Back to school
Publicado em , por macaco
1:29 am GMT
I’m going back to school today… mind you, I’m a teacher there, not a student. I have to get on a boat in about 8 hours from now to go there and I haven’t come up with today’s class… I’m a bad, bad teacher. I think I dislike teaching a lot…
Anyway, I still haven’t collected my pay from school for March and we’re halfway through April. Needless to say we’re broke and that’s how important it is that I teach as a second job.
I teach in a sort of post-highschool course, which isn’t college, but isn’t that bad either… I really couldn’t say what kind of degree you get there, but I suppose you get out of there ready for action. It’s an art and design school and I’m teaching computers to the first two years of the graphic design course. Basically I have to tell them about PhotoShop, FreeHand, Illustrator and Quark Xpress. We use iMacs at the school which sucks because I absolutely loathe the damned little ugly things.
The computers do look nice when you first set eyes on them… after two months they just look “different”, and now they just bloody look ugly and I realized: “yes! that’s why computers are usually either beige or black”… It’s a low profile thing I don’t suppose fashion victims who actually bought iMacs will ever understand.
Anyway… I still gotta come up with an exercise for the students to do tomorrow, plus I gotta teach them how to start using Xpress which is something I basically can’t do because I don’t use the damn thing and I hate DTP anyway. (DTP means Desktop Publishing, it’s a severly cocky expression for putting stuff on a page and printing it out).
I’m also noticing that it’s only 1:26 am, although I supposedly started this entry at 1:29, which means I either misread the time in the first place or there has been a major space-time warp and I’m about to meet myself in three minutes. Interesting as my life is, I’m ready to bet on the first choice.
I think the worst thing about being a teacher is that you have to get along with a large number of young people. Young people are fighting to establish their identities and personalities and what-have-you. So when I walk in the class room and propose: “everyone draw me a rock band logo containing an illustration of a skull done in FreeHand”, there’ll be a guy yelling out: “cool!”, another guy will say: “this is pathetic!” and a third one (could be a girl this time) will say they’d prefer to do it using PhotoShop… What do I do?
I’m the teacher! I act like a mature adult, of course! I reach in my bag for my trusty double barreled, easy loading Quake shotgun and start distributing hellish punishment. Heck… I’d do it if it was a perfect world. Like my wife’s brother said the other day: “we should have several lives so we could just do that kind of stuff (he was referring to driving off a steep cliff)… then we’d just load…”
And he’s right, you know.
I just know that in a few hours, when I’m driving down to the boat station I’ll start feeling that Carmageddon sensation creeping up on me, I’ll start looking wickedly at pedestrians and sleepy slow drivers… unfortunately, I’ll just be a good boy and prevent a lot of deaths.
Life just isn’t fun enough. Neither is death, apparently.
…I don’t think anyone reads this, isn’t that pathetic? I double dare anyone reading this to e-mail me (not you, you nearly-successful lawyer with the highly intelligent 2-year-old who will inevitably take over the world)… but anyone else, I triple dare you! e-mail me now! Yeah right…
8:56 am GMT
Hello? am I awake?
I went to bed about four hours ago, now it sort of feels like I have thin long acupuncture needles in my eyes. I hate not sleeping.
On top of everything my e-mail program insists on downloading messages from the server that I already have… it’s now downloading the sixth version of every message in a 33 message batch, isn’t that nice?
Oh well, I gotta go to work…
20:05 GMT
Home… home at last.
Got my March paycheck, so it wasn’t all bad. Actually it wasn’t bad at all, except I was unbelievably tired… and I’m staring to suspect that my students think I’m some kind of junkie by the way I drop my head on the cafeteria table and gulp down coffee, like I’m trying to recover from some terrible hangover. So now I’m gulping down my 9th coffee of the day and reading my e-mail… all seven copies of each message… I long for Linux.
23:42 GMT – now playing: David Bowie – I’m Deranged
Coffee number 10.
I’ve just watched a pretty cool movie my wife rented. I was called “Dark City”. Nifty. It’s about this sort of alien race which uses a whole city as an experimentation lab and they exchange people’s memories around every night turning them into someone else altogether. Very good story, nice sets. The alien characters looked a bit like a cross from Fremen from “Dune” and the guy from “Hellraiser”, but ok.
Blast! My coffee’s over… I can’t get online the damned phone operator is messing up again! No, not the ISP, it’s the telecom company, the damned monopolist bastards…
Boy, I’m tired.
