Walking home from work, the night air sparkled with a sprinkling of snow, the air cold and clean-tasting. Work is hard these days. I'm trying hard to improve my teaching, and there's a lot of pressure and discomfort at work because we've been losing students, too. This is partly just because hagwon business is cyclical, and parents always pull their kids out of hagwon in January, when public schools are in vacation and parents find other things to do with their kids. I can never understand how Korean managers – ever relatively good ones such as my current boss – seem to take these cycle-driven losses of enrollment so personally, and assume there's some mistake being made by teachers as opposed to just being the vagaries of the market.
Well, anyway. So work is hard, these days. I have a tight, dense schedule, too. But I felt OK about it, today, walking home in the dark in the cold in the snow in my dreams.
I found this really interesting image online at a site called love all this – it's supposedly Woody Guthrie's New Year's resolutions.
[broken link! FIXME]
I really, really like the resolution that goes: "19. Keep hoping machine running." It appears he doodled a picture of it, too. I like the idea of a "hoping machine." I'm doing some repairs on mine, currently.
What I'm listening to right now.
Neutral Milk Hotel, "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea."