May 19, 2023·edited May 19, 2023Liked by R. G. Miga
My father and his wife are both teachers. Well, my dad is retired as of 2021--gritted his teeth through a year of distance learning and cashed out his PERS just in the nick of time, because by all accounts working conditions for educators are abysmal in 2023. On top of the perennial difficulties of low pay and crushing administrative pressure, the kids are completely checked out: oversexed and undersocialized and basically divorced from the idea of education as anything more than daytime childcare. The heavy egregore of "school" as an inevitability for all young people has been broken over the last couple of years; these kids have peeked through the veil to experience an unstructured adolescence in the 21st century, and they came back to report that it's all just Pornhub and the same four walls around you, all day, every single day, for weeks months years on end...
Another anecdote. In a small tourist town in New Hampshire, I worked at a coffee shop frequented every single day by one of the town's only EMTs. He'd been on the job for 20 years or more, and by the time I knew him he was a fascinating combination of truly dedicated to saving lives, and generally disdainful of the lives he was saving. Suppose that's what happens when every fifth call you respond to is from one of the same two dozen people, overdosing on heroin (again) or nursing bruises from their POS boyfriend (again). Craig could map entire family trees by dysfunction and saw the diseased roots popping up everywhere, locally and in the world at large. As far as he was concerned, most people are too stupid and self-destructive to deserve to live--and yet there he was nonetheless, sipping on a peppermint tea every afternoon, on call to attend to the worst day of someone else's life. I would call it inspirational, but there's something troubling about the idea that acts of altruism can be set atop such a deep bed of resentment.
I see so often people referring to how far they live from a hospital and how quickly they can get care. Is this some sort of fear of death or something?
Like the closeness of a hospital dictates where they live.
My father and his wife are both teachers. Well, my dad is retired as of 2021--gritted his teeth through a year of distance learning and cashed out his PERS just in the nick of time, because by all accounts working conditions for educators are abysmal in 2023. On top of the perennial difficulties of low pay and crushing administrative pressure, the kids are completely checked out: oversexed and undersocialized and basically divorced from the idea of education as anything more than daytime childcare. The heavy egregore of "school" as an inevitability for all young people has been broken over the last couple of years; these kids have peeked through the veil to experience an unstructured adolescence in the 21st century, and they came back to report that it's all just Pornhub and the same four walls around you, all day, every single day, for weeks months years on end...
Another anecdote. In a small tourist town in New Hampshire, I worked at a coffee shop frequented every single day by one of the town's only EMTs. He'd been on the job for 20 years or more, and by the time I knew him he was a fascinating combination of truly dedicated to saving lives, and generally disdainful of the lives he was saving. Suppose that's what happens when every fifth call you respond to is from one of the same two dozen people, overdosing on heroin (again) or nursing bruises from their POS boyfriend (again). Craig could map entire family trees by dysfunction and saw the diseased roots popping up everywhere, locally and in the world at large. As far as he was concerned, most people are too stupid and self-destructive to deserve to live--and yet there he was nonetheless, sipping on a peppermint tea every afternoon, on call to attend to the worst day of someone else's life. I would call it inspirational, but there's something troubling about the idea that acts of altruism can be set atop such a deep bed of resentment.
I see so often people referring to how far they live from a hospital and how quickly they can get care. Is this some sort of fear of death or something?
Like the closeness of a hospital dictates where they live.
I find it very curious