Having a "secret" impact

Being famous can’t be easy, and if you in addition are rich, well, you will always suspect people to be around you for the wrong reasons. (Right for them, perhaps, but so very wrong for you, that is.)

And if they are around you for the right reasons you always risk that confidence and trust will be broken in the future.

Anyway, I am not famous, I am not rich and I am very, very far from ever becoming either. I am not sorry about it, though, because I have this notion that it would have deprived me of more privacy than what I hold today.

What I do feel intrude my private sphere is the knowledge people in the local area have of me. Because of my job it seems like as if everybody knows who I am… I hardly know anybody but when I introduce myself I often get the “I know, I have heard about you”:

I hardly ever go out. Not because I do not enjoy being social and to have fun, but going to a public place to me often includes the charm of having a former (or present) student who wants to tell me about his successes and fortune and life in general.

One day I was standing in line at the cash in my local store, and behind me I could hear two women talking. They didn’t lower their voice or anything, so it was not like I was eavesdropping or something like that; it was just, you know, the kind of background noise talking between people often is.

Then I heard my name mentioned and my ears just tuned in, all by themselves. They were referring to something I had said in class. None of them were my student, but I recognized one of them as being the mother to one of them.

In this case it was all innocent and well received, as it was about what consequences it will have if you fail in one or more subjects, but it made me think.

I say and do quite a lot during my teaching every day, and everything is not necessarily all that well thought through, and sometimes I get lured into topics I really should not go into depths with (At least not in a classroom full of teens). Even worse, maybe, if what I say is misunderstood because I choose the wrong or bad wording.

I understood quite a few years ago that my profession has the side effect that I will be talked about by strangers every day. Every day one or more of my students will talk about me among themselves or to members of their families.

I just never thought that what goes on in the classroom would be something that people took notice of and cared to repeat, let alone point me out as the source and tell my name.

Challenging driving conditions

When I woke up this morning and looked out of the window everything was covered in snow. Beautiful, calm, silent snow with promises of joyful play for the kids.

I grew up a bit further north from where I live now, and every winter we knew there would be snow; a lot of it. I learned to drive a car with icy and winter-like driving conditions 4 months of the year.

Here… we are lucky if we get a few centimeters a couple of days each year. We had snow about a week ago, but the freezing wind turned it into hard crust and it was very icy… apart from the roads, which were dry and comfortable to drive on.

I like the snow, and I enjoy driving. But here they tend to salt the roads as soon as they expect we will get some sort of winter-like weather.

The result is a strange, dry slush which sticks to the car, especially under the mud flaps, causing the car to react a tiny bit slower. Or they plow the roads before salting them, and we get a wet salty road splashing up on both the car body and passers-by.

This morning I knew it would be a lot of obstructions on the road on my way to work (previous experiences told me that much), so I started early. I left my house thinking I was so early I would get ahead of the rush hours. Normally it takes me 13 minutes to drive to work. This morning it took me 2 hours!

The road was not slippery; there was snow, but no ice: It was perfect winter driving conditions and yet the traffic stood still.

I am a rather laid back person, it takes a bit to get me angry, but this morning my temperament really was boiling. If you don’t know how to master the driving condition you really should not drive. Get on a bus!

If you chose not to change tyres or you drive on worn out tyres: winter driving conditions is really not for you and/or your car, the rest of us will be late for work you see, and even more to consider: you really, really upset us who are comfortable driving and cause dangerous situations like hazardous overtakings and that does not help one bit when you are stuck in a queue of cars snowing down.

Do I seem a bit annoyed, perhaps even angry? I am! And now that I am writing this I feel bad about it.

I know we are different and have different skills. I know people have their routines of how to get to work or school. I know it is hard to wake up and change plans. Still, when you are good at something it is hard to settle with the fact that others are not, and I should learn how to be more indulgent.
That is my challenge this morning.