Well, I'm still hovering around the same basic weight from day to day, give or take, but that basic weight is very slowly dropping. I'm certainly not going to make the kind of progress I had hoped for, especially since it's only about two weeks until our big kayaking trip. But at least I am, for the most part, making progress.
But at the same time that I make this little progress, it seems that everything else is going backwards.
They always say "when it rains, it pours" and "bad things come in threes" and other such sayings about trouble coming in packs. It certainly seems to be true--celebrities seem to die in groupings, tragedies within a group of people seem to occur together. Here in our school community, we lose parents, cousins, grandparents, other family members, and friends in groupings.
But in regular daily life, it doesn't necessarily require "events" to cause pain and torment. Rather, it seems it's just a gradual increase of unhappiness, only needing one actual "event" perhaps to become the proverbial straw for the camel.
Every year we live in the South adds some unhappiness to our lives. We did not ever intend to live here this long. All the things we like to do (water sports, winter sports) are not easily found in the surrounding area. We've wanted to move for years, but we haven't ever found jobs or anything like that, and we don't have the money saved up to buy a house. So that's been frustrating; we've only recently begun trying to save for that.
But as we've stayed, we've grown less and less happy with our jobs. Oh, mine is fine, for the most part; I love teaching, but I'm tired of having technology shoved at me and forced into my curriculum. My school is very "cutting edge", and the teachers are expected to use as much technology as possible, with less regard for the actual usefulness. It's all about appearances. All this has eaten into my planning periods and my free time, time I would normally use to plan lessons and grade papers. It's also very stressful; we all feel like maybe our jobs could be in question if we don't utilize all our technology. I doubt they'll actually fire anyone, but it's still disconcerting.
My husband's job is even less happy. Changes in ownership and management have changed the power structure of the company; although my husband has technically received "promotions", he has actually moved down the power structure. He used to be included in planning and implementation decisions; now he feels he's been reduced to a button-pusher. He's looked for jobs, but the economy and job market being what they are, he hasn't found anything in any of the markets where we'd like to relocate. And he's being sent to FL, where the company's corporate headquarters are located, for a week and a half, at pretty much the worst time they could send him--I'm also supposed to be out of town, and then we're supposed to go kayaking; we're going to have a hard time paying for these tickets even though we get reimbursed for them after the fact, and who is going to watch the dog for this period of time?
Sorry, this whole thing probably seems really incoherent, but I'm just really disappointed with how everything is working out (or not working out), and I'd really like to do something to make my husband happier, but I don't know what to do. I'm just frustrated, and tired.
No comments:
Post a Comment