Four Corners

I never thought I would find myself lusting after a cubicle, but when I visited my Friend at his job in an office building downtown I almost wanted to cry or explode with yearning when I saw a view of the New York City Skyline. The quiet solitude of the cube made me want to give up my current dayjob right then. There were no children. No screaming. No pressure that if I fail, a human being was going to end up in jail, on the streets, or dead.

It's my daily burden. And in that comfortable, half-enclosed piece of solace I just wanted to sit; just so I would have a bit more security. It's a rather difficult feeling, considering I'm always talking about how much I love my kids. However, whenever tenured teachers tell me about their real hope for these kids my heart breaks a bit.

Some of their hopes aren't for the kids to go off and become the next big-time multimillionaire. Their purpose for teaching is that the kids--our students--will be a little kinder to someone when they're on the streets doing violent or illicit things in order to survive. The general consensus is that they won't make it. And with many of them failing Regents Exams and being placed in all sorts of categories, it's difficult to keep my spirit strong against things like that.

In that cube, there were no responsibilities that wake you up in the middle of the night. There isn't someone who claimed to love their progeny, a parent, that didn't really give two shits about them. In the cube, I could quietly make more money than I do now, and still have my peace of my mind when I go home.

Every time someone tells me how much they make, I'm slightly pissed. I am befuddled that their worth can be higher than mine on a socioeconomic level. And I have all this stress and they can cruise along, no problem. Maybe I will see about getting this basic 9 to 5 in the Fall, because I swear this cube is unfairly mocking me each time I go to visit those bougie people who I swore I'd never join.