Actually, that's probably not the right way to start. I mean, it was a singular month within my personal history of months, but if you really focus you could say that for almost any month.
Anyways, it was crap. Sort of. Semi-lucrative crap, anyways; I climbed the learning curve at my school, herding cats (year 7's) the whole time while occasionally considering just not going in the next day...and yet I continued to do just that. It was odd: I've finished 5 weeks at this job, which was utterly inconceivable when I started.
I had to teach Macbeth (which I didn't know), Of Mice and Men (same), Jekyll and Hyde (still nope), a poetry unit to year 9's who quite dislike poetry (kindred spirits), and an intro to Shakespeare unit to some year 7's that, by and large, have no business attending a school of any kind. Yet, time has passed, and here I am.
I spent the entire month being cold and annoyed, with a festive zest of being sick for the last 3+ weeks. The house I live in is spartan, moldy, and still my favourite place to be, because it means that I'm not at work or walking about in the cold.
At least the days have become noticeably longer, which lets me get out after work and still be able to capture stunning frames like this:
This city gets remarkably ropey once you get off the side streets. We tend to romanticize red brick buildings in western Canada, I find, because there's a look of permanence about them that you don't get with stucco and vinyl siding...but in practice you see a lot of permanent piles of crap. It could be that a veritable orgy of beautification takes place once spring comes around, but when you walk down the side streets...well, you can see. At least it serves to highlight the general ok-ness of my cul-de-sac.
Thus I sit on a sunday, reflecting upon the personally remarkable feat that I've continued to go in since the first few harrowing days - with an inordinate amount of work waiting for me to resignedly lean into after I'm done. I just thought that my literal tens of readers might be interested in some kind of update.
My prize, by the way, for all this drudgery, is visiting a city next week that my brother described in an email as a 'dogpatch'. While I understood the context of his comment, I still turned to my Chinese friends for affirmation on my vacation choice; it is exciting, really, for most people to get a chance to visit the 'ancient world'...you best believe I'll be taking some pictures.
As a parting shot, here's a parting shot of a remarkably country-road looking lane near my school: just don't take pictures of the old brick houses and things look a bit more elegant...
