You Won't Read This

Slowly close your eyes so that when this sentence ends they are - ready? - shut. If you didn't follow my instructions or if you've reopened your eyes, stop reading right now. Are you still reading? Do you, like everybody else, smell the scent of a pushover? You can just push me right over, is that it? I'm a feather-weight to you. I could say this story is a disease and that by reading it you'll catch it; that you're an idiot who won't understand it, so stop reading; that I'm bound for hell because I'm that bad. If I said any of that, you would still read this. That's because you are like my students, my children, and my wife. You refuse to listen to me.

Do you know I wake up every morning wishing I hadn't? My day is the fulfillment of various obligations. I get out of bed because I have high-school students to teach, mouths to feed, and a wife to appease. I did it all yesterday and all the other days, so I'm expected to do it again today. The wife needs me to be cheery in the morning or she's a bitch, the kids need fatherly wisdom or they bitch, and the students need a forgiving and lenient teacher or they bitch. I am their bitch.

As an English teacher, I suffer disappointment everyday: fragments, comma-splices, and two-hundred word essays on global warming and Good and Evil. I'm returned a paragraph on topics that require anthologies. They snip at me for being cruel and too rigid. (They don't use the word "rigid." One of them will mumble something with a contorted face and straighten his back. The rest nod in agreement, laughing.) It's a joke. Public school is a damn spin down funny lane. The principal peaks in and I smile like I'm pleased with progress. When he leaves, a senior asks me why sentences always have a subject and predicate. I have a doctorate and could be a professor. When I chose high school I thought I would make a greater impact influencing younger minds. I can't get to their minds. It's already too late. I try to make it fun. I read Hamlet to them, changing my voice for each character. They love it! But when I ask them to take a turn, embarrassment fills the room. They can't read and I'm too embarrassed to listen, so I read for them.

Some have been so far from passing that they offer to sleep with me. Young, very pretty girls who have no future unless they learn to communicate with their breasts and buttocks. Is it tempting? I'll be honest, yes; sometimes extremely when I consider being fired for poor student performance. I am low, but not that low. I would rather suffer from unemployment the rest of my life than sink that low. I do have morality in spite of my championing of Deconstruction. Truth does shift, but my wife's reaction to infidelity does not.

My wife expects too much of me, but I love her. My kids are little brats, but I love them too. I love my obligations as much as I hate them. I said that I wake up wishing I hadn't, but I forgot to say that go to bed glad that I did. Life is an obligation. I learned a long time ago that the world is only as happy or sad as I make it. Nothing is as I want it, but I'm not going to lose my happiness over it. If you've read this far, you've actually listened to me. Thank you.