27 July, 2007

Holidays are gone and back into school. I feel completely fucked. Man, this job is hard work. If you’re not being hammered by students, it’s colleagues. If it’s not colleages it’s marking, planning, thinking and trying to remember all the shit that is expected of a teacher. If it’s not that…well, shit….you’re asleep. I love this job….but shit it’s hard work. It’s hard to switch off to the students’ lives sometimes. Most are great people but have some shit World’s to live in and it’s hard to hear some if it, work with it and not burst into tears. If I have a whisky after work you can damn well bet I’ve heard at least one thing that has rocked my world…beatings, drugs, alcohol, frustration, pain, anger, violence, aggression. I hate watching kids deal with this stuff and am only able to help in small ways. I’m not their friend but I always feel like I have to be stable at school. Sounds pretty twee and all Florence Nightingale but if you worked with some of these kids you’d feel it too.

It’s been a tough few weeks and I have fallen back on punk music. I was thinking about my second year at university this week. It was a truly unpleasant time of my life and things were pretty bleak. I still remember the day that I popped a tape that my brother had left into a car stereo and heard… “aaaaah fuck, fuck , fuck, fuck” followed by Session. I worked my way from there. Punk music still seems to make things work for me. New Zealand is a great place to live but it’s a frustrated and insecure place which tends to wind up the locals. I hope we figure it out sometime soon.

I have started doing cross stitch again. Inspired by the Transformers movie I have started sorting out an image of the original Bumblebee for a cross stitch. It’ll be about 200mm x 200mm and 8 colours. It’s the pose off the original box and makes him look tough but still … Bumblebee. Hopefully it takes ages and looks as good as I think it will. Beats thinking.