Dumb Stuff I Gotta Do

Dumb Stuff I Gotta Do

My dad used to have a notepad in, I think, the early 80s where each page, if I remember  right, said the above title. It was a kind of dayrunner notebook. Such notebooks are still available.

I have to do an amazing variety of dumb stuff these days. Thing is, for years now, largely in the trenches of elementary education, I have realized that the key for me is not to think about the things I have to do, but to think about how I need to go about doing them.

This has led me to strategize or "plan" my short to middle term future actions. Plan is a word that I am told refers to thinking about the future in terms of concrete, ordered steps. It may amaze some of you to know that I can entertain this kind of thinking at all. It amazes me. Now, my dad, you see; planning was actually part of his job title. He is an emeritus professor of Urban Planning, a Planner, and a planner. The gene was not passed on.

For myself, the problem has not been planning things out, but rather communicating to ordinary Homo Sapiens Sapiens just what those plans are. This comes must sharply into focus in the various journeys I have taken, such as my exquisite month of filth and suffering in Quebec on a bicycle last summer, but also in something as simple as what I can get up to just traveling form Emeryville Amtrak home. Pity the fool who would be subject to these whims. In company, I tend to leave the planning, for better or worse to others.

The watchword here for me is that if you can't change your mind, how do you know you even have one?

Well, I been changin' a lotta plans lately. This current week was to be a heroic glidepath of not teaching too hard as we come down to the end of the year. Oddly, Kaiser seems to have a different view of things. I gave up on asking them to schedule my appointments on days that were convenient to me. They just have no understanding of what it takes to set up a substitute teacher even in glidepath days. Their apathy toward the needs of my working life is palpable. So it is that my last week of the school year has an at least 3 day cookie cutter hole in it. 

My line in the sand is the last day of school. Clearly, nothin' educational is going to happen tomorrow, Friday, before the kids leave for summer. I do have a lot of organizing to do, that is, I need to have the kids take home everything in their desks. Turns out tomorrow's work day is not a "thing I have to do", not a "thing I need to work out how to do", but rather a thing I will not be able to do.

There is a famous and perhaps apocryphal quote of a pro cyclist, Tom Simpson, who died on the Tour de France in 1967. He had been using amphetamines, among other things, in an apparent effort to improve his performance. Allegedly, his last words were "Put me back on my bike." There are stickers available with this phrase. (I think I need one.) The tragicomical thing about this is that at some point, we need to acknowledge that we cannot just pedal away. In his case, he really needed to get on with the business of dying, and he did. Cyclists visit his memorial on a French mountain road. Sheesh. (This is not the kind of cyclist I am.)

Well, anyways, back to the subject at hand! My plan was to finish the school year and then start therapy. Funny, not everyone has that option. Not every teacher even has their cancer line up with their calendar. But here we are. As to finishing the school year, I have had to scale way back, as I said above. But at a certain point, school year or not, a teacher has to face the possibility of just leaving the whole shebang looking like a bomb has gone off, just walk away, leaving it for the hapless sod who has to clean it up. Leaving the spare underwear in the closet (rainy days on the bike), the yogurt container forgotten on the snack shelf (it keeps surprisingly well!), and the despicable pile of ignored paperwork for someone else to deal with.

I just found out that there will be a 1 week gap between the end of school and the beginning of radiation therapy. If the pain of my abdominal surgery (long story, off topic here, and as you can see, I stick doggedly to my topic) recedes, I will be able to use that to impose some kind of order on the room for whoever it is who starts out next school year in it. It may not be me.