Sunday, September 30, 2012

W-Days

Chicago is nice
Autumn is cool and crispy
Leaves crunch under foot
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When you are young, you go to bed early. You walk to your room and hear your parents still watching TV or closing doors and turning off lights. You watch camp counselors preparing for bed while your part of the cabin already lies in murky darkness. You hear your siblings listening to music or doing homework as you fall asleep.

Then, one day, you wake up, and you are the camp counselor or sibling, or perhaps the parent who sent yourself to bed years ago. You find out what it's like to have your light still on while the young ones sleep. You tip toe around creaky spots on the floor to attempt to not wake them up. You go to sleep later and wake up earlier than them. You're the one who checks that all the doors are locked.
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I teach Mandarin at Morgan Park Academy to first and second graders this trimester. My students call me "Mr. Kyle". The teachers refer to me as "Mr. Kyle". I am Mr. Kyle. I feel I am a kid who gets paid to play the part of a grown-up... who plays with kids... and gets paid to do it. 
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I have recently discovered that it's one thing to have many tasks of the exact same nature to complete, but it changes everything when the tasks I must complete are diverse and spread me all over the place. In other words, if I have a stack of papers in front of me that have information on them that needs to be added to a computer (or some other mundane task), that stack of papers can be a foot tall, but it will still present less of a stressful situation to me than the challenge of completing a variety of different tasks.  
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Rockwell- Childhood Memories
Bjork- Crystalline (Current Value Remix)
Indigo- Ayahuasca
Seven Lions