paint me a day without dismay.

i am frustrated. i have crazy allergies today and my students drove me absolute nuts today. they are totally disrespectful when i try to redirect them, which leads to me being petty and whiney. i wish i exhibited a bit more authority in those situations. whenever i such at managing a class of ten kids, i seriously fear moving forward and managing a class of twenty five or more. luckily, i have not heard back from any positions. it’s weird that i am happy about that right now.

as of right now, i just want to close this year as effectively as possible and then have a fantastic summer. i laughingly suggested that my parents do not want me to ever move out and tony responded by making it very clear how much he cannot wait for that to happen. it’s weird that i actually enjoy living with them now. when i was an adolescent, i hated it, and now i like it and thought the feeling was mutual, but i guess i really do need to figure something out.

i am living in the day. sort of. i am trying to live in the moment, especially in the career realm of my life. i do a little bit of action each week towards trying to secure something, but i am not panicking because i don’t know what i want right now. is it still possible to live a life of my dreams? i’d like to think so. i’d like to focus on that, but i feel like i need to do some searching to figure out what that life looks like.
 

in regard to my frustration towards the chaos i feel sometimes in the classroom, i did get one good thing from my crazy therapist so far in my visits with her. she talked about how social work and teaching are like this:

sometimes, rarely, you plant a seed and watch it grow. other times, you plant the seed and someone else watches it grow. sometimes you watched someone else’s seeds finally grow.

i guess i need to understand that. one benefit that erin gruwell had was that she had her students in ninth grade and followed them throughout high school. i came midyear to this school and increased the rigor for these eleventh graders. many of them have made up their minds about just passing by the bare minimum and then not going to college. i cannot really change their minds this late in the game. i can try, but i can’t feel like a failure if i don’t.

on another note, i spoke at my homegroup about my experience with step four and tradition four. it was the first time i spoke at my homegroup because usually we make an effort to get outside speakers. within a month, i went from crying, locked in the bathroom in fear of completing my step four and by the end of the month, i had shared it with my sponsor and then shared that experience with a whole room of people.

oh and sharon came back. and the katie thing blew up, and i am okay with not being katie’s friend and perhaps letting go of the resentment and just letting her go completely because i am allowed to have certain standards for the people i have in my life. she has done me wrong plain and simple, and does not feel any remorse about those events. she minimized the impact of my father’s death by saying that she and her father were close, so it was "different." then she recused herself from the position of my sponsor because she felt like she couldn’t help me, which was true, but the way she acted was that i was the problem. i allowed her to make me question just about everything about myself neurotically. she lacks empathy. she is selfish and self-righteous to an extreme, and then she asked me to lie by omission to my best friend about something that could hurt her more if she knew that i knew and didn’t tell her. now she’s pissed at another friend for finally telling sharon. i don’t need that in my life. i never knew boundaries like that could feel so good. it’s like, i don’t need to stress about how the person is wronging me so much. i can just let them go rather than feel like i’ve failed or i’m doing something wrong by being upset. it is okay to stick up for myself.

ahhh, i need to catch up on grading.