Against everything

I feel like the good habits I built in the UK slipping. I have very scarcely been practicing Yoga which I had managed to get an hour of each day in 2022 before I came. I haven't run since I have been here or done any conditioning. I found myself pointlessly browsing the internet (when you get an advertisement for a book on ADHD you know you've been algorithym'd) even though there's so much to do. Even my prose is slippery. I imagine this is due to the fact that I haven't been speaking much English (in my head at least)! After 12 hours of practice yesterday during my school's festival, I reached a level of competency where I managed to get the number of a American lady before she noticed my +44 area code (though she said she had to be very patient to understand me, thinking I was a Polish man with very basic Spanish skills).

Anyway my pen has ran out of ink and I can't be bothered to walk to supermarket so I am writing this blog post in the stream of consciousness style I would write in my journal. That means I am writing to work something out, so bare with me. I don't think that superlatives like 'the people are are so friendly', 'the food is great', 'everything is fantastic' are particularly helpful. Not least because they don't really distinguish this gig from package holiday. The real question I should be asking is 'what are we  here for?'. We are, lets face it trained monkeys who get to make a living out of entertaining kids with a language that came natural  to use by an accident of birth-geography. Those of us teaching primary age children are babysitting. I'm obviously not going to mention this on my CV, but its true - I'm not particularly stretched as a pedagogue in the way I was working in the UK, where I had to manage a class of multilingual adults according to beaurocratic standards. This is fine! There's nothing wrong with child rearing, its the most important job one could do. Just because something is 'work' doesn't mean it has to be unenjoyable. There's a Puritanical and Calvinistic strain to life in Northern Europe, a hatred of the body that says 'anything worthwhile is like a pushup by other means'. Its hard to escape this attitude that sees people spend the majority of their lives attempting to turn into machines at work, and worshipping them at home. This so-called superior way of life being spread by across the world by blood-debt sees infants staring at ipads turn to children playing computer games to adults binging boxset  dvds to drugged up dementia patients watching day television in crammed retirement homes.

So no, I'm not here to 'gain experience' teaching Trinity Exams which will prepare me for a life of temporary gigs in the underfunded ESOL sector paying so little I will never meet my student loan threshold. I wouldn't have chosen this career path if I wanted to be rich. I am here rather to be temporarily reborn into a way of life that I can take home to be against everything.

While teaching prepositions of place to a group of 6 pupils I showed a put a pencil next to a pencil case and said the word was 'against'. The connotation here is that to be 'against' is to be in a contrary position that shows the adversarial anglo system of democracy:  'if you are against america you are for the terorrists'. Its important to embrace this war-like definition of 'against': be against  zero hour contracts, social media, consumerism, cynical uses boredom and other forms of the all the other easy ways of accelerating the journey to death which are advertised as normal.  In Spanish however, the word 'against' translates as 'enfrente', meaning to face something, to be in that embracing position in which lovers cry out 'yes' and create new life. I think if I were to sum up my attitude to life I would say I am 'against everything', not just in the anglo sense of burning the map to see the territory but in the iberian way of vigorously and truthfully attending to all the things on this beautiful earth. So yes, after this post I will no longer be able to be to reference this blog on my CV but this has been a necessary form of potlach, a process of  'burning the map to see the territory'.