CRYING TIME

Crying is freaking automatic these days. With all the hullabaloo at work and meetings and debate sessions with the kids at school, I cry in the inside seeing my family at the sideline waiting. I look at the stuff I'm supposed to finish down pat, it's still there lying helplessly on the dusty racks. At times, they seem to stare at me and say, "What are we doing here? Aren't we suppose to go somewhere else?"

My friend once told me, "To have peace, one has to return to his unfinished businesses and make a closure to each one of them, or else, he wouldn't know where to go and how." There must be some grain of truth in it. For with my unfinished book and project, I remain immobile when it comes to my career. At least that's how people see me from their vantage viewpoint. I would not try to argue with them nor would I offer any excuses with possible meta-analysis (which I am won't to do to defend my cause in a helpless fix I usually get in). Yes, the world I am in is a stress-laden world. I could go for a million stress-busters but still come out dehydrated for trying to survive. Teaching often does that to the real victims in the classroom--yes, the teachers. And because the government expects public slaves to send their students to the real world well-equipped we get whipped by demands making us give up priorities--in my case family and special personal projects.

It's a joy to teach. No doubt about it. I'd jump at it again and again. But I'm doubly sure that after all these head-cracking activities, if I don't do anything to replace the liquids that I lost, so to speak, I would die in the toxins I'm plunging right now. And worse, my family bond will suffer some cuts and bruises and it won't be long until it breaks.

So what do I do? What else? I spew liquids with sniffs here and there, hoping the coast will finally clear. But more than that, after the crying, I got to stand up and start making a plan like a real man that I should be, or should I say "woman" that I am.