exhaustion chic, or: how I learned to stop sleeping and love teaching

Tasks
1. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I’m teaching from 7:45-3 every day and it makes me sleepy.
2. This particular day (it was Tuesday) I also had a staff meeting after classes were over.
3. Then I went grocery shopping and spent 30 minutes helping El Boyfriend… pick out a goodbye card. He’s… particular about these things.

Trappings

jeans — Gap, refashioned blouse — F21, thrifted sweater — vintage necklace — fair trade store in Berkeley

Tales

I’m pretty tired right now, so I’m just going to say this: teaching, though an activity only slightly less exhausting than soccer, is fun. Because you know what happens when you work hard and do your job well as a teacher? It’s like you open a room and these amazing, infuriating, humbling little people walk into it and learn stuff and think stuff and then all of a sudden you realize that the world is a richer and more nuanced place because of what happened in that place that you created; you realize that what’s important is not that you taught them something good, but that you opened up the space for them to teach themselves, opened up a space for them to fill. And that’s a pretty good feeling.

Other good feelings? A thrift-centric EBEW! As an avid, voracious thrifter, I love having the opportunity to show off this outfit, which is made up of entirely thrifted, independent, or refashioned pieces. The blouse and sweater were both thrifted from my favorite consignment store, the necklace from a store in my hometown that sources fair trade goods from around this world (this necklace is Nepali!), and the jeans were an old pair of Gaps that I retrofitted and made new again. Even the shoes, though you can’t see them, were snagged at a thrift store — still with their tags on! My goodness does that ever feel nice.

Final nice things? Seeing my tomato plant blossom and flower. Look at these little babies grow!

And last but not least, this: I may or may not have spent the last two years working (sometimes full-time, sometimes exceptionally part time) for a large bookstore chain that recently announced it was shutting down. In the time I worked there, I met some unbelievably kind, smart, helpful, wonderful people, both coworkers and customers, and while it was never my career, there were days that I truly loved that job. The company closing means that some 11,000 people are out of work and a whole niche of our retail culture is ending. So dear, lovely readers, please think a moment about those employees before you get too excited about the liquidation sales; I expect that all of you are the kind of generous, humane people who offer support and sympathy to employees in such a situation, but I’ve met too many customers without that perspective in the time that I’ve worked retail to not offer a word of caution when given the chance. And for goodness sakes, brilliant reader friends, read something amazing posthaste!

Tags: biking, blogger event, teaching, workplace politics