The Budding Optimist

I read once somewhere that teachers make around 3,000 decisions per day. I have no idea whether or not that's true, but it certainly sounds impressive, doesn't it? Therapy Elsa says that some of the judgments I have made as a teacher have led to consequences. When I signed my contract for this year, the contracted start time of school at my building was 7:05 a.m. and the contracted end time was 2:20. This meant I had plenty of time to log onto my laptop for my 2:30 medical telehealth appointments every other week. Only... they decided to change the start and end times of school. This meant I had to tell my brand new boss -- brought in special by the Superintendent -- that I had medical appointments that interfered with my assigned bus duty and various meetings two days a month. He did not like this. He didn't say that, of course. But he repeatedly asked me to ask my medical provider for a different time (although I explained several times that there was no other time). It b

  My therapist says I am undergoing an existential crisis. Again. What a trope. I feel like a caricature of a human being. For weeks now, I have been trying to make sense of life and death. I've been thinking a lot about transitions lately. I hate instability. I hate change. I'd much rather be instantly transported from Point A to Point B than have to suffer through the uncertainty and instability of the in-between. I keep thinking about butterflies and what a short time they live. Did you know that those pretty yellow brimstone butterflies only live 2 days? What a fucking tragedy. As an English teacher, I feel like my mind only operates in themes, so I've chosen one pose a month as a yoga focus, and then every class is a variation on that theme. January was lunges. February was binds. March was Mermaid. April was figure 4's. May was core-focused. For June-July, we did splits.  And then came August. Like many of Life's lessons, I didn't know what I was writing o