I had a day at work.  That means I spend the day being the person that people expect and accept that I am.  Mostly, I actually am that person.  Sometimes I’m just wishing everyone dead and have my game face on like wearing period panties.  But after all these years, I’m mostly just who I turned out to be, which in this case is someone associated with distance learning best practices and college strategic planning and academic program assessment.  I had my best work bud, Patti, in the mix and my next best one too, Marta, in successive meetings, making eye contact mid boardroom typa deal.  I need to spend about 150k on a learning management system, which is a thing you put classes on and run them out of.  Every class that we migrate over to that new system costs money.  So only the ones that are halfway decent can go, and everyone else gets busted back to a classroom in the real world.  And let’s be clear: many educators are getting paid to teach classes that they do not at all show up for, and as long as students get an A in those, mostly they don’t complain.  There are classes that have no syllabus, no grades, no evidence of interaction whatsoever.  Then there are the “best practices” standards, which my name is equal to, but I do not meet them.  I know what they are, and I do not meet them fully.  I do not engage with my students daily any more than I eat the right amount of vegetables per day, drink the right amount of wine, think the most productive of thoughts – I do not meet them any more than I meet ANY standard, which is not at all in any case.  I say this.  And people pause and I can see them thinking “whew” or “wtf”, either of which is fine by me. I teach like I (would prefer to) live; I would rather you read some stuff and I read some stuff and some of it was the same but some of it was different (but similar, like, ya know, ABOUT SOME SHIT really, some kinda way) and that we just trusted that was so of each other, and that in the aggregate it was adding up to some measure of an introspective life respectively, which included trying not to be a total asshole if at all possible and sometimes even better than that - so, go read/think some stuff and I will too, and we’ll talk sometimes about it, when that would be useful, and sometimes we’ll talk and it won’t be useful, but that impasse might be useful to one or both of us, and it will go on like that until the end.  I say to the e-Learning monitor, “As for assessing my courses, it’s like asking if I look fat in this, I don’t want you to answer me honestly at all.”  She nods.  Patti laughs.  But she knows I’m serious even as she is dead-set on idealism.  She has to be, she has told me.  The three foster kids she adopted engage in behaviors for which they are about to age into ‘could be tried as an adult’.  About that, I can’t comment further in detail actually.  But the point is that she and I have come to a kind of crossroads: We can’t heal people nor they us in that process.  She cannot heal those children.  She can provide them a context in which they might heal, but that’s it.  And I tell her, truly, in my opinion that is not a failure of adoption, it isn’t a failure of any kind, every person’s life belongs to him or her ultimately.  Even children you have made inside your own body, once they leave it, their lives are more in their own hands than anywhere ultimately.  And they don’t owe it to you, it is not in existence to affirm yours, and they can end it even if they must, and you will die over it maybe, but tough titties.  That’s the way it is.  She can still TRY, of course, and feel obligated to do as good a job as possible of course, but that’s HER life, not theirs, and it’s a decent one as is.  As I am talking to her, I know, this is true of me too.  I cannot heal Aaron.  And if the context of our relationship could have aided that, it probably might have done so by now.  And regardless of whether he is what caused me damage or not, he cannot ultimately heal me of that damage like a magic trick.  He can TRY of course, which might enrich his own life, and it MAY help me (it couldn’t hurt, for sure), but it would probably help him more, and I’d still be in possession of my own life and how it feels and what it means (if anything).  I show this to the kids, finally, and we debate its merits.  Then I say to Ears, ‘You know what I’m really talking about right?’  Yup.  ‘Do not use people [women] as a means to an end, it's fucked, and you will surely not be able to gauge that correctly in any case.’  Yup.  ‘You okay with that?’  It scares the shit out of me really, either way, your being in charge of me or my being in charge of me.  ‘Fair enough.’  My having loved Aaron as best I could did not result in what I wanted for myself or what I wanted for him, did not succeed in effecting either, so by either measure, selfish or selfless/idealistic, it failed.  I would have to measure it differently, some third rail, and I don’t know what that would be at this point.  Patti has a little scrap of paper taped to her desk that reads “faith”. 

"That Uncertain Feeling"