What I Would Give To Dance In The Temple of Angels

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark clouds

Of night and light and the half light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

—William Butler Yeats

I hate marking papers.

I thought for sure in the last couple of weeks before the end of the semester my schedule would be a little bit looser. Fate didn’t think so. In fact she stuck her tongue out and jeered, “Guess what?”. When I had planned for my week, I found I still have a huge stack of final papers to go through, hundreds of evaluation sheets to tally and compile its data to make a report and a staggering load of essays still in the backlog.

My 2 hours of writing to preserve my sanity was going to be compromised.

This is the part I fucking absolutely hate in teaching in a formal academic setting.

Paperwork. Because it’s often expected that a teacher often brings home work and you tend to use your spare time doing that. My sister wouldn’t trade her bank job for mine when she sees me lugging home a sack (literally) full of papers and then settling down to mark them while she kicks off her pumps and watches American Idol.

Instead of waking up excited everyday to do my writing, I’m grumpy and suicidal because I’m using scarce precious hours on goals that aren’t mine but someone else’s. I know it makes me miserable but unless I want to lose my job, I have to do them.

If I procrastinate on that mountain of paperwork, I’m going to have an anxiety attack and then as a result procrastinate and grow even more anxious as the backlog grows to gigantic proportions till the deadline looms nearer and I know I’ll have to put in all-nighter, my stress levels going through the roof, I’ll probably do a messy job and then I’ll have a memo waiting for me.

Fuck!

I do not want to be stuck in this lifestyle because I do consciously want to pursue my dreams and am making an effort to slowly start supporting myself through my writing but how can I do that when my job demands more and more time from me everyday? It’s a sick cycle. I’m aware of the truth of the situation I’m in. I want to get out of it but the situation won’t allow it unless I cut off all the ties. Go broke. Get out there exposed in the cruel world without a shield –naked, shivering, alone and hopeless.

I’d like to escape this rigid academic college setting and go back to language teaching but I still had some horrible scars from the latter. It demanded a lot from you to the point of giving you no day offs for a couple of weeks, having you make an entire book from scratch, call you at 7 in the morning on your supposed day off work because a teacher got a hangover from clubbing and would you get your ass here and no we won’t pay for your transportation and overtime and we won’t give you another extra day off for this because it’s your fucking job. What do you expect this school to be –a friggin’ spa?

So remembering all those sick memories, I’ll stick to my college job and its ugh paperwork, thank you very much and still earn thrice more than from that horrible job.

But I can’t afford to be too complacent in my present situation either. I shouldn’t. The new semester rears its ugly head closer and closer. It’ll be here in a couple of days but this time I’ll make sure it doesn’t snatch me away from my temple of nirvana, my brief moment to dance in heaven with the angels. Control the amount of homework I give out. Take on less teaching hours even if I have to suffer a pay cut. I’m willing to earn half of what my salary is today if I can spend my days doing what I love.

Because money isn’t important. Being happy is.

Related Posts:

Why Real Life Stops You From Going After Your Dreams
Just Let Them Go and F— Themselves – A Rant On Being A Teacher
I Will Not Give Up! The Cry of a Writer’s Persistence – an Inspirational Post

Why Real Life Stops You From Going After Your Dreams

I wake up this morning amidst the chilly air of China. I think of how I might start my day. Take a walk, write a blog entry, answer some emails and work on my short story. Ah, that would be paradise.

Then I remembered one ugly fact. I groaned and buried myself further underneath the covers.

I’ve got to go to school today.

I hated myself this week for allowing real life to get in the way. I allowed myself to get swept away by this tide of marking papers, student consultations, midterm exams and extracurricular activities like performing my first ever rap song in front of colleagues (though it went surprisingly well). But stuff like this happen and I had to bind myself for a while and plough my way through. There were so many times I wanted to pick up my pen once again and blog but bills must be paid. We all have these times. The trouble is we stay in this way for far too long.

What stops us? Is it fear of looking at the spare coins clinking at a musician’s cap singing his heart out? Or the image of a painter selling his wares for pennies? I tell you what we’ll do. We’ll immediately rush to our comfortable apartments, happy that we’re secure in our monthly salaries and daily food on the table. We’ll be assuring ourselves, “I’m glad that’s not me.” yet inside our hearts stir with envy. We see Freddie going around places with just his guitar. There’s Larry, tutoring art on the side while he hones his comic drawing skills. We smash our fists on the table because that could’ve been us. Sure, it looks like a romantic lifestyle but in fact it’s not. Freddie goes into debt and Larry’s students often pay for his lunch because they knew he couldn’t afford to eat. That’s why people often say ‘starving artist’ not ‘well-fed artist’.

To us, that’s not the ‘real life’ we seek. The real life we want is an awesome apartment, a sleek sports car and plenty of money so that when we retire we can do what we want because that’s what the manual of the Safe Practical Guide To Survive In Society says. The manual that says there’s a big chance that if we let go of everything we have and follow our hearts, we’d go broke, miserable and alone in the gutter and not even get an ounce of recognition. That’s shit scary. We have to start from scratch and we’d be doing plenty of failing on our first try. Many people around you say there’s no market value or any real money in doing what we love. And that’s the magnum truth cemented in their minds. Because we listened to them, we shut ourselves in our little cubicle, beating ourselves up constantly doing what we hate while our dreams languished. Every penny we earn we blow out just buying more stuff to take away the pain of not following our hearts.

Real life means setting aside the novel inside you to make way for the more practical stuff that pays the bills or impractical ones that provide you instant gratification like watching T.V. or youtube. “I’ll do it later” because you’ve got your boss and clients waiting, students wondering where their marked papers are and an audience ready and hungry for your next words in your blog. Why do we often procrastinate on the things we want to do the most that doesn’t give us money but offers us the one thing that money can’t buy –happiness? The sad reality is that you’re setting that story or song aside because nobody cares about it but you. Only you know it’s going to be great. The rest? They simply don’t care. They’ve got their own troubles to worry about and their own achievements which they think are so awesome but in reality suck crap as hell only you don’t have the heart to tell them because they might say the same thing to you.

Yet, you deserve to do what you want the most and to hell with the rest of world –you’re going to march to your own damned tune!

This is why we often feel empty inside because we’re clipping our own wings and following fail proof practical advice. Perhaps that’s why we love reading those personal development blogs so much. We look at people living our dream and strive to find a life full of meaning and purpose because frankly, we’re just not living it.

We seek to distract ourselves from this feeling of emptiness. We numb ourselves with T.V., computers, drugs, alcohol, painkillers and sex. Anything to take away the pain. For a year, I was “numb”. Everyday was a torture to live because I was never true to myself. Because I was living the ‘real life’. One day I took out my pen and notebook and bled myself dry all over the pages, shedding bitter tears, pouring all my pain and frustrations at not being able to write for a living, not being able to do what I do best, too much of a coward to go after what I want and not live with the music singing in my heart.

And I bet you and I share these moments when we just looked up and asked, “God, why?”

It took me a year up to that moment to take a deep breath and plunge towards that dream. Now I’ve had a few small accomplishments under my belt. Although real life still intervenes, I won’t let it silence my voice for too long. I’ve learned from that mistake. I still go to school to teach but now everyday whenever I take that pen and let the words dance under my fingertips, I feel truly happy. Truly happy because I finally get to do what I love even if it’s just for 2 hours a day. But in those 2 hours, I felt I have truly lived and was able to touch heaven even for just a moment.

Photo: Eli Mattson, runner up of America’s Got Talent, an artist who paid his dues from NBC site. Now he’s living the dream stirring the passion within us with his voice and his piano.

Related Posts:

Just Let Them Go and F– Themselves – A Rant On Being A Teacher

Why I Write

Writing Updates-The Magic of Storytelling

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