"...Did you come here for a pie, sir?
Do forgive me if me head's a little vague..."
Okay, so this all starts like a revolution... or a war. Or an alternative -and, hopefully effective- pain killer.
Like some French people one hungry afternoon might have thought about their precarious situations and come to that one historical conclusion: "fuck this".
Like thousands of nameless wacked-to-numbness wives one fine day pluck up some courage and come to their own fork in the road, and decide for the one way that's gonna chage their lives; the one that says: "fuck this".
Like a born teacher who was not allowed to know she was; who had to stagger, stumble and then silently tiptoe her way through tedious bunches of other jobs that made her learn who she was, only having to repeat, every new step of the trip, that every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end, as the song said. Then, a big inevitable truth, as a mantra, just not to forget, ever again, how decisions can be easy to take, and how their consequences have to be lived proportionally to the amout of effort used to take the decision that provoked them.
All that is lyrical for I'm old enough to know my limits, far too young not to disregard them, and that's costing me no less than my health. I believe being a teacher is one of the most important jobs in the world (after doctors, and right before coffee and tobacco makers, in my list) and some of the people I'm working with apparently don't seem to share my views on the subject.
"You take it personally", they said. There's always somebody ready to say that when I try to assess important flaws in the system.
I'm working with boys and girls. I'm shaping their thoughts, I have the very scary capacity to manipulate them into wanting or not wanting something. I have a certain power over their future, and then again, over mine. I'm working with their choices, their limitations, their talents. I'm moulding souls.
I'm working with teenagers; the people who will choose my generation's retirement homes. Can it get any more personal than that?
That's how one day I woke up with no voice, high temperature, and in a state of general bodily misery. My head hadn't hurt so much since The Morning After The Night of My Eighteenth Birthday, and this time, much to my discontentment, I hadn't drunk a sip.
I sat on my bed, scratched my poor aching head gently, grabbed the phone and, while hearing the first tones of the school phone, I said into the speaker: "fuck this".
That was some weeks ago. Before the procession of pain killers they've given me for my strange migraine. Before realizing I was working far too much and sleeping way too little. Before deciding I don't want to be Lara Croft anymore, jumping, running and fighting off alleged baddies and
-real- parasites.
It's taking me a while to settle for some basic rules in order to keep being myself adn not dying in the attempt. Goodbye Lara Croft, hello Mrs Lovett. If I gotta sell human meat pies, so be it, but a woman's gotta do what a woman's gotta do, and I'm not letting anyone or anything get between me and my idea of what my job -or my life, at that- should be like.
The late nights, though, are gonna keep being late. That does not belong to a phase, I'm afraid, but to my very person: If I were an animal, I'd be an owl. For an owl to be me, it would only have to smoke. A lot.
I think... I have to go to bed. Tomorrow's the first day of this silent, cold and inner war against my Stupid Self, something I have to do for the sake of my Survivor Self, my Admired Self, the part of all myselves that I long for the most.
"...A woman alone,
With limited wind,
And the worst pies in London!
Ah, sir, times is hard,
Times is hard...!"
Night-Night.
