Exhaustion

I am so drained people.

I crawled into the end of last week, barely able to stand or speak. My voice was a raspy mess of phlegm and stale air. I could barely maintain my body temperature, and my balance was for shit. In fact, I'm surprised I didn't tumble down the stairs on my way to bed.

I've been nurturing the same cold for more than a week now. What started last week as a bit of stuffiness and a fever has blown up astronomically into a huge disease clusterfuck. I've been coughing nonstop for four days now and around Tuesday night , my body broke out in hives. I've been a splotchy, itchy, miserable looking man.

And yet, I'm fairly sure I've done some good.

This is an interesting job I find myself in. Yeah, it's the education field, and more of the same education stuff I've continually fallen into (and continually swear that I'll never do again,) but things are admittedly different. First off, the hours can go from sub-standard to capital punishment at a moment's notice. Some days, you pull a three, and then there are days like last week where I was pulling nines and tens. Coming from a background where a full eight hour day was considered "working hard," an extended shift can just lay you out on your ass. And this isn't just sitting in an office staring at a screen, this is being in front of a room full of people, hoping that the information you are telling them sticks in any way possible. The state of mental drain you send yourself home with, trying to think if there was a better way to say this, or a better way to explain that, can be immense.

But it definitely can be rewarding. This isn't just rehashing the water cycle to a room full of kids who have probably heard it better and more entertaining from Bill Nye or some other PBS knockoff. It's important, valid information that people actually want to know. And at the end of the night, when I'm barely hanging on to my guts, and my brain is so shot to hell that I can't even process a commercial on TV, I can let myself slide into sleep and think to myself, "I think I did alright today."

This is probably one of the hardest jobs I have ever done. I rarely come home from a day where I don't feel completely fried, and where I have a hard time falling asleep at night because I'm thinking of what I can do to make the next day more seamless. But, I'm not using this space to bitch. It's hard yes, but it's a good kind of hard. I've got more freedom and space to function the way I like to, and I'm teaching to an objective. One that's pretty hard to miss. So yeah, it's not like my heydays when I got to decide what I wanted to talk about and present it the way I liked to, but it's close.

So, that's my story thus far. It's what resulted in a distinct lack of posts last week, and may serve to do so again. But I suppose, considering the ridiculous nonsense I do generate when I generate something, that you're probably better for it.