Perfection

My first day on the job was overwhelming. I arrived to work half an hour early because I totally miscalculated the time I thought it would’ve taken me to get there. I thought I’d be at least fifteen minutes early, not a full half hour. I waited in my car and saw all the high school kids drive into the parking lot and park. I immediately felt old. And this is a kindergarten through 12th grade school. It’s strange seeing five year old kids and grown teenagers on the same campus at the same time. The campus is broken up into three distinct buildings: elementary school, middle school, and high school. The class of 2015 is like fifteen people. It’s incredibly small. I was given a tour by the superintendent of the school (and my boss), and he introduced me to many of the teachers there. Some were super relieved to finally have a tech guy, so they immediately bombarded me with issues and questions involving all the tech they have. The tech this school has is impressive. They have a desktop computer and laptop for pretty much every student, as well as an iPad and iPod touch. They have smart boards in most classrooms. Look it up, I didn’t know what they were either. I learned the layout, met most of the teachers, and wrote down a long todo lists of things to get to eventually. All very overwhelming.

I’m scared. I feel like I may not do as good a job as I thought I might. There’s a lot to learn, a lot to do, and a lot I don’t even know I have to worry about yet. The staff there told me that I shouldn’t be nervous. I’ll learn everything in due time. That’s a big thing many people repeated: they’re not expecting me to learn all this quickly. They’re giving me a three month probationary period for a reason. I don’t have to learn all this now, and that is comforting. But damn. I want to be perfect. I want to know all this already. But apparently the school signed the last tech guy to a contract, and he wasn’t very good, so all he did was play video games in his office and the school could do nothing about it. Or something like that. I at least won’t be anything like that at all.

After work, I went to my brother-in-law’s house because he wanted to celebrate my newly employed status. I treated him, my sister, and my two nieces to food at the Outwest Grill restaurant in St. Ignatius. I had the Montana Jack burger, a cheeseburger with jalapeño ranch sauce and sweet potato fries as the side. I washed it down with strawberry lemonade. It was delicious, but I felt fat afterwards. When I started this blog, I wanted to live as perfect a life as I could. That meant exercising, writing, reading, eating well, not drinking, not pining over some stupid girl, working, making money, improving myself in every way — in short, to be perfect. I didn’t want to eat out and eat unhealthily. But there’s no such thing as perfection. The more I try to think there is, the crazier and unhappy I get. Today I didn’t eat well. Tomorrow I will. One day isn’t going to kill me.

But I don’t want to lose focus and let this be the start of the end for me. I don’t want to feel the weight of that stone feel heavier where I can’t hold on anymore and watch it roll down the hill for me to push up again later. I don’t want that.