Countdown to Ennui

September 11, 2008 in Personal Reflection
Tags: 60, been, busy, cell, double, ever, fiction, growing up, history, hours, liberated, maturing, overtime, phone, responsible, than, time, work, world

My life is playing out exactly the opposite as I had figured it three years ago. I’d have a comfortable living, working just enough to get by. I’d spend most of the rest of my time with my laptop. I’d spend whatever was left as another bored 20-something.

Yet by Friday, I’ll have clocked almost 60 hours — a third of that time-and-a-half, some of it even double time — over five days at an unsalaried job, and I spend nearly a fifth of that time driving. For fun, I spend on average 15 hours each week playing my trombone or hanging out with other band people — especially the really old ones.

I spared a minute or two to stop by a bridal shop to buy myself a tuxedo between work and rehearsal. In the same trip, it took another minute or two to replace my belt — never buy reversible belts with a built-in hinge, because expensive does not equal reliable — and I only had the time for both errands because the stores were right on the way to band practice.

I’m busy.

Perhaps the best illustration: Because I’m the responsible sort, or like to think so, I don’t answer my cell phone while on the road, at rehearsals, working, sleeping and showering. Save for the 12 minutes I spend waking up every morning and perhaps the better part of my weekends, it’s impossible to get ahold of me.

I’m really busy.

Because I’m not salaried, I have no work responsibilities shoved on me for over my weekends. On two days of the week, I can spend as much time as I want reading long-winded histories and long-winded fiction, checked out from my local library.

I never achieved this sort of freedom in college. Owing to professors’ busywork, my frenetic schedules and a sadly delinquent campus library, I was doing almost as much as I am now, but it never seemed to matter as much. Papers were just another hurdle, over which I’d leap; going to class was just another sand trap, around which I’d aim.

Now, working matters. Now, I don’t have to worry about artificial deadlines, arbitrary assignments, fundamentally useless paper pushing. I’m doing it for real, now, and all doors are open — that’s liberation, and it changed my whole paradigm. I hated work, but now that I’m busier than I’ve ever been, I love it.

Funny how that works out.

In the Middle of Class, a Different Kind of Text

March 9, 2008 in The Way It Were
Tags: advice, cell, classroom, confiscate, master teacher, message, moral, passive, phone, reading, rule, school, student teacher, substitute, talking, teacher, teaching, text, the glare, voice

My weekend got off to a marvelous start. I got to confiscate a phone.

I had been monitoring the class my master teacher had me subbing — the same seniors I see every day, except now I get paid to do it — and I was busy making sure the little rapscallions spent their time reading reading. I was also brushing up on my use of the passive voice, but that’s neither here nor there.

Rather than read, one student — who, coincidentally, was tardy to class that day — kept talking. After a few uses of the glare I called her on it. Her friend decided to step in on her behalf.

“We aren’t doing anything, anyway. What do you expect?” she said. “People are going to talk. I think we should get out early.”

I expected that non sequitur — I am a sub, after all, and students love to make any argument on Sub Day that includes “we should” and ends with “get out early.” No dice, kiddo.

What got me was that she was text messaging while she talked. Strictly speaking, I didn’t see her phone as she was clever enough to hide it under the desk, but she was at least looking at her lap very intently, and was scooted back from the table just enough so that the right angle would show a cell phone. Her book lay open on the desk.

As per the class rule, I confiscated her cell phone — she seemed surprised that I saw through her ruse — with a promise to return it the following class day, a phrase which here means “on the other side of a weekend.”

She issued a protest. I told her to stay after class to talk about it, and she did.

“I have to call to get a ride to work. We don’t have a landline.”

“Nobody else in your family has a cell phone?”

“No.”

“Do you have friends?”

“I can’t use their phones. Their phones don’t have my mom’s number.”

Caught her in a lie. She can wait until Monday.

Moral of the story? Maintain healthy skepticism toward excuses. More than a few are false.