The Bostonian Abroad

-- The recent slap in the face is still smarting. Judgement of the kind forced upon me is very painful. I am entirely against hurting people, and this way of doing so is the most deplorable, since education is supposed to help, not hurt. Everything I learned as a teacher tells me that what happened to me, what routinely happens to students in my position is wrong. Teaching a subject without teaching about how to teach is irresponsible. The result is the kind of hurtful system to which I have been subjected. What's more is the insulting way in which those in positions of power treat those deemed less than the powerful. The arrogance I have seen is still stunning to me. It is hurtful and it is unjustifiable. It serves as a reminder of how not to be, both as a teacher and as a person. I shall struggle on, but now, with anger and contempt in my heart. I no longer enjoy this path, but I must persevere. Out of spite, I suppose, I shall continue. Having struggled so ha...

-- On the way home today, I lost my temper at a driver who was, in my view, driving like a jerk. I did the old, Masshole routine of tailgating, high-beams on. When she went to turn left, she slowed down to a complete stop and diagonally blocked the road. I laid on the horn, and a good deal of not-too-good words were exchanged, fingers punctuating the dialogue. I felt really bad about it immediately after it ended. I had lost my temper yet again drove dangerously, endangered my wife's safety, beat on my nice, new car, and screamed like a nut-case. Shameful. Why do I get so angry? Why do I feel so out of control sometimes? I swear that sometimes the stress I feel is so intolerable, it threatens to snap my fragile mental state. Work, school, commuting, isolation, culture shock, money worries - these all gang up on me in my head, and I feel like I'm going to lose it completely. So, on my way back to campus this afterneoon, bearing my former angry state in mind, I took 3...

--- The wind blows fierce up there, but it's gorgeous. People jumped or got shoved over the edge of the cliff, but you'd never know it to look at the place. Tourists flock there in droves, while thugs wait to steal their stuff from their unattended rentals.

---- It was about a month ago when the realization hit that passion was gone from life. The droning of the workaday, the getting up and going for reasons unknown, save the digits on a piece of paper adding to the financial security to continue in this limbo. I had lost my passion. This life had seduced it out of me, invited me to let it go. Linguistics removes it to quantitatively and qualitatively categorize and analyze various aspects of human language in an empirical way. Teaching had likewise been reduced to the systems of the language, the ways to communicate most effectively and clearly: English Grammar, Listening Strategies, Oral Production and Pronunciation Techniques, Cultural Analysis, etc. All emotion was gone. Something to be considered as hindering the analysis, limiting the effectiveness of communication, the true stuff of WHY we speak was excluded. Life had taken on the soma-pleasant sameness that comes over a person who lives in a place where the seasonal chan...

-- I have been in my program now for about three and a half years, and I have begun to wonder what kind of Ph.D. I am going to make. Am I going to be the academic pedant, "strutting and fretting my hour upon the stage, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing"(Shakespeare C.1620)? Or am I going to be a pasty wonk, seldom escaping the musty confines of the library, more content to interact with texts than with humans? Maybe I will be like Doctor Sullivan at NSCC back in Lynn? He looked like he just came from his bolling league, and he sounded authentically Bostonian, but he knew his subject, loved it, and inspired us with his teaching. I suppose I will end up a mixture of these. One of my friends saw me in class recently and said I looked pedantic. I know names and titles and use phrases like "in terms of". I guess by the standards here, I am a big, ostentatious poseur. But by the standards I grew up in, and by those I witnessed in my very short tenure in...

Here it is, 2004. We went to see a has-beens concert for free and had a decent time. The rain kept the massive amount of fireworks from starting many fires. All in all, it was a quiet little vacation, just what the doctor ordered. What is on the agenda now is the testing and jumping through various flaming hoops. This student thing is a tiresome business, but I am looking forward to getting on with it to get it over with. 3 1/2 years in, and I am at the point where I don't want to do anything at all. No correspondence, no travelling, no writing or reading. It is a blah place to be. The constant rain isn't helping.

The grades have been turned in. The papers too. The finals have been taken. The twicth has returned. As has the headache. I'm done, but I don't feel relieved. Such is the way when the work was unworthy.