I think, I should cut off his head with axe to…to… so he will not suffer…”

Running around like our heads are chopped off, we do it all the time. Don’t tell me that you don’t sometimes feel like the zombie-chicken so often referred to in the English idiom about panicked, hopeless people. Just don’t.

I finished my first whole week of teaching classes to children who don’t understand eighty percent of what I’m saying. This week I have met a half dozen people in a half dozen places and taken a dozen buses to do so. I’ve learned that if you get on the wrong bus it will take you all the way to the end of the line and then kick you off into the rain without even being sorry for you. I’ve started projects I have yet to finish, read emails and letters I have yet to reply to, and put on my running shoes twice before taking them off and falling immediately to sleep instead. Also, I’ve been pretty sick.

And despite the fact that I’m having an immensely good time here, I do tend to feel like I’m running in circles I can’t completely control (mostly because my life is tied to a bus schedule I don’t know well enough to be flexible with yet).

So when fellow teacher, personal guardian and something of a genuine friend – Hanka – asked me if I was joining the teachers for their TGIF celebration I almost said, “No, I have to catch a bus.” In all honesty, I had already missed my bus by that point. I make excuses to not hang out when I’m stressed.

But, I reasoned with myself, were you not telling yourself today how much you hate sitting by yourself at lunch? That it’s horrible and you feel like a total loser eating by yourself in a crowded cafeteria? You need to make friends, honey.

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