Tuesday, 11 April 2006

• Teacher. This name of names ascribed to me by virtue of a job in education, itself an ethereal, formless concept endlessly approached, more often mimicked in the guise of school. I am a teacher, in this school. A sweaty sack of bile and bone in a cheap tie and in the simian process of mimicking the manufactured: teacher. With a modicum of addition, it is readily apparent that for what I take to be my I, there is but less of me than the baseless, costumed marionette leaping about in an irrational fear of disappointing some larger force he cannot hope to comprehend. Now that’s a freakin’ onion metaphor - like one of those Russian toys in which each figurine hides a slightly smaller identical twin, and so forth. If I am broadly viewed as a hetero male American Protestant teacher in a state named Florida on a planet called earth, then it is equally lamentable that each of those categories should be sub-divided and, redundantly, re-sub-divided ad infinitum. The frightening thing about those Russian toys, and quite possibly the reason for their popularity the world over, is that none of the figurines is any more real or authentic than any other figurine. They’re all hollow, deceptive and hollow. No core. No center. No nascent being. Just diminishing quantities of negative space.

   

  Dude. It was a long day at work. I should have stuck with economics in college. Sure, chasing the concept of money may be as illusory as that of knowledge, but if you’ve ever tried to teach cultural philosophy to an audience who could care less simply because the grades don’t count, well, you begin to appreciate the idea of self-inflicted schadenfreude – or masochism – or masochistic irony. Those work, too. And what if, in the worst case scenario, I did graduate with an economics degree and got that phat corporate job, perhaps middle management, and I still wasn’t fulfilled? Well, at least I’d have a cool set of wheels and some trophy-wife-lovin’ every other week. I can admit openly, but with some amount of frustrated shame, that other than suburban girls (who get Jettas on their sweet sixteenth), nobody really thinks these cars are “cool”. As for the wife, my trophy hasn’t been loved for months. It is, in fact, just another diminishing quantity of negative space. Sigh.

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