Friday, October 14, 2011


I thought you all might enjoy the following email written by my boss:

you have all been here long enough to know that I march to a different drum.

I definitely have anti-social behaviors and I think I may be a psychopath; except that psychopaths almost always have a history of torturing animals. and I love animals. I don;t love cats, although I do like it when my dogs chase the black cat, but I don;t want it to die. maybe I do want it to die, but i don;t want it to suffer.

anyways, please, if I do something that offends you, let me know. and please, don;t be upset by my behavior. it is never personal. sometimes I find stuff out at the last minute. sometimes I have somethingelse going on. sometimes I think you are on the same page as me. so I bark orders, when i shouldask politely. I am sorry

I have never and will never want to hurt any of you and the thought that I have hurt any of you makes me very sad. Which also disqualifies me as apsychopath, since psychopaths feel no emotions.

Matthew

This week has not been the easiest for all of us. Last week of classes for the semester meaning lots of extra demands in order to get everything sorted for the course that begins Monday. As I already mentioned Nora and I had to make two trips to the base and speak in front of the people there, and this weekend I've been asked to come in and make calls to the kajillions of people who have ever had any connection to the school and had the misfortune of leaving a phone number for their future SEA harassment. Then additionally Nora and I were reminded at 930 last night (although he'd never told us in the first place) that we had an appointment at the immigration office early this morning, meaning I just spent the last three hours alternating between waiting impatiently and having my thumbprint stamped. On the bright side, three months later, I'm finally legal.

You know, there's a lot of crap that goes on in my job and a lot of reasons I could get really mad or upset or whatever. Mostly it doesn't bother me too much. I think I may not get as much of the crazy as Nora or Lizzie because for whatever reason Matthew seems to think that at any given moment I'm on the brink of quitting. I emailed him earlier this week regarding one of my kids classes and his response was to ask me in the future to please include a subject line because every time he gets an email from me he thinks it's to say I'm going to quit.

Earlier in the week a guy walked in and wanted to talk to Matthew about getting a teaching job. Here's another can of crazy, by the way: when the guy first walked in I spoke to him in Spanish and he got that deer in headlights look like I don't understand what's happening. I asked him where he was from and he said that he was an ex-pat. Which is weird, because that's irrelevant to the question I asked and anyway we all are here. I brought him up to Matejo (my clever name for Matthew, by the way, a superb blending of Mateo and pendejo) anyway. Then later I hear that the reason he said he was an ex-pat was not that he was living outside the country, but rather that he had attempted to renounce his U.S. citizenship. I imagine he didn't officially succeed in this because as the story goes his method was to walk into a U.S. embassy somewhere in the north of Mexico and throw his passport on the table with a dramatic flourish: "Here, take it, I am no longer a part of you." The idea (idiotic) being that without the citizenship he wouldn't get deported for working illegally. Um, you're a dumbass, I'm sorry, there's no being nice about this. I have heard of people renouncing citizenship - it makes sense for tax purposes if you are absolutely certain you're never moving back. But only if you have citizenship somewhere else. You can't just be a free agent.

He has none of that and also, dude, you don't speak the language. And also, dude, you don't have a degree or any of the basic qualifications to be hired as an English teacher. You can't just speak English, ya know? It's kind of insulting to say otherwise. Anyway, as I said, this guy was a dumbass. He had shown up to the island with 66 pesos to his name. That's about 6 dollars and not even enough for the ferry ride back to the mainland.

The point of this digression is to say that Matejo told him that he was afraid of me. Yeah, you better be, ya butthead.

The thing that worries me though is that Matthew really gets to Nora. One night this week she knocked on my apartment door after work absolutely livid about something he'd done or said, and another night she knocked on my door and burst into tears as soon as I'd stepped outside. Now she's taking the weekend to think over whether or not she's going to quit before the new round of courses on Monday, and I don't know what she's going to do. Nora's my best girlfriend here - to be honest I have not an enormous amount of patience for Lizzie or Mel - and I would be very sad if she left.

Side note. This week in class we were working on the differences between past, present and future tenses. One student's response to a job question: "As a child, I wanted to be a builder. Now I want to be a manager. In the future I will want to be a Chippendales." Also in his final exam the future tense question he came up with was "You will sleep in my bed."

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