today was the kind of day where I just had to come home and crack open a 22 oz. bottle of Stone from the fridge and drown the flame of irritation with sweet, sweet ale. (fuck yellow beer! huzzah ale!) I've been having this feeling lately of unfulfilledness. Now, this is a feeling entirely independant from my marriage to Alli. As a matter of fact, I can't look forward to anything more than that. I really think we're a "power couple" - we set high goals and we achieve them. We love each other endlessly and to be quite honest, I'm addicted to her. But back to my other feeling of malaise. (I must be careful and be quick for I am in the sway of the Stone already and the typos are more frequent.) I've been in a funk lately, a dark cloud - plagued, beset upon by an unshakable feeling. Now, this is going to sound egotistical in some ways, but roll with me on this, but haven't you ever felt like you were destined for something great? Like, you knew that you were going to be or do something GREAT that would be remembered for all eternity? Be someone like Coleridge or Whitman or Hughes or Shakespeare or Spielberg or Presley? Not that I feel that I'm squandering my life or anything, but I have to say, I imagined more for myself than attempting to drill the idea of metaphor versus simile into some reluctant and relcacitrant teenager's skull. I'm going to be honest with you here, (thanks probably to this potent brew I'm imbibing) I don't know if I can do this for the rest of my life. Here's the main problem - I've always envisioned myself as a great human, someone who really made their mark on the world. I can see this energy in many of my friends. I can see Joe and Ben and Cory and Dave and Jason and Aaron and Jenn and Alli all doing it. For some reason, I can't figure out how or why I would be able to do the same. This is a tempest of the soul I need to get over quickly, lest I become a miserable beast for the remainder of the school year (although, 5 weeks is an entirely doable beast-hood), and as reluctant as they are in the ways of learning, my students don't deserve that.
posted by MAtt D. at 4:54 PM