It's a bit of a gray day in Streeterville. It's 35 degrees at the Mini. Still no word on the wind chill factor. Been looking out the window and the ice melting and breaking up on Lake Michigan has created these little oval iceberglets that look like nothing so much as white blood cells as seen under a microscope, or at least as I imagine they would look under a microscope, based on my vast experience, having seen the Bell Telephone science film, "Hemo the Magnificent," in 6th grade or somewhere thereabouts.
It's Sunday afternoon and the holiday period is over. Christmas is done. New Year's is done. This means but one thing. Tomorrow I return to work. I'm sure there may be some odd duck out there who will be returning all refreshed and ready to go, looking forward to meeting the new year of work and conquering all, against all odds. For most of us, though, we will greet Monday morning, January 5th with a hearty, "Oh shit, I have to go to work."
Now I must admit that, as jobs go, working in education is not too bad. I could, after all, be working in a coal mine, "going down down down...." Thank you Sam Cooke for that. Reality is, however, that no matter what you do as work (We all know about the dignity of work, the feelings of accomplishment, blah, blah, blah...), if work were that exciting or cool, they wouldn't have to pay you to do it. I am a professional educator. Note the word professional. That means they pay me to hang out with adolescents and educate them. No pay, no education.
Like many another working stiff, I face Monday morning after a holiday thinking about when the next holiday will be. Hmmmm. I do have Jury Duty on Friday, so that's kind of a holiday, unless I actually get chosen for a case and have to sit and listen to testimony and stuff. Had to sit on a Federal jury for a civil rights case once. Was stuck for a week listening to how this woman resisted arrest and she claiming that the cops used undue force and assaulted her. Was it worth a week off from work? The jury is still out on that one. Bah De Bump!
There is that Martin Luther King Jr. holiday coming up, but come to think of it, I scheduled a doctor's appointment on that day. Truthfully, what I have to look forward to is Spring Break. In educatorland, we get this week off in the spring to go do whatever for a while, before buckling down to ACT tests PSAE tests, AP tests, final tests, and that stretch run that happens at the end of yet another school year. Spring Break is a wonderful time. For most of us in the colder climes it means going to a beach somewhere and getting too much sun and spending way too much money and enjoying the hell out of it.
Babs and I already have reservations at a very nice hotel in South Beach. Babs has a thing about hotel beds with sheets that have a high thread count and a bathroom with a nice stand alone shower. The hotel in question has access to the beach and a pool to end all pools, with waiters to bring you drinks and food and basically to make you think for a moment that you are someone special, not just another working stiff. That's what vacationing is about.
This is not to say that I have not had a sense of accomplishment at times, over the years, when students come back to visit and say, "Thank you." When I have run into former students who are doing well in college and looking forward to a productive life. When I have run into former students who didn't hold much promise and find out that they turned out alright anyway, and they are happy to see me.
It's just that there are people who live to work. They don't quite know what to do with themselves or their families when they aren't working. Their jobs are their lives. Furthermore, most of these people are not Warren Buffett. Most are very ordinary working stiffs, like you or I. I know about one person, ... OK he's my brother, who retired from the FAA as an electrical engineer and after a year or so, I suspect of going stir crazy, he went back to work for a private contractor. In my estimation electrical engineers, while not exactly factory workers on a line, or construction workers with hammers, are still not Warren Buffett either, and thus qualify as working stiffs.
What I don't get about this scenario is why a guy who owns a perfectly nice home, car, and lots of stuff, who has a perfectly nice wife, who has all the retirement income he needs goes back to work when he doesn't need to do so. The only thing that I can figure is that the thing that he loves is the work, or that possibly that he has spent so much time and energy doing that work thing, that he can't think of anything else to do to fill his time.
I am not one of those. As we used to joke in high school, "I should have been born rich instead of so darned good looking." Man, I can think of thousands of things to do with my time, rather than work. There's music and writing, and reading, and travel, and just plain relaxation. My inner self does not identify itself with what I do to pay the bills. I have a self that embraces so much more than that. It is just one small part of who I am.
This brings me to one of life's little petty annoyances. How many times have you been at a party or fuction and when you meet someone the first thing they say to you is, "So what do you do?" As if what you do for a living should define who you are as a person. I submit to you that there are some persons out there who are defined by what they do, scientists, politicians, full-time artists, actors, musicians. For the most part, though, humanity works to live, not vice versa, and each and every one of us is so much more than what we do for a living.
With that in mind, I will be back at work tomorrow morning and I will do the very best job I can at educating those teenagers. I will, however, continue to look forward to the next time I can devote to living the life I have earned, not earning the life I live.
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