My Work

After my work is done I'm going to start a blog about working and trying to do what's right. Maybe that means it's a blog about metaphysics, but very few metaphysicians get past how things affect each other to really view the way that things ought to be. Perhaps, then, my blog will be pataphysical.

Perhaps it will be nothing but an endless series of violations of client confidentiality and unprofessional disclosures.

Perhaps it will be a look at the beauty of any fleeting moment when any two human beings accept each other, regardless of whether that acceptance is rooted in understanding each other's differences or mythologizing similarities to gloss them over.

Perhaps it will be about forgetting you're supposed to work overnight on a Friday night and getting text messages from your girlfrend about what she should wear for the evening, and writing back to say how much you want to see her. It will be about counting the minutes until the next shift arrives, and checking the schedule to see who is coming and what is taking them so long.

It will be about asking the new trainee, who has just asked a third time why you don't change your name to Ali, whether he can stay late to cover for you while you go buy groceries, so you can lay in enough sugar and caffeine to stay awake until eight in the morning.

It will be about teaching children and feeling responsible for their futures, and the future of the world. It will be about the lessons children have taught me, not just about teaching, but about life and about myself.

It will be about learning not to push kids' buttons. It will be about seeing that somtimes a nine year old can be the bigger man. It will be about the fine line between teaching and parenting, and the difficulty of telling a kid you cannot cross that line even after you've invested so much that the question makes you step outside in the rain, ostensibly to take out the trash.

It will be about helpig kids learn math. And Spanish, English, physics, civics, u.s. history and the mysteries of life. It will be about never again signing up to substitute teach a class on the mysteries of life.

My blog will be about raising up communities. It will be about Booker T. Washington's philosophies. The belief in freedom through education continues in my mind unbated, whatever anyone might have recently told my relatives would make them free. I'm starting with fresh bucket.

It will be about quick showers and even quicker shirt and tie choices to make it through the traffic light timers and the rush hour and the Sunday drivers to be on time for even four hour shifts. It will be about the lifts we get when we feel like we're making a diference and the pain of wondering if maybe we're not.

It will be about shoveling snow off the tops of fragile gas-powered compressors and dingy, rat-infested dumpsters and walking through blizzard conditions to answer a phone and try to be a part of things.

It will be about security checks at four in the morning that never reveal a thing out of place but give one a chance, at a liesurely pace, to pass by all the survelance cameras and show that one is still awake, still doing something, still not still.

It will be about the boring things on cable overnight, and the decision between red eyes from too much ligh and the fear of losing consciousness without it. It will be about reconnecting with friends on the west coast and across the word over instant messages at times when only they are awake.

It will be about the pleasure we all get from this beautiful world, where we get to share so much time together, and even though it's never enough, occasionally talk soccer, or talk music and realize that we are all the same.

It will be about the invention of a new board game.