If an occupied cell has two or three neighbors, the organism survives to the next generation.

At James's birthday party on Sunday, one of his old youth pastors asked me what I do for a living. There were, actually, two of his old youth pastors there along with about 20 other close personal friends of our dear own Mr. Parker. We sat in the back room of Chubby's along a long set of table table that grew more tables like mitosis o as people showed up. Chubby's is a place I can hardly recommend to anyone on Weight Watchers, but I can hardily recommend to all those whose weight is not currently held under suspicion, like mine is. Especially if you're hungry at three in the morning, and you want something a little less sketchy than Poncho's over on Main. Which, although delicious, is not my first, chubby's choice for pre-pre-dawn meals.

I had already decided how to answer the question should someone ask. I asked him if he meant what I do for living, or what I do for a job, because they're different things. For a living, I spend time with good friends, and eat meals, and hang out with homeless people, and love my wife. I read books, and comic books, and web sites, and I blog (now), and play in the rain. I work with the youth at church, and lead (ish) a small group, and am part of a smaller group of guys who are trying to encourage each other by speaking the truth, as hard as that is when you're good friends and you want to enjoy each others' company. But, once a day I head off to Olathe for 9 hours or so and do tech support for real estate software.

I used to be a teacher for a living. Like the Spice (without the cool eye color change) it permeated my whole life. I talk about the caffeine affecting my sleep cycles back then, but the teaching was just as much a part of that as anything else. A normal, good life should have a rhythm. Nights and days and rest and hard work. Live in the seasons and let them reverse the pathetic fallacy on you. But teaching for me was a full-revved engine twenty-four hours a day, all the days of the week, even on breaks. At a gaming session I once drank one and a half shots of AMP after having consumed three or four cans of the Diet Mt. Dew (seeing any trends yet?) and my heart started racing, and I felt seriously up for a couple of hours. The tail end of that feeling, when you're out of activity but still full of energy was what teaching was for me most of the time.

I taught English. Now, the NEA isn't going to acknowledge this, but teaching different subjects amounts to entirely different jobs. Believe me, I subbed for three years. I've seen it first hand. Gym teaching is pretty easy, it's the platform our school system has set up for coaches to actually be able to do what they really care about, which is pour their lives into young people. Something the typical school day is antithetical to. Math teaching is mostly setting up good assignments and then going over them. English is a different beat entirely. I don't want to dwell too much on that time period, but English teachers are tasked with teaching the building blocks of all the other subjects: reading, writing, speaking and listening. And on top of that, they're supposed to teach literature, too. Of course, for a good high school English teacher, the literature is only the delightful and rich tool to teach the other, more important, building blocks of learning. At Turner, every teacher was supposed to be teaching reading and writing (along with problem solving) in their curriculum. You can imagine how well that went over. So it ended up falling to the English teachers, as you'd expect. One short writing assignment is a minimum six hours of grading. And that doesn't get spread out over the whole school. You can't toss a writing assignment at a teacher's assistant like you can a multiple choice test. It was just me.

It was my first year, and I was dealing with learning to be an authority figure, and be organized for other people, and keep my energy up. And on top of that, grading (six hours for a single good assignment, remember), and plan five lectures a day.

It was my life.

More than living it and breathing it and tasting it in my food, it was who I was. I taught for a living. I loved it. I love the students. Like I said when I quit, I didn't dislike any of them. Even the annoying ones. I taught in my sleep. When I bought things I thought about how it would affect teaching.

I trained the new guy this afternoon just like I did on Friday. I took my lunch off to organize my new laptop. This morning, read all the blogs and comics I wanted, searched all the aggragating sites I wanted, played a game I wanted to, talked with Steve about the estate tax and a little about Ron Paul for a couple hours, worked on the book that I've been too lazy to write, and still had time to write this this afternoon. And I still took forty-one calls today. I get to see Nicholas and Dan here and laugh with them (and Rick Roll them). Mondays I have lunch with my dad. That's my job now. You can read Dan's Tech Terrors if you want a taste of the details, but for me, mostly, this job it's a necessary interruption to living, which really gets going when I leave.

It comes down to identity. Teaching used to be it. Performance, maybe. Succeeding. I like to think I'm giving that up. Learning that it's who I know, and how well, not what I do that matters. Being willing to follow Jesus to any weird places he might take me. Palces where I may or may not teach.

I don't know which life is richer. But I know which one affords me rest. And time with friends. And evenings with Jill where nothing happens at all. But it's also the life where I make up not-so-clever answers to the "whatya do?" question so I can spring them on people who think my job is who I am anymore.

Never thought I'd be that guy

The first semester I taught high school, my addiction got so bad that I would drop by the convenience store at the corner of 47th (Johnson County) and 55th (Wyandotte County) and get my fix on the way to work most days. That gas station is a scuzzy place. Like a lot of places in the Turner area. Not shady, mind you, just scuzzy. Like when you go to a small town in the middle of Kansas, and things are dusty, and no one notices because there's nothing to compare it to. That's Turner. small town feel, but they've got some big town issues. Gangs, if you believe it.

There is a liquor store next door, and a bar I went to one time to celebrate an early year Friday with some colleagues. It ending up being just three or four of us, and I had a Mountain Dew, and they all had beer. Step one of the reasons I never fit in with the teacher crowd. By January, I was already uncertified, and one of those guys at the table had drunk-dialed one of his volleyball girls and he got swept under the Turner rug like everything else there that doesn't fit the Turner values. He wasn't the only teacher that left in the middle of the year, but I guess small Wyandotte school districts don't matter in the grand scheme of things unless plagiarism is involved. But then again, Piper's got some money, and Turner's the cat that you walled in during remodeling and you can't even hear the meows to know you screwed it all up. Probably one of the reasons I loved it there. I don't think I would have quit if I hadn't had to.

I never fit in with that teacher crowd. For people that are supposed to be teaching kids how to become, they haven't become very well themseves. Petty people, a lot of them, thinking they're helping, but unwilling to change. I'm not sure if it was that I still felt young, or that they were all very populist and I lean on Libertariansm, or that I liked to hang out with the students and they mostly liked to kick them on the way out the door at 2:30. You home life sucks, but you can't be here. Get out. And they wonder why so many Turner girls drop out right before they move in with their baby daddies.

But besides of a couple three people who were gone at the end of the year, I never made the connection beyond 'hi's in the hall, and the occasional lunchtime debate over politics. Maybe if I'd had more than a year to become a teacher. The common wisdom says you need three years to get acclimated to the job. And stuck myself with one because I'm not much for bureaucratic red tape and reading. But that's my fault, nobody else's.

But like I was saying,there were a whole string of mornings I stopped by that gas station to pick up two cold 2-liters of Diet Mt. Dew. One for before lunch, and one for after. That's 4 liters of caffeinated bliss every day. Or, in terms perhaps more existential, approximately 1/6 of the dose of caffeine it would take to kill a 200 lb. male if ingested in less than an hour's time. And I was right there at 200 lbs. Some days I got a fifth liter as I gassed up on the way home. Or 42 ounces at Quicktrip over lunch.

Let me say something about Quicktrip here: It freaking RULES. If you've been there, you know, man. You know.

It was around this time that I made my Christmas list for that year. Now, this was back in my consumerist days, before I learned to fight the power of the Needs Stuff Empire, and when my Christmas lists were multi-page categorized and hotlinked affairs with options for all price ranges and purchasing abilities. One of the myriad items I asked for from Think Geek that year was a hoodie with the caffeine embroidered on the front. I'm trying to say that I was hardcore into that stuff in late 2005.

After a while I started to notice that my mental math skills weren't working as automatically as they usually do. Most of the time, if I want to know how my 57+62 is, I ask my brain, and it spits it out in a second or two, like an old school adding machine. That fall, I was having to spend the time to write it out in my head. It was like I could feel my myelin sheath dissipating, clouding up in a dust cloud after it left. I wasn't sleeping well either. Wake up in the middle of the night, terrified that I had slept in and missed work. Did that once, even. Sleeping in, that is.. And then there were nights I couldn't get to sleep. Admittedly, my schedule wasn't helping. I am not a morning person, and on top of that, I like late nights. Double whammy. But at least I wasn't doing it with sugar pop. Ida been twice my weight by then ifa had.

So I quit. I remember being pretty irritable and anti-social for three or four days, but I did it. Even with first year teaching and everything. And it felt good. Like I was living again. It was like spring. Every winter I fall away from the surface of alertness and motivation, so slow I don't even know it. And then one day in March or April, I realize how deep I am and kick back up to the surface, finally getting air I didn't even know I was missing. It was like that.

Today, before work, I went to the convenience store with Dan. He got a breakfast sandwich, and I got a 64 oz diet Mt. Dew. Later in the day as I started dragging after lunch, I had a cup of coffee to get the motivation to keep writing this post. And as I'm finishing this up here in the corner at Jeremy's birthday party while people play Halo2 (my favorite game of all time; a post for another day), I almost grabbed a can of Mt. Dew to muster the mental acuity to finish. Like Derek Webb said in that song about the box of letters, I find the same old things are plaguing me still.

I was off for a few months. Maybe it was the fact that I now owned a blue hoodie with an electric green caffeine molecule on the front, or maybe it was just that I like the community coffee creates, or maybe I liked the illusion of being able to function on very little sleep. But I hopped back on that beast as soon as I got the chance and took a ride.

It's not as bad as it used to be. Believe me on that one. I did drink a gallon on January 29th, but that was over 8 hours. And halfa one most days at work. But it's not nearly as bad. Maybe I'll quit again, and get awake again. Maybe I'll take the wide road and go get a can out of the fridge right now. I'll let you know either way. But I've got a party to be at, so, tootles, ya'll.

Edit: I had one 12 oz. can. And it's 2:15. And I'm trying to figure out why our old router doesn't like our new cable modem and flakes out when acquiring a new IP address. I got nothin'.