So, after a week full of paperwork and two night classes of summer teacher training, this is the first full day of summer school, and I don’t want to go. I’m not up for it. I’m exhausted from the last week of teaching elementary school, the grading, the graduation concert, learning the grading software, and then taking responsibility for my own kids 24/7 and now I have to go to class from 9 to 4 this afternoon and it doesn’t seem bearable. Plus I forgot to order the text books, so I only have one of them, and not the “important” one, which is humiliating.

There’s nothing wrong with the classes, mind you. Actually they’re quite interesting and I probably need to learn these things, about classroom management and making lesson plans, to use on interviews soon. But my level of exhaustion is very great.

I barely succeeded in dragging myslf to the class on Thursday night and then they said today’s class was not a half day but all day and I almost fell over in despair. The next day I went and told my mother:

“I feel like I can’t do it.”

She gave me that old teacher look, that she probably used on kids of her own classrooms before she retired. “Think of the positive results of going.”  She’s talking about having a real job and all the comforts of employment, things like being able to pay your bills and not worrying about if someone has to take a trip to the emergency room.

Okay, I can do something for 12 hours that would appall me if I had to keep it up for a lifetime.  Just because I’m exhausted doesn’t mean I can’t “wing it” one more time.  And again, and again. We all have our problems, don’t we? And it seems to me these days, that we wish they were dramatic, like the ones in movies, so we could get some interest and sympathy. Then they’d be like those of Indiana Jones: a giant ball of cement is rolling down to crush you. But actually, the real problems of life are much more pedestrian.

Not that I don’t feel like a giant ball of cement is rolling down a ramp toward me. I do. But I also know that my chances of getting past this crisis are almost as good as Indy’s chance of getting out of that tomb. And that gives me the strength to continue.  As Woody Allen said, 95% of life is just showing up.