Saturday, I wouldn't work 8 hours on Sunday - I'd work 14 hours instead. Teaching is endlessly expansive. There's always something else that can be done. This is a really bad time for him to be bored, because I'm anything but.