What's Up, Wednesday?

It's been two weeks since a Wednesday post, so here I am.  What a time it's been.

First of all, the girl turned 14.  I fully intend to write a longer post about this, but I've also been trying not to dwell on it, so naturally it's a bit difficult to write about something you are trying not to think about.  Let's just leave it at "I-had-a-breakdown-listening-to "It Won't Be Like This For Long" by- Darius-Rucker-the-week-of-her-birthday" for the moment.  We good with that?  Okay, moving on...

 Mardi Gras came and went.  I love this King's Cake we get from a local bakery.  And I pretty much ate the whole thing myself and then had to downshift for Ash Wednesday. If you talked to me that day, I'm sorry for what I said when I was hungry.

Hello...

and good-bye 

What else?  The weather has been manic depressive of late.  Take your lithium, Mother Nature.  I fear there will be no blueberries this summer. 

Last week...

...and this Monday 

Just one more thing...There are times when I get fully fed up with my job.  I've mentioned a few times on the blog what I think we're doing wrong in education these days, but I don't like to go off on long rants about much of anything, let alone testing and pushing things on kids too early.   But then there are things like this:

And I fall in love with an abusive partner all over again. 

I read this in Big Magic by Liz Gilbert over a year ago and it's still hanging around in the attic of my brain.  Gilbert says, "I recently read a fabulous blog by a writer named Mark Manson, who said that the secret of finding your purpose in life is to answer the question in total honesty: 'What's your favorite flavor of shit sandwich?'  What Manson means is that every single pursuit- no matter how wonderful and exciting and glamorous it may seem - comes with its own brand of shit sandwich, its own lousy side effects.  As Manson writes with profound wisdom 'Everything sucks, some of the time.'  You just have to decide what sort of suckage you're willing to deal with.  So the question is not so much, 'What are you passionate about?'  The question is, 'What are you passionate enough about that you can endure the most disagreeable aspects of the work?"  

I've had many people tell me, "You should quit your job teaching if you find it frustrating and just become a writer already."  And I answer, "Like that's not frustrating too?  And I already am a writer.  All you have to do to be a writer is write.  Somebody doesn't have to pay you to do it."

Even writing for a living would suck some of the time, even though I'm passionate about it too.  If you don't agree that everything sucks some of the time, well, we most likely won't have a whole lot to talk about.  Probably not even the weather...