Somewhere in Japan

Dispatch № 108: Precarity

You admonish yourself for having neglected them until you needed them and wonder why you have also for so long put up with a job in which you are forever making up for the incompetence of others…

Dispatch № 104: Possibility

With less than a week left in the year, and with less than a week left for me in my thirties, I am feeling an uncharacteristic sense of hope and optimism.

Dispatch № 94: The Light

When you realize that a dream, one that once compelled you into focused action, has all but totally withered away over many years of difficulty, you have a decision to make.

Dispatch № 89: Not Giving Up

If it weren’t for the fact that I like the people I work with and I like the kids I teach, I’d have run for the hills a while ago.

Dispatch № 84: Conditioning

Almost nobody gives them permission, let alone a push, to question authority or to push against the structures to which they find themselves subject but from which they rarely benefit.

Dispatch № 30: In The Small Chairs

Across the table from me is a blue plastic chair, 26cm tall at the seat and 49cm at the back. It weighs about 1kg. Weighing in at about 16kg is the small boy sitting in it. Let’s call him Ira.

Dispatch № 11: The Last Day

Yesterday was my last day of work at the English-teaching Job I’ve had since May 2015. Or, it would have been, had they given me any classes. Instead, I got my farewell, a final middle finger, in the form of an empty schedule.