Sharks and God

A kid in front of me was curious why there were sharks.  He asked god for the answer, and waited to “see if an answer came.”  He closed his eyes in a silent prayer, waited, and said “no answer came.”  He had the most serene look I’ve ever seen on a fifth grader’s face.

“I bet dinosaurs would eat people in heaven.  That’s why they’re probably down there.  I bet they have dinosaurs down there.”

I could tell a shift in my thinking occurred – before, I would tell the kid why he was wrong about the whole dinosaur thing, or that I could tell him why there were sharks and that he didn’t have to pray.  But when he was presumably asking for the answer, I saw a calmness spread across his face.

There’s nothing I could say that could justify taking that inner calmness away.

Delay in Houston

So I was sitting in the lobby of Hobby airport in Houston, a pretty darn small airport for someone used to Atlanta, a couple of weeks ago.  My flight was delayed an hour at the time of this writing.

There was a flight before mine that’s been delayed all day long, for the past 12 hours.  There was a technical problem, and the part needed to fix it is on my flight.  There’s a high school chorus of 45 kids going up to new york on that flight.  After articipating in many vrious boredom busters, they started to sing/practice for their concerts in new york.

I tuned out the CNN playing in the background and fosuces on the music.  The beautiful choral music produced by a group of 45 high schoolers who have been waiting in the hobby airport for the past 12 horus for their flight.

There choral music had a spirit behind me.  And whatever spirit they have after waiting 12 hours in a boring airport is more spirit than I have in my whole body.
And for those wondering where I’ve been – I’m out of town every other week for business now, flying to Dallas and Houston and Charlotte sometimes, and maybe Seattle soon as well.  Life’s just too busy to keep up with this on a regular basis, although I do have a couple of other posts hanging around my computer I’ll put up.

The universe works in mysterious ways

A while ago I asked my boss for a company laptop, as I really do need one to do my job.  He told me that they were going to surprise me with one by the end of the year, waiting for the new mac OS to come out.

I was on the phone with my mom today, discussing the logistics of our thanksgiving pilgrimage up to Indiana to see my grandma, and she inquired about said laptop.  I told her I hadn’t gotten it yet, and am starting to wonder if I really want it, as my job duties would expand even further from their already bloated state.  And I was looking forward to using the excuse that my grandma has no computer, nor Internet, so I couldn’t really do anything remotely work related while I was gone.  Laughs were had.

Well, my boss called me up about 2 hours later, saying the laptop was in!  “And great timing too!  You can take it with you on your Indiana trip!”

You know you’ve had a long/bad week…

It’s been a rough week in the life of Kinsi.  I’ve had much worse in my life, but this is probably the worst so far this year.  I pretty much had to fire someone for the first time – I didn’t have to actually make the call but I had to send him an evaluation that made it clear it was about to happen, and it pretty much completely trashed him.  He’s a nice guy too, which sucks all the more, and made me feel like crap this week.  But he’s just too, well, incompetent to be a tutor.  if you are going to tutor math, you need to know at least Algebra 2 concepts.  My brain knows that its part of my job, and certainly the students will be better off with their new tutor, but it just doesn’t make that sadness in my heart go away.  I have to write about 15 more evaluations at some point soon, and I’ve got a few rather big work projects weighing on me.  I haven’t had time this week to work on my NaNoWriMo and have accepted my goal shall go unmet.

I had a huge back and forth with trying to rent a car, which took a lot of mental energy away this week, and in the end when I got to go pick it up they wouldnt take my debit card, so then it was a whole lot of nothing.  When I couldnt find my cell phone when stuck in stop and go traffic in the middle of south carolina (traffic for no reason), I almost broke down in tears.  Its not that the cell phone had all that meaning, but it was just one more thing in top of everything else/.  (The cell phone was found…by me…underneath the center of my passenger side seat.)  Even the songs on my XM/MP3 player were making me want to cry (and we’re not talking about big emo songs here, we’re talking Santeria by Sublime.)  And whats with that random traffic in SC?  Traffic in atlanta doesn’t really annoy me that much, because its to be expected.  But the traffic for no reason in the middle of no where just aggravates me.

I hope thanksgiving will be a break – I’ll be gone from Wed-Sun,  off with my mom and my niece to trek up to Indy for thanksgiving with my grandma, but even then it wont be a real break.  I need to look into cheap vacations for next year.

But I just need a good cry I think.  So I’m going to go watch Ordinary People, one of the movies guaranteed to make me cry.  If I get it out then it’s out and not in, and I wont be obsessing over it.  And hope that the rough week shall end tomorrow.

What a research paper on Emerson can teach me about life

So I work for an education company, for the two of you that don’t know. I still teach a few days a week, but now I mostly do other stuff (like training, which is what I’m doing right now typing via PDA in charlotte.)

My student Chris had to decide on a research paper topic, and I helped out with the decision. He picked the topic Emerson’s attacks on Unitarianism, as he had just read some Emerson in school. Last week I had to proof and edit his paper, which was the first time I has seen his final paper.

Well, he was filled with questions about modern day Unitarian Universalism. This was the first time I had really ever sat down and discussed modern day Unitarian universalism with someone, and that someone was one of my students.

He asked the inevitable question “what do you Unitarians believe?” After stumbling through an answer, he followed up with “well I read you can kind of pick and chose what you like of other religions.” I completely misunderstood his tone – I thought he was implying that was a bad thing but actually thought it was “kinda cool”. So I launched into a discussion about how some believe that and some follow more classic religions. Theres a UU Christian group, a UU Buddhist group, a UU pagan group, etc. He asked me which one I was in – I told him I was an undecided Unitarian universalist, and he thought that was cool. The whole table was absorbed in our discussion…and when I realized that I hollared for everyone to get back to their math and we moved on.

Evangelism on the job is a tricky business, especially for a religion that sees evangelism as a bad thing. Its even more so when the job is working with kids. I didn’t get to the point of inviting him to some Unitarian church, although there is one pretty close by the center in question. It took a while to get to the point in the conversation where I felt comfortable. I would like to say I don’t know why, but I clearly do.

I’m not solid enough in my beliefs to feel comfortable talking about them with other people in person…especially strangers. I’m just now starting to enter in a time of spiritual exploration, centered around Taoism and Ekhart Tollee, and I have yet to see where that will lead me. I hope that if I felt more comfortable in my own skin, then I would be more comfortable evangelizin’.

People aren’t perfect? – a quick post from work

So I had a realization today while at work – people aren’t perfect.  And I was shocked that I was shocked to find that to be true.

My assistant director is korean, and she speaks really, really poor English.  Whenever I hear talking English to a parent, or someone interested in the program, I cringe, because I know that if I were that parent then I wouldn’t enroll my kid at my center…because the people there don’t speak English.

Well a few days ago I asked my director, who speaks pretty good English for a Korean, to fax me something (I was elsewhere and needed something that she had faxed to the Corproate HQ a few days ago.)  She couldn’t find it, but did want to complain about something (shocker.)  Well, I asked the Assistant to find it today, and in no time flat she found it…even though she had no clue what I was talking about.  She knows the office and is pretty darn organized.

I was struck for a minute how I wanted her to be perfect at her job, but wasn’t.  I was mightily aggravated earlier in the day because of the whole English thing, but now am pretty satisified that she found what I needed.  I wanted her to be perfect. 

Then I got all meta for a minute – why am I expecting perfection from employees and coworkers, when I, myself, am [deep breath] not perfect?  In fact, I hate it when people either assume I am perfect, or expect perfection from me.  Yet I here I am, expecting it from others…and getting aggravated when it doesn’t come true.

I know I have high expectations…for pretty much everything in life.  I don’t want to lower my expectations…because that just seems soooo negative in my mind.  But maybe I need to lower them just a little, away from the unattainable perfection to just doing their best.  (Ah, but what happens when their best isn’t good enough?  The quandries of being a Unitarian Universalist Mid-Level Manager – an UUMMM – maybe I need to explore this idea further when I get home – how to be a mid-level manager while holding on to UUism)

shoot me now

My boss assigned me a book to read that he thinks will help me, especially with the whole judging people thing.  I’m fine with this, and I’ll read it.  I definitely want to get better.  But.  Butbutbut.

The book -

“How to win friends and influence people.”

oiy. 

Meanness = Promotion?

So my boss assigned me a task because I can be mean. He saw me being rather harsh to a trainee who was on his last day of training. On the last day I’m a little harsher to fine tune some of the problems I’ve caught during training. Everyone says that training is harder than real life on the job, which makes be rather happy to hear frankly. This guy in question did really well on his first actual day of teaching…despite sucking hard that last day.

Well, my boss calls me up and wants to observe a teacher they’ve had complaints about. And he’s picked me because I “can be mean!” He was proud of how harsh I had been on poor unnamed trainee – I could hear motion in his voice when there rarely is any. He wanted me to be that harsh and particular when observing this teacher on Thursday.

So his comments had the total opposite effect on me than what he was hoping they would (I imagine.) I now feel pretty bad about being so harsh and particular with that trainee (despite its very clear results) and I’m rather dreading Thursday since I need to be harsh. I’m worried about getting typecasted.

This brings up a while new realm of questions as well – do I have to be mean to get ahead? I’m not a corporate cutthroat by nature. Is it time to start setting aside these feelings of uneasiness about being an ass to get ahead? AHH! I hate this inner turmoil going through my new quasi-corporate life.

Well, a little glimpse of the future career, dare I say, of Kinsi

Sometimes it’s really damn tough to get out of my boss future plans for me…even on a weekly basis, much less longer term than that (I usually find out where I’ll be Thursday on a Tuesday or Wednesday, for example) but today I asked him about travel -

See, when he promoted me and the other guy, lets call him Alan, he told us that we would alternate trips traveling with him when he goes off to other states to train, etc.  Me and Alan (yes, I also teach grammar for a living) were talking today and turns out the boss has given him a tentative travel schedule – but nothing on this end.  So tonight I asked him – I have a habit of being blunt with this boss, and he responds to it pretty well – what, if anything, the travel schedule would be.   This took place on a cell to cell, sometimes fuzzy connection, but what I gathered is that I’m not going to be traveling…Alan’s going to do it.  I’m going to be sticking close to home and eventually “in charge of Georgia” [and possibly North Carolina when it gets up and running]

Our company does have a plurality of centers in Georgia, and we’re the highest grossing state I believe, although they are hugely expanding out in California and that’ll overtake Georgia eventually.  “In charge” means in charge of like, teacher training, maybe teacher schedules, I guess.  Beats the hell out of me.

So I don’t know whether to be stoked or annoyed.  I don’t terribly mind I’m not going to be travelling – I was torn on whether I would want to travel or not.  Although I will have to travel around in Georgia…and hell maybe North Carolina and other spots in the southeast…it’s not the same as off to Illinois, Texas, etc.

I have to admit, the thoughts are there that Alan’s going to get a bigger promotion than me, which is ludicrous frankly. The two of us are trainers, and since that distinction was made a month ago I’ve really been the only one training new teachers…he’s been evaluating current teachers.  My bosses (including the president) are deferring to me when it comes to the trainees now, especially when they’re done with training and when they’re not, and just today I told the boss that the training curriculum he came up with had to change, and he accepted it.  But I also get the feeling they like him better than me (although I have to admit that might just be paranoia.  I have extraordinary low self-esteem.)

It’s such a complicated mess right now in my head about this whole climbing the corporate ladder thing.  Life was much easier as just a tutor.  This isn’t to say I don’t like training new teachers – I do, but it gets pretty monotonous after a couple of days in a row, whereas tutoring kiddos is/was always different.

Oh. Hey there.

So its been eons since I last update.  Reasons -

1) burnout.  I burnt out on everything related to Unitarian Universalism.  I haven’t been to church in almost three weeks…thats the first time thats happened since I set foot in the door of UUCA.  Burn out on everything.  I might not go to church again this Sunday.  You know what I did last sunday?  Watch every single star wars movie, all 6 of them, and it felt great.

2) promotion.  It’s not that its more work (its not really, just a little) but it just sucks the energy out of me, so by the time I get home I’m too zonked to blog.  or think.  or do anything but watch tv, read harry potter stories, or

3) fish.  I bought an aquarium!  10 gallon, got three goldfish (Fred, Ginger, and Craig, expect pictures in the future) and I’ve spent a little amount of time each night doing maintenance, reading about fish, etc.

There’s actually a lot more mental anxiety thats coming along with my promotion that I didn’t expect.  I got promoted from tutor to a low to mid level manager of teachers and trainer, along with still teaching students.  I’ve had some anguish over the managing stuff – part of my job is evaluating current teachers and filling out reports on them – I’m judging their job performance, and there are a couple that just suck (for lack of political correctness) and my evaluation will probably be used in justifying their firing – and it’s a weird feeling.  I don’t like it – I assume I’ll get used to it, but this is really the first time I’m responsible for evaluating teachers (and trainees!  I have to start giving letter grades to my trainees on how good I think they are so my boss can decide who makes it out of training and who doesn’t) and it’s just freaking weird.  And it makes me uncomfortable.