While making my bed I discovered a tear in my bottom bedsheet. Ugh, Mondays… Am I right? I guess that’s what I get for sleeping on same side of the bed every night. Things wear out. I find that I’m having a change in observation about such things, that I noticed before but didn’t really think about.

My previous way of thinking was that I’d just go out and buy another set of sheets and move on. I know the crafty among us might attempt to mend the tear because that’s what people did before the consumer/everything-is-disposable mindset took over. But, looking closer at the tear, the fabric around it is also very worn. So mending the tear would only briefly delay the tear from getting even bigger. Things wear out. 

I’m in the process of filing out my social security and teachers’ retirement paperwork and however you cut it, I’m going to have to really cut back on the notion that I can cover whatever expense I run into with the next paycheck. My district had a year-round payment system, so that, even though my last day with the district was May 23rd, my last paycheck was delayed until August 31st. That helped  a little. And having stayed close to home since the Pandemic, I had some reserves in my bank account such that I wasn’t feeling too pressured to look for immediate further employment. The months since the end of May have been about exploring whether I could retire or not. 

I’ve applied for around a dozen jobs, positions related to journalism and writing, several applications for positions at my local libraries, but so far it’s been goose eggs. In my LinkedIn feed I see lots of classroom or teaching jobs that are looking for people with my experience. Nah, I’m done. I did everything I could do for as long as I could. Sisyphus is done with this stupid rock and it’s time to do other things with whatever time he has left. I’m reminded of this sign that I posted toward the end of last school year. Things wear out.

I talked to my tax accountant today, letting him know that I am going to forward some retirement paperwork to him so that I don’t screw up the numbers. He talked about his investments and the economy and I recognized that I should have done a much better job planning for this than just working my ass off, at least one year beyond what I had originally planned and then walking away with no other plans than hoping that I can survive on my social security and teachers’ retirement. Truthfully, when I left a very good job at the phone company in 1994 to start teaching, I had no plans to retire and thought that I’d just do this until I dropped dead. Even when I began I saw veteran teachers who seemed to survive each year with minimal trauma and what looked like a pretty good work/life balance. I never really got there. 

Since the beginning, September 1995, I was the guy who got there at the crack of dawn and after taking a dinner break would be back in my classroom until 8 or 9 P.M. When technology became my main subject, it was virtually around the clock with me doing research when I got home five days a week. My rewards for all this hard work were taking Monday night off for Monday night football and Fridays at Taco Beach. I’d sleep late on Saturday and Sunday and just keep on working. I did it that way because I loved it and I thought that’s what was required to get the job done. It only got worse when I started teaching at the university level at Full Sail University in Florida. 

At least with traditional public education there were the holiday breaks for Thanksgiving and Christmas and Spring Break and summer breaks (even though I was on campus for many of my summers working on setting the technology up for the coming school year, but there were no kids to deal with!). But at Full Sail it was literally 24/7, with a couple days off for Thanksgiving and Christmas and Fourth of July, and depending on how many years you were with Full Sail determined how many days off you’d get for your annual vacation. Again, I did it because I loved the work and I felt like this is what was required to get the job done. And I would have kept on that trajectory had two things not happen to me that made me reconsider my plans.

The first wake-up call was in 2012 when I was diagnosed with Chronic Inflammatory Demyelinating Polyneuropathy (CIDP), having lost the use my legs such that I could not support the weight of my own body. That made for a two-year struggle that I hadn’t anticipated. My neurologist said that I had a mild case and after 88 IVIg infusion treatments I was “cured,” but would always have some neuropathy in my feet, a not so subtle reminder of how quickly life can go sideways. The second wake-up call was when I was laid off from my teaching job at Full Sail in October of 2014 because the university couldn’t make their budget. As if the first one wasn’t enough, the second one really made me reconsider my life choices. 

I really love my teaching job at Full Sail, but it was, as usual, it was all encompassing and I had nothing in reserve to get me through to whatever was going to be next. I survived the next two years working way below my pay grade at a “summer camp” type job with Full Sail Labs. I had made sacrifices to move from California to Florida and up until getting laid off it looked like my risks were paying off. I started down sizing and going through my stuff, digitizing the boxes of papers and journals and work that I had done over the decades. At one point I uncovered a note that I had gotten from one of my professors at Chapman University in 1993 after I had given her a copy of a book I had written, Briff’s Gift. She was my Reading professor, who I knew had published her own books, and she gave me contact information for a New York publishing agent. For the life of me I don’t remember if I did anything with the contact information or why I didn’t do anything with the contact information. All I can imagine is that I didn’t trust myself or my writing skills enough to make that choice to pursue a job that wasn’t some form of working 9 to 5 for some big organization (like a school district). Even in 2014, even after getting laid off from my teaching job, I couldn’t get my head around building a career centered on my writing or even some form of journalism. Thus, in 2016, I ended up taking another teaching job, clear across the country, in Las Vegas, teaching STEAM and robotics to elementary school kids in a low-economic part of town. It’s almost as if the pattern, for me, is inescapable. 

But we’re back in the game. I have a pretty salary, I’m back to “the early mornings/last person on campus” routine and I’m comfortable enough with my future prospects that I invest in a new MacBook Pro and a couple new Olympus digital cameras. As before, it’s too much work, besides developing curriculum, I’m managing and maintaining computer hardware and classroom sets of robot kits, trying to figure out how to make all of this work for the entire school. I also started coaching the school First LEGO League robotics team before school and on a couple weekends. I love it, but there is no room for anything else in my life and after the first couple years my interaction with my administrator became strained, the last straw being that I turned in some district assessment late. It became clear to me that he’s one of these administrators who picks out his heroes and his goats and for whatever reason I ended up on his goat list. He made a formal reprimand because of the late paperwork and said he was unimpressed that I was the last one working when he left for the day. Strangely the solution was for me to switch schools, in the 2020-2021 school year, after the Pandemic hit to teach Robotics and Media at a middle school in a low-economic part of the city. Gee, I wonder how this story is going to turn out… 

Actually, because we spent from August to February teaching fully-online, I was in heaven. It may have been hell for the kids, but I loved working from home, using the virtual classroom and having them turn in their work via Google Classroom and Canvas LMSs. Hell, this is what I was doing for the six-years that I taught at Full Sail University, and had gotten my Masters and worked on my doctorate in Educational Technology online from 2001 until 2009. Alas, I was the only one who seemed to like, much less love, working in virtual environments. So that practice was forced to a close down as quickly as possible and I slugged it out for another two-years dealing with de-socialized middle-schoolers who didn’t want to be in my classroom and were dedicated towards making everyone else hate being at school. I was done at the end of the 2022 school year, but I let an assistant principal talk me into signing up for one more year (also knowing that I needed to wait until I was 65, so that I could qualify for Medicare). Then that assistant principal changed to a more affluent school before the beginning of the school year she’d talked me into. That did not speak well for how the following school year would go. But, I made a commitment and no matter how difficult it was, I was going to see it through. 

It wasn’t pretty. We went through several assistant principals and a lot of teachers quit right in the middle of the school year. But I finished, packed up my robotics lab, organized things for my replacement, published my curriculum so that others could copy the lessons and units and have spent the next half year trying to figure out what’s next. Over Christmas break I got into a text chat with one of my fellow teachers from my last school and found out that my replacement robotics teacher lasted all of two-weeks before he quit. They’ve been “managing” the course ever since with substitutes and other teachers, selling their free periods to babysit the robotics students. I’m guessing that there is no ongoing robotics lessons happening. I wonder what condition the robotics kits must be in and whether they’ve broken into and stolen whatever LEGO they could get a hold of. It’s kind of sad, but it does keep my streak alive, that every job I’ve ever left has required multiple people to replace me (or they abandon the “mission” altogether). 

So, just like 2014, I find myself downsizing and revisiting past decisions, still trying to wrap my head around the notion that I can survive without giving up on my desire to write and become “employed” as a storyteller. Things wear out. Sometimes you just let them go. Sometimes you remember what you did before you got so distracted.