I am so exhausted right now. I hate Thursdays – no matter what I do, by the time 9pm comes around, I’m dragging myself through the motions. I feel really bad for my night course adult students – I am being a shitty teacher, and I know it. It’s painfully obvious to all of us in the room that I really don’t want to be there, that I’m dead tired, that I desperately need more sleep. I feel sort of ashamed, since I know this attitude is not really professional on my part – the constant checking of my watch, the hurried rush through the lessons, my barely-sufficient explanations.
One of the concepts I came up with for the new website logo*. What you do think?
*I copied the pose of the panda from a sticker I saw somewhere. But this is all me, my mouse and a very steady hand, baby Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
I have come to the sad conclusion that my level of “caring” is inversely proportional to how tired I am. I have noticed this before with previous Japanese-speaking girlfriends – the more tired I am, the more irritated I get with trying to speak Japanese, until I finally give up all pretenses and just babble away in English. This worked out well when their English was much better than my Japanese. The other times… well, let’s just say I’ve had some short-lived relationships as well.
It’s much the same way with school. In the morning, I come in, and for the most part, I can handle the immense amount of slag waiting for me – the horrible first year students, the big piles of essays/lesson plans piled up on my desk, the ridiculous last-minute assigned tasks – and do it all while effacing myself and affecting a big ol’ grin in the face of incomprehensible the prefecture-dialect.
But catch me 13 hours later, tired, ragged and exhausted, and I just simply can’t bring myself to pretend anymore. I wear my feeling so clearly tatooed on my face, the only way I could be more direct would be to grab my students and shake them violently by the shoulders screaming “for the love of god, stop babbling nonsensically!!!”
So yes, I know that’s a bad thing for a teacher to feel. I’m working on it, or so I keep telling myself. I keep thinking back on all that crap I told my interviewers back in Chicago, about how I am “flexible, and easily adapt to any situation… comfortable working in a Japanese environment… patient, and accustomed to working with students”. Was it all a load of crap? I hope not – but it’s in these everyday moments, these ragged edges of lethargy, when the superficial face slips, and you have to gaman suru under less-than-ideal conditions, that I guess the true measure of whether or not I can live up to the principles I espouse can be clearly observed.
That having been said, I still managed to find time to update the website. It’s not done yet, but it’s started somewhat. I’m thinking of changing the buttons and bars to a more “bronze/autumn-ish” color, and more importantly, putting up a better hand-drawn banner at the top. This is problematic since I don’t have a scanner right now, but we’ll see what can be done. Going to go through and add/remove new/dead links, mess with the columns a bit, maybe play around and add little rotating picture gallery (for my ketai pictures), etc.
Sometimes all this tinkering is theraputic – mindless clicking and mousing to help me space out and forget the day. Pachinko for the panda soul, if you will.
Let me know what you think of the look so far. Or if I should maybe just leave it the hell alone, step away from the intarweb and go play in the sandbox because I am “tex suX0rs n00b”.
Now listening t “Amoebaassasin – Piledriver (Grayed Out Summer Mix)”
(male vocals… hrm… dunno how i feel about this, especially since they all sound like anguished germans)
9:49 am
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Site update
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