"I'm a Teacher and a Student"

I spent six hours sitting in a crowded room hearing intelligent people use very technical language to describe proper approaches for dealing with annoying parents, unmotivated students and the best ways to bring in the best numbers.  I think it is good to help people, and perhaps there are some students who are trying to get into colleges where they could thrive but they're not particularly good at standardized tests, so we are helping them in their battle to not be held back by a standardized test.  However, I don't believe in bumping up people's scores so they can get into schools where they don't belong.  I took that test once, and it pretty accurately conveyed my abilities at the time.  My score was a little lower than the practice test, but I don't think it ruined my destiny.  I know other people who didn't get very good scores, and I wasn't surprised, and then they got tutors or took courses and learned how to take the test which was supposed to reflect how well they had learned the past eleven years, and they did hundreds of points better.  I will be facilitating that process.

I couldn't help but think of my hero Tom Robbins all afternoon:

“The enemy of the black is not the white. The enemy of capitalist is not communist, the enemy of homosexual is not heterosexual, the enemy of Jew is not Arab, the enemy of youth is not the old, the enemy of hip is not redneck, the enemy of Chicano is not gringo and the enemy of women is not men.

We all have the same enemy.

The enemy is the tyranny of the dull mind.

The enemy is every expert who practices technocratic manipulation, the enemy is every proponent of standardization and the enemy is every victim who is so dull and lazy and weak as to allow himself to be manipulated and standardized.” 

 -Even Cowgirls Get the Blues by Tom Robbins 

Then I thought of my other hero, Joseph Campbell, because I can't continue to support myself in my own apartment (inexpensive as it is) without another job.  From Pathways to Bliss:

Now, there’s one other crisis, and this is a very serious challenge: the intolerable decision where you really have to do something that you regard as immoral, beneath your dignity, something you’re totally ashamed of.

Well, this is an intolerable decision.  And intolerable decisions may meet you.  I had friends during the Depression who had families and no jobs; they had to do some things that they would not, as people in charge of their own lives, have wished to do for the maintenance of their families.  These are the sorts of things that bust up your ego and bring up the whole content of the unconscious.

Now the problem of individuation for Jung, the challenge of the middle-life crisis, lies in cutting these projections loose.  When you realize that moral ideals—the moral life to which you are supposed to be committed—are embodied in the persona, you realize the depth and threat of this psychology.  You are to put your morals on and take them off according to propriety, the propriety of the moment; you are not to identify these morals with cosmic truths.  The laws of society, therefore, are social conventions, not eternal laws, and they are to be handled and judged in terms of their appropriateness to what they are intended to do.  The individual makes his own judgment as to how he acts.  Then he has to look out to be sure that the guardians of the social order do not misunderstand or make things difficult for him because he is not totally playing their game.  But the main problem of integration is to find relationships to the outside world and to live a rich life in full play.

After the long group meeting we got into smaller groups and I got to hear some of the tutors talk about their experiences, and it all began to become more human.  Afterward there was a party with free pizza and booze, and everyone became even more human.  One girl told me that at first she was worried that test prep tutoring would be too constraining, but it can actually be fun.  I remembered back to taking the writing test in November when I had to write the introduction to an essay, and the essay was about the definition of wisdom: is it money, knowledge, or something different, like happiness?  In fact, many of the reading comprehension sections were about issues I had been thinking about a lot at the time and still think about, and would love to discuss with people.  By the time I left the party, I felt better about the upcoming endeavor.  And if it works out, it's only a few extra hours per week on top of my normal work schedule.  At least at first.  I only have to tutor as much as I want to.

Then I came back to my apartment and finished putting up the most effective inspiring quotes from (awesome!  DJ Shadow's "Building Steam With a Grain of Salt" just came on!) my room in California and listened to a great playlist on my iPod.  In fact, it was a playlist I had compiled of my 333 most listened to songs between 2006-2011.  The former is when I bought my iPod and iTunes began keeping track of my most listened to tracks.  The latter was when the headphone jack broke for the second time and I figured I should just buy a new one from the Apple store in Tokyo.  I still have it, in my pocket, right now.  Anyway, I'd started the playlist at number 64 with "Lucky" by Radiohead, and by the time I finished arranging the quotes on my walls it was on "Everything In Its Right Place" by Radiohead.

The #1 most listened to song on this playlist was easily "Wagon Wheel" by Old Crow Medicine Show.

The most listened to song on my new iPod, beginning in 2011, is easily "Place to Be" by Hiromi Uehara.

The second one on both playlists is "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots" by The Flaming Lips.