report to members

These last days of work before summer holidays begin are drudgery.  To be honest, a lot of the staff sneaks out and spends the afternoons in the neighbourhood pub.  I'm not really that type of employee, although I would like to be, and so instead I spend my days hiding in my office reading books and sipping coffee and watching the clock.  This is just as useless as drinking beer down the street, but somehow I feel like I'm on firmer moral ground when I do this.  I wonder why I care about things like this when no one else seems to.

Something is wrong with my office computer.  It has been making odd noises like those that occur before an airplane takes flight, that whirring sound that gets louder and faster until take off.  Only in this case I suspect take-off will actually be a crash.  In public school, things like this aren't worth mentioning to anyone.  I can tell the tech team my computer is dead, but dying doesn't mean a thing.  (This is the same policy practiced by the Ministry of Families and Social Development.  You have to report that a child has been killed, not that a child is being killed.  They only act after it's too late.)

Speaking of too late.  The Awards Committee coordinator just handed out the program to staff with two students' names misspelled.  This means their names will also be misspelled on the plaques they are to receive tonight.  This kind of thing drives me nuts, but the only way to prevent it is to join the Awards Committee and I know better than that. 

I had a dream about Colleen on Saturday night.  She was a child, maybe eight years old, and she had a terribly high fever.  The family was gathered around her, and the fever was climbing so fast that it was becoming apparent she was going to die.  We were saying goodbyes when she suddenly seemed to spontaneously recover.  And then I woke up abruptly, first relieved that my sister wasn't dying, and then to a higher level of conscious awareness in which I remembered she had already died.  I think it is Awards Night that is making my mind play these games.  Her daughter will be accepting an award tonight, and Colleen should be there.

One of the school counsellors is bugging me.  Ever since I finished my degree, she keeps trying to foist her counselling kids off on me, without consideration for the fact that I still have a full teaching load.  I do not have time to do her job as well as my own.  (Especially not when I'm supposed to be drinking coffee and listening to my computer perform feats of self-immolation.)  And my conscience doesn't allow me to send crying children away because it's not my job.

It is becoming increasingly probable that I am sick.  Actually I think I am often sick in June, only I mistake it for hay fever because it is sometimes difficult to tell the difference, except that hay fever, unlike flu, doesn't actually come with fever.  I have to present awards tonight, which means I need to go home and sleep on the couch for a couple of hours between commitments.  I am feeling worse as the day progresses.  I wonder why I always get sick in June.



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