The problem is, when you aren't getting any compensation for your work, every failure feels devastating, and each victory seems inadequate. I know that that will change more. When I only have myself to disappoint as a teacher it won't feel so awful when I'm disappointing. Disappointing other people is the most awful feeling ever.
D and I found some pretty great honeymooning options. That's exciting. We waffled back and forth on a cruise for a number of different reasons, but in the end it looks like we're going for the cottage-by-the-sea option. Seclusion, beauty, privacy. Hurry up, July!
I'm finishing a book right now called Kira-Kira. It won the Newbury Honor award for 2010. It's a very beautiful book, I have enjoyed it a lot. Here's a passage I found particularly touching. The narrator is an 11 year old Japanese girl living in Georgia in 1955:
"Then I didn't feel like crying anymore. I just felt barren, my eyes felt dry. The sky was still gray. Everything was gray, the sky and the store and even my hand when I held it out in front of myself. I wondered if anyone else in history had ever been as sad as I was at that moment. As soon as I wondered that, I knew the answer was yes. The answer was that millions of people had been that sad. For instance, what about the people of the great Incan city of Cuzco, which was ransacked by foreigners in the sixteenth century? I wrote a paper about that for school. And then there were all the millions of people in all the many wars throughout history and throughout the world, and all the millions of people with loved ones killed by millions of other people.
A lot of people had been as sad as I was."
It's by Cynthia Kadohata. Check it out sometime. Originally I checked it out because it was a YA novel about a non-white kid, which is part of a required assignment for one of my classes. But then it turned out to be pretty great. Awesome!
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