So it has been a thoroughly shitty day at work. Kids out of control. My brother is now sickly and passed out, so my chances of actually seeing J again seem rather slim, which is unfortunate, as I need someplace where I can forget the nonsense. Better than Wanda, whose apartment is apparently all flooded, like. It's days like this, with the rain pouring through everything, which make you wonder why you got in this business in the first place, when you could be sitting at your sinecure blogging more about less. The amount of abuse I am expected to absorb is ridiculous. I think it's rather hard to fathom for those in bujii professions. My kids don't know how to measure things with ruled tape. I am expected to get them to pass the Math A exam. This is all rather frustrating, and this is one of those weeks when I wish I could just phone it in. I have been producing more incident reports than prose useful to and representative of myself. I am being wasted here, slowly, I can feel the wrinkles creeping up on me, the thwarted energy: I went in today with the best of hopes and energy, and it took nothing more than wilfullness to crush me. Nothing I can do will really change things. I mean really change things, not just provide the cosmetic black successes capitalism needs to perpetuate itself.

And that's another thing: more and more I realize I am couching my experiences in a pseudo-Marxist language. Which is only a framework, I think. I have real beef with the way that things are. Apartheid is dumb as a system because the barriers are formal, rooted in the law. This country is so much more the fucking cleverer for encoding everything in more subtle ways. It's hard for me to pick apart: the humbling lesson, the point of this experience, if there was one to be front-loaded, was precisely to realize that I don't have the answers. I can't offer an account of how this system works: it's not premeditated, it's the organic disease of will and power inflicted from above in many directions, a really dynamic mill. Which perhaps sounds like I am absolving my students of their responsibility to be adequate human beings as opposed to savage little fucks. Well, it's not that. There are things one can do, no matter the circumstances, to lift oneself up. It's just a matter of how much we're giving, how much a priority it is to enable that. I just don't see it. It's hypocritical, it's cowardly, it's fucked.

I'm tired. Bone-weary on a Monday.