Thursday, September 09, 2004

Doctored Up

"Dear Dr. S.,"

This began an e-mail I just received from a doctor in Italy. The positive deception of e-mail. I didn't even have to complete the appropriate schooling to earn this address. I tried to make my reply e-mail sound official enough not to blow my cover. "Thank you for your message. I will inform The Good Doctor also when he returns from Paris" rather than "I'll be sure and pass your message onto The Good Doctor and see what he thinks when he returns from Paris."

It's becoming clear to me, from these posts and from the thoughts that go on upstairs that are secret from you readers, that I am not satisfied with my current station in life. I like my new job, and I have learned something new about life, about people, and about myself, with each new job. But I don't like being anybody's bitch. Which is what I am at least some of the time with this job, but still a step up from previous jobs: my very own office with a door! When I was teaching I was in charge (though the department chair did her best to make me feel like her bitch); I had bitches: You don't please me and pass this class, you don't move forward in your college career. Although teaching taught me and I did get great satisfaction from the few people who were attentive and learned (and from some of those who didn't), in that position I felt like I spent more time babysitting and talking to the air than teaching or learning. The frustration that came with teaching required English composition at this particular community college came to outweigh the benefits (that and teaching & tutoring enough classes to equal full-time but not receive medical benefits). I feel more satisfied on the other side sitting quietly in a classroom taking notes and working them through my mind and into my own words and ideas. I still haven't figured out where to put those things, other than in poems that don't make my economic living. Which is why I continue to find myself in the role of someone's bitch. Where is the best of both worlds? Transcend, young Luke (my mom was going to name me Luke if I had been a boy)! Act now and achieve your dreams! Picture me perched on a mountaintop, pointer finger up toward the clouds. I am Aries, after all, supposed to charge and ram with fierce fire and war-like fist, not get lost in ambling, wandering, floating. I am Aries, also, with sometimes too little patience for process. Who knows what this medical venture will stir given time. I think Spencer Short, poet about to begin law school--which is bad-ass by the way, may have had something to do with this rekindled fire under my brain's ass. Merci. Nevertheless, I sometimes think I'm destined to flit from thing to disparate thing forever and it's up to me to find satisfaction in that. I'm tired now and losing train of thought. Bitch, schedule me that colonic and shiatsu massage.

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