So I have been negligent, but increasingly a little bit more confident, as I look around at what the other teachers are doing and I worry further about what I am actually managing to accomplish with my students and classes--I'm not half bad, somehow, adapting to the entire ELL thing without too much of an hitch, except for all the kids who still don't get it--I just need to reorient, repatient, and learn the truer lessons of kendo without thinking too much about kendo itself. If that makes sense. I do tend to be too hard on myself in most things, a sort of reflexive self-critical defense-strategy I picked up as a kid with unpleasable parents, somehow. Self-deprecating still better than self-defecating. No, it's troubling, this career thing, as I consider where my brother stands in terms of his entry into this profession, how I'm in this for the long term, and how I'm outearned by bujii nonsense folk. But I do feel old, it's at the point where my chronological age still surprises, while I have told every false age to my kids from 28 to 42. All this is against the backdrop of retirement--that somehow is my time-horizon, though I suppose that this occupation of mine, or some less tactical variant, is my life--there is no turning back now, and this is scary, as my parents are fond of pointing out how easily I retire from things--from comicking at 21, literary magazinery at 21, public speaking at 16, and girls at 12. Why not end up giving up teaching? Or, even more recently, kendo? It's easier to reach some nominal level of competence, the trophy level. It's harder to stick with something at the risk of long-term mediocrity. It's said that you should hold a stock for at least three years if it's worth buying. I've done few things for that long, and this here now the end of this schoolyear, is precisely such a turning time.

Hrmm.. I wonder if I can turn that in for my self-evaluation.