24

Hello hello hello, I am 24. Well technically 23 years, 364 days and 17 hours old (because I was born around 7:30 am in the morning), but for brevity's (and sanity's?) sake I am 24. Hello world, happy birthday to me.

Today after work I bought two slices of cake from Awfully Chocolate. Around 10:10pm I pulled both slices out from the fridge and started to eat them by myself because my Dad was upstairs and didn't want to come down, my Brother was dead asleep and my Mum was absorbed in trying to book flights on the SIA website while sitting next to me. So I sang a birthday song to myself and started eating the chocolately cake while watching a Channel 5 documentary about landmines in Cambodia.

Singing the birthday song to myself caught the attention of my Mum, so she stopped trying to book flights for a moment and started digging into the cake with me. About 10 minutes later my Dad came to holler at us to go upstairs and we lured him down instead with cake. He shoved half a slice of cake into his mouth and then switched the TV and lights off on us before heading up again. That left 1 slice left for my Mum and I to polish off in the dark. I started on the remaining slice and ate it till about half way before giving the rest to my Mum. So that meant my Mum and I ate about 3/4 of a slice of cake, so 75gms of chocolately sinfulness and my dad had 50gms.

After my Mum finished the cake I got her a cup of water in my Penguin P.G. Wodehouse mug. She was still absorbed in trying to figure out the best possible way to utilise the family's frequent flyer miles on the SIA website.

So anyway, Happy Birthday to me.

Doldrums

Been feeling increasingly burnt out from my job lately. Part of it is because since late November last year, I was given an assignment I not only did not want, but have increasingly felt incapable of properly coping with. I was given two classes of P4s. I now have a newfound extreme distaste and short temper with children, and have decided that I don't like anyone around that age that is not related to me. Even before I step into the classroom on Wednesdays I feel all riled up and upset, like some terrible pavlovian response. I feel more agitated, get angrier more easily, feel depressed and a sense of hopelessness.

Safe to say I think I can safely conclude from this that I do not like young children because they're these terrible creatures who reek of WTF because manners, boundaries and common sense haven't yet been pounded into them by society and I have ZERO patience for that. I can be nurturing in an intellectual and emotional sense BUT HELL NO I AIN'T BRINGING UP YOUR DAMN KID. Why didn't YOU, dear EGG and SPERM DONOR, teach your kid that it's rude/inappropriate/stupid to ask the teacher "Why are you dressed like a man?"/"Why does your lipstick match your jacket?"/"Why is your makeup so ugly today?" YES THERE ARE STUPID QUESTIONS, AND YOUR KID JUST ASKED THEM. As an aside, I think I'll be the type of parent that spanks their kid, because I want to do that to my idiot students often.

For all of this I can only say I blame M/s L because I told them explicitly before that I did not want to teach young students, and they ignored me anyway. They're utterly charming like that, which also explains why they have so much trouble retaining long term staff. As if the job wasn't emotionally draining enough, they stick teachers with assignments that we do not want nor are able to handle well. This just results in teachers (ergo, ME) getting frustrated and burning out at the speed of light. DAMNIT. I like my job most of the time, just that now I feel exceptionally unhappy and strung out like a piece of drying spaghetti.

In other more joyful news I've been offered a place by Teacher's College, Columbia. On one hand it makes me feel happy cause I've finally made it from all the wishing and hoping I did before, on the other hand it's opened a whole new can of worms. I am now forced to think of the future which is nice but extremely scary on the other hand (then again I've always been scared of the future) and worrying about money problems because living in Manhattan to attend Teacher's College is extremely expensive, and I'm still not sure how long the whole programme lasts/how the damn American college system functions.

So in short my job makes me feel shitty now, but thinking about the future makes me feel shitty too. No wonder I'm feeling down in the doldrums.