V e r i t a s . S o p h i a . I u s t i t i a

so i get up, not having much left to say, make some excuse that really isn't necessary cos people flit in and out without social graces anyway. walk outside, nudge my way through, trying to feel a pulse. there it is, only it's not mine. i could be dead to the world; i am already dead to mine; my world stopped oscillating a long time ago. i live on the moon and it is made of cheddar cheese, which i take big bites of. i also take big bites of almond chocolate croissants because i don't mind the calories. i get a text message on a sunday morning from my boss. freaking ridiculous, right? nine a.m. on a sunday morning? five-day work week, mam, i don't work for you saturdays and sundays, but i answer anyway. piss drunk and doubled up on disillusion. i returned to my seat to see the arrival of somebody i used to know quite well. we shake cos it's good manners; i remember but it's only me. doesn't matter, i think, but it cuts like a knife. am i who? yes. yes.

so that was one. revolving doors; i know how they work, but every time i stand there, wait for the next opening, there's that moment's hesitation. now now NOW. i don't have a heart condition but if every door was a revolving door, i think i wouldn't be able to take the strain. i was in and then i was out. unrecognized but i recognized and that was bruising. crossed the street, paid twenty with a complimentary drink, then i dance the night away, only the entire room's a playground now with kids on merry-go-rounds and me chasing after a bunch of rag muffins whose entire idea of fun soon becomes hide and seek. it's time. seriously. get off while you can. it's not hide and seek. it's all hide; you're the only one interesting in seeking 'em out. they'd do anything not to be found. common sense or something rational clicks; come here, let me tell you something, i say. then i leave, and god be damned, i am still hoping on the world to change.

I want so badly to sleep… I need it, God, I need it. Even more so now that I’ve banished coffee from my diet (I am REALLY trying to get out of my depression). I know for a fact that if I can just take sleep till nine, I’ll be more productive than if I begin slogging at my desk right now. Nothing useful will get done. I will simply type away and away and then “wake up” again at nine, the grogginess dissipating from my eyes, and realize that everything I’ve done since seven has been completely useless, and then I’ll trash everything I’ve done and start all over. Should I be compliant then, and work as everyone else does- from seven, or should I go to the bathroom on the third floor, lock myself in a cubicle and sleep till nine? When did I start ignoring my instincts? They’ve never let me down. I think I just answered my own question.

I don’t cry easily and I wish I did. My tear ducts are too proud, trained from years of holding it all back, strained stoicism. Every hate is held in control, every sarcastic remark that would have in my youth stung indiscriminately at any king or fool is forced back down my throat, its sharp tip tearing, ripping organs as it strong-arms against the will to morph into a near physical shape . Most of the time, all the hurt, frustrations, and anxiety accumulate, grow and fester into ugly visions of self mutilation, wrap themselves around my consciousness and they tug, tug, tug like a ball of rubber bands around my heart, making it difficult to breathe. Every intake of air becomes a hard-fought suction through an oxygen mask.

It all falls apart about once a year. Once a year, at some unpredicted time, I will cry. I cried last weekend, I howled and struggled to breathe through my tears, I screamed, my mother shut the door to contain my anguish. Teeth clenched, fists clenched, rubber bands snapping, I rolled myself into a ball, catatonic but for a face contorted into pieces of unrecognizable flesh like a Francis Bacon, cradled by a mother who both knows and doesn’t how much it hurts, this creature set free. And then, I am dead to the world. I fall asleep, only I am still awake, but empty now, the cancer excised, healing. It was as though a veil had been lifted from my eyes, said Claude Monet when he realized the possibilities of painting from Jongkind.

I am now a man with nothing to lose. I have no one to impress, I don’t desire to advance myself in this profession. Just do it- impassionedly. This is just another ordeal. You, you who dare tell me what steps to take to become a better teacher, how to manage my lessons, you who would dare to tell me what is possible and what not, or how life should be lived, here, here, the unspoken law that you do not leave before six. Since it is unspoken, I will pretend to have heard nothing… You are a lightweight when it comes to the sheer power to imagine. I have my breakdowns, I grant you that, my emotional fragility, heed this though- do not presume to know more than me. You may have been at it longer, but no one else in any proximity you want to define can dare lay claim on possessing a more beautiful mind. Terrified, impatient, it is not time though the skies are fast changing their colors. I am afraid I will miss the evening star as it manifests itself.

I am becoming, I have become, a disaffected, disgruntled civil servant who despises the majority of my colleagues, loathes the people in middle management, and finds the self-importance they possess absolutely farcical. In fact, it would be laughable, seeing these worthless human beings scurrying around their little ant hill that means nothing to anyone else in the entire world, if I wasn't being forced to play an ant myself. We strive for awards given by the organizations that basically run us, consumed all the time with winning awards for our "good practices", our "good working environment", our "quality of service", prepping our students to say the right things to inspectors, getting our teachers to perform all kinds of work completely unrelated to teaching at all... I have spent the majority of this week working on a logo for my department. Seriously. Every department needs a logo now. I have been tasked to tidy up all the artworks in the school, make sure they aren't crooked and torn, the school is in a frenzy because there's an "important" seminar today and there will be "important" guests. Do I honestly care? Am I really supposed to be impressed? I find it hard to hide my incredulity, at how my colleagues can take all these "events" seriously at all; and how about this see-who-stays-the-latest competition, as though the longer you slog at your desk, the more... the more... Christ, I don't even know what we're all slogging for. Work is endless. Go home. This is a job. It has fixed hours. You can go home after lessons, do so. The entire rationale behind having a job is to be able to improve your quality of life, and my quality of life is certainly not improved by working 12 freaking hours a day. I am not a teacher. That word is still in circulation but it's lost its meaning completely. Teachers simply don't exist anymore. I spend more hours doing administrative work and prettifying our school's image than I do teaching. Going to class has become a hobby, something I do when I am not piled under a ton of pointless paperwork. I am in the business of education. I am not a teacher. This makes me sick to the core.

It’s Friday, finally, though at this specific moment there isn’t really much to cheer about. My Friday schedule consists of a one hour lesson at eight in the morning and then zilch till CCA from three to five, which leaves me a gap of seven hours of… nothing. Of course I can and should use this time to prepare my lessons for next week, get this week’s marking done, etc. etc. But I don’t know, I look at the two piles of observational drawings in front of me and I just don’t feel like marking them. People always think marking art is a piece of cake with whipped cream and a cherry on top… well, they be mistaken. You look at a drawing, refer to your rubrics… oh yes, her use of contour lines is excellent, surely an ‘A’, but her shading doesn’t really have any depth, which puts her at a ‘C’… except at this corner of course, where the shadow under the whatever really gives the drawing a sense of three-dimensionality… there are so many things to juggle when you’re marking an artwork. And the rubrics aren’t carved in stone either. One scores a ‘B’ in every criterion and thus is given an equivalent grade; another scores ‘C’s in almost all criteria, but overall, somehow, you KNOW the latter is a better work than the former…

Giving feedback is tough as well since you can’t or at least it isn’t very nice to circle in red the areas of the drawing you think can be improved. Sometimes the reason why a piece of work doesn’t work can’t even be properly articulated in words… it’s just… “out”. But the toughest part about marking, though, is that once you begin marking the first drawing, you have to, have to, have to, mark the rest of the thirty pieces, because you’re in the zone, and you can’t leave the zone and then come back, because the new zone isn’t the old one, and you’ll ending up marking some works according to one standard and others according to another… If you’re gonna start marking, you’d better be damn sure you have the next three hours to spare, and the energy to sustain yourself till you’ve marked the very last piece…

And of course no one has the freaking energy to sustain himself through three hours of marking art! After work number 12, you get tired, you get cranky, and you get sloppy and hand out marks and feedback arbitrarily, rendering them as good as useless to the students (“shading can be improved”), or, you get cranky and blunt, curt and just plain mean… (“shading is near non-existent and shows no sense of how to create form through value.”) So do I mark now? Plan lessons? That’s another cookie to break one’s teeth on… but never mind. I’m gonna grab a bite, pretend to work by reading an ACADEMIC book like T J Clark's Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism for research (I have Don DeLillo’s Libra in my backpack...) and then make a decision at noon.