I feel humbled and mortified by the conviction that the Creator has gifted  me with intelligence almost in vain. I am almost twenty two and have as yet attained but the threshold of knowledge.  …

The night has seldom found me much advanced beyond the station I occupied in the morning … I almost despair of ever making any figure in the world.

My new hobby: considering law schools.

I suspect that this is for you underwhelming, as much as it is for me overwhelming. This blog has long since faded into the typical irrelevancy of an online diary, and I don’t even know where to begin after more than a month away from the keys.

As I write this, my girlfriend distractingly calls from her bed.

What are you writing about? Are you writing about how I met your parents? Your stepmom is a great cook. Chili, pork tenderloin. Man, those Corn Flakes were good. Mmmm. You should write about how we left the milk out twice, and how your sister told us to take a drive up Hicks Road, and it was okay. The drive up to Santa Cruz was much prettier. You should write about how you surprised me with that trip, and with the sandwiches we made before we left.

She begins to coo for a while, and then satisfies herself with breathing heavily. I hear an occasional hum before the inevitable sighs and the rustling of sheets as she turns away from the screen.

I’ll think of something to write, but later. For now, I have better things to do.

Round up the usual suspects.

I love this ending, and so I’m not looking toward the back of the room when my girlfriend’s mom lifts up her shirt and flashes my girlfriend’s dad. My girlfriend wasn’t as diligent a Casablanca watcher as I was, though, and she saw everything.

She reels in disgust.

Eww! Why do you guys have to do that? I don’t flash Ben in front of you guys.

Her parents laugh. I shake my head. She blushes.

You should say that you never thought you could find a woman who could be so committed, and devoted, and get you the most awesome birthday gift ever and that you’ll love it and I think you’ll like it, but if you don’t, we can take it back and get a refund, and I’ll just give you the money and get you something else, but I think you’d like it, and you’d better like it because it cost me my first-born child.

But I don’t want you to say this at all. You could probably write it better than I could.

She read this, then she hit me. Then she hugged me, right in the place where my arm hurt the most from the hitting.

By all rights, this was set to be a stressful, almost unmanageable day. I had accepted the job above the elementary schools available only because I felt like having a free period. I just checked out an oral history of the zombie apocalypse, and I wanted to get some reading done.

Sure, they got antsy about halfway through — I let them off with a five-minute break of walking around. Sure, there were a few chatters — a stern look set those two straight.

It’s a testament to their leash’s normal tightness that while I had no free period today, I’ve known 201 pages of World War Z.

Substituting doesn’t have benefits, but it certainly has perks.

At the very least, bad public relations on the part of the gay marriage advocates, even if they were very slightly, very passively provoked.

It isn’t as dated as I would have thought.

I’ve always wanted to be a teacher, at least since I graduated high school.

I find it ridiculous that half the state didn’t pass the exit exam that first year. As I am young, I am also ten feet tall and bulletproof. I will single-handedly combat the ills in the decrepit, underfunded and outdated American school system.

I am well-prepared to do it, too. My experience as a camp counselor exposed me to the triumphs within seasonal work, long hours and low pay for a thankless job that most of my peers don’t take seriously.

I’m coming into this job with my eyes wide open. I’ll do just fine.

That’s good, basically. I wrote it in five minutes on a school computer, itching to finish up the process already, so I did a mighty fine job, considering.

I paused a moment to consider the statement — it’s good, but not complete. Just before the end, I added another paragraph, for the sake of full, unrelenting disclosure.

I won’t be doing this alone. I intend to write publicly about my personal experiences in the classroom, so as to blaze a trail for other prospective teachers, to gauge my own progress and to elicit advice from education’s professionals.

Submit.

Internships in teaching are paid, full-time teaching gigs — years in an internship don’t count for seniority purposes, and that’s the biggest difference.

Internships also fulfill the final student teaching requirement. All I need now is first to cement that internship and second to apply to a local credential program.

Because I make little enough money to qualify for an fee waiver on the application fee for the same local state university, I’ve decided to re-apply there and see if I could slip under the radar.

Of course, if the powers that be still read this blog, they’ll catch on pretty quick — but I have a feeling they’ve written me off as a blowhard and a self-obsessed know-it-all.