Well, no headache today, but I guess I am feeling the effects my reduced caffeine intake.  This morning I had one and one-half cups of coffee at home, and a cup of black tea at work. Today was another sugar-free day, but it was harder.  I found myself getting angry at little things, just like I was doing a few weeks ago.  This afternoon they served spicy bulgogi pork for lunch. The more I ate the hotter it got, but I was hungry so I kept eating.  For a while I was in that sort of eating trance that happens sometimes.  (Does that happen to normal people?) Then I came out of it and realized my lunch was making me extremely uncomfortable.  It was too fucking hot and burning my tongue and giving me the sweats.  I mean seriously, it’s just fucking lunch, not an exercise in self-abuse. Another teacher saw me sweating and pushed a box of napkins toward me.  That did it.  I got up, disposed of my leftover food and walked out in a minor huff. See, I felt like the other teachers must have been thinking, “poor foreigner, can’t handle our food,” and maybe chuckling to themselves a little.  There may or may not be some truth to it, but I have no way of knowing so I shouldn’t pretend to know their thoughts.  

Anyway, so getting mad at my lunch didn’t help my attitude any.  I had five regular classes today, plus my after-school class.  The day was kind of a disaster.  In first period I tried to teach a song that all the other classes got two weeks ago, but the Wednesday classes didn’t because of a holiday.  The song was “Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weenie” and I used it to teach adjectives. (It was a fun lesson, but I hope I never hear that song again as long as I live.) So I started doing the lesson, and I do this thing where I put up the first words of the song one at a time and get the students to guess what the song is about. Then we do the big reveal and I show them a picture of a yellow polka-dot bikini I got from Microsoft clip art. As part of my shtick I hold the picture up to my belly as if I’m modeling what the bikini would look like on me.  It always gets a laugh.  Wellllll…as it turns out, because they didn’t get the lesson earlier because of the holiday, the teacher played it for them during her regular class time…and didn’t tell me that she did that.  So back to me now—I put the first words of the song on the board and the students immediately knew what the song was about, and there was half my lesson blown out of the water.  To be fair, the teacher may not have realized I was going to make-up the lesson. She might have thought I was just going to skip the Wednesday classes.  Still, she shouldn’t have been mucking about in my territory, but whatever.  I handled it graciously, for me, which means I only freaked out a little.

By sixth period, after the angry lunch incident, I was exhausted and moody.  I was about to have a tantrum about having to teach a 90 minute lesson after a full day of work.  I only had the barest outlines of a lesson plan as well.  I “co-opted” some material about prepositions of place from a level one text book, thinking it would be a nice, easy lesson to get started with, and it was, for three of the students.  The other nine were totally lost.  So we dialed it all the way back to, “The pencil is on the table.”  Tough room.  

So to review:  Take away my sugar and I become a raging asshole.  Next time, My life would be easier if people would stop messing with me.  Don’t eat the spicy bulgogi pork, it fights back.  Le crayon est sur la table. Wait, what?

Oh man.  What a rant.  This isn’t right. I need sugar.