Sometimes I’m happy I decided to go into teaching. Sometimes I realize that I laugh everyday I’m there, that I’m so incredibly lucky because I get into all these students lives. 125 students a day let me in to who they are. I get to talk to them, develop these relationships, give them advice. I get to see what they are afraid of, witness the important things at that age. Sometimes it hits me that I’m getting the very things out of every day of teaching that I always wanted. The very reasons I say that I went into teaching I am fulfilling. The problem is that I forget it nearly every day.

Sometimes I see things that remind me of how much I’m missing loving someone. I know I’m not particularly good at sex, that I’m someone who needs to be helped along the way, shown the right spots to hit, etc. Sometimes I get chilled from watching something on television or from something I’ve read and imagined happening. I’m someone in need of training sessions during relationships. Sometimes I just want to feel elational love for some beautiful girl and I want it to look like it does when Hollywood writers write it and I want it to feel like it does with two people embrace with a soundtrack behind them and good lighting. Too often I want to feel a life-long intense love connection to someone. Sometimes I feel the early onset of carpel tunnel syndrome. Sometimes I think I’m all right but that if I don’t find someone to spend some romantic time with I’ll burst or delve further into cynicism and masturbation.

Sometimes I listen to Ani and think of Cheryl and the concert I went to with all those women in my life. I remember snippets of her, like a Cheryl-montage, and then I go back to that night so long ago outside of McCutcheon Hall when we sat on a warmish night sitting on the concrete talking of our fucked families and how we were shaped by tumultuous situations. One could see the bonds forming in the spaces between us as we took turns sharing. How many lives ago was that? How much time I have wasted since then? Have I touched many lives since then?

Sometimes I think life is nothing like I thought it was. People interact in ways I just didn’t think they did. Fantasies are acted out and crushes are acted upon, sex is being had all the time by far too many too young and too old for it. Life isn’t valued, it gets thrown out with the old newspapers each week.

I am Jack's raging arm pain.