Tuesday, January 21, 2014

but also, all of this!

Reasons to get up this morning, the Tuesday edition:

1. It is totally possible we will have a snow day -- and only slightly possible that, like last time snow started in the late-morning hours, my child's caregivers will collectively decide,"eff this noise" leave a single voice message on my cell phone at 2 pm letting me know that they are closing at 4, not call daddy, and then follow up at quarter to five, wondering if "[I am] on the way to pick up McCartney". (I was not.)

By "we", of course, I mean New York City Public Schools and their associated after-school programs, since if Facebook is to be believed, everyone in the entire world besides myself not only has a snow day but may never have to report to work again. (So can I have their jobs?)

2. Facebook is not to be believed. About anything. Ever.

3. Should my nursing job search continue to avail me nothing, there is always the New York City Teaching Fellows, as there was in 2008, 2011, and 2012. Although it's getting increasingly harder to avoid their questions as to why I have not accepted their offers to join: do I just need somewhere to be for four hours on a Saturday, every other year?

(One does not simply blame one's husband for one's career choices whilst interviewing for jobs.)

For real, though. While it may only ever be a salve to the battered terrain of my self-perception as I continue to not find nursing work, the fact that I clearly am meant to be a teacher and that any number of nursing professors/colleagues/interviewers for said Teaching Fellows program have said that to me, in so many words, is reassuring, in its way. Like if Dancing with the Stars was cast, not with celebrities in the acting field, but novelists. "What can you do, Wally Lamb can't meringue? His novels are six hundred pages each!"

(I am not Wally Lamb.) But I would have been a really awesome teacher.

3. Writing. See my next blog entry, eff not writing, because -- while I'm sure they all meant well, those friendly adults who instilled in me that the drive to say things and do things and create things is a gateway to pride and the swift fall that follows --  WWJD if writing made it possible to continue breathing, if writing allowed J the headspace to occupying J's remaining hours with more outward-directed acts of service and worship? I suspect that J would WHAO.

I don't know why putting words after one another, however inelegant then arrangement or self-involved the topic, allows me to still the manic push to attack myself and those around me on the daily, and with special fervor on workday mornings. But it does, and thank God for that.

4. "God -as-I-understand-God". Which is to say, a God who does not create wonderful things like love and art and science and then jump on anyone weak enough to celebrate those things instead of attempting some weirdly reified act of worship in which one attempts to separate God from the only aspects of Himself we can actually see (to wit, the cosmos and the love and the W.H. Auden?)



I mean, really. Among the best feelings I am having this morning -- counter to the already- throbbing onslaught of job-related irritants (career advice: don't wait until a week before you leave to give notice, do so via an email with no apology, over the weekend, and then ask for a meeting to discuss "what this means for [the company]", because never. you. mind. my friend.) -- is the freedom engendered by the fact, whatever I do believe, I don't believe in a God who has a problem with gay families. Lots of other people do; let them. It's not that I'm a shitty Christian because I can't accept this God; in my perception of the universe, there is no such God, so my failure to believe in Him is natural rather than sinful.

And I can't even handle how good it feels to not be pounding my head against that specific wall.

5. Freaking babies, man. Let me tell you, after a week of rage-y, nasty, entitled eleven-year-olds (because, the occasion glimpses of Christ that one sees in even the most wretched among us notwithstanding, there are no other kind, and anyone who says otherwise is most likely trying to solicit funding from you), it is a blessing, in the corny but absolutely truthful sense of the word, to spend three consecutive days with my often rage-y, but also joyful, soft-skinned, and infinitely more cuddly toddler. Not only does the kid enjoy much more wholesome pursuits than twerking and insulting me to my face; he is still of a size where, when he does forget himself, I can pick him up, put him into his crib, and click links on Jezebel until he becomes something like "docile" and I become something like "able to go on". Would that middle schools everywhere gave us this option.

Happy Tuesday, everyone. What's getting you out of bed this morning?


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