My school promised they'd let me go tomorrow. We'll see. I'm definitely not coming back until a month has passed - I need the time off for sure.
I think I've gotten called "Tober" more times in the last few days by teachers than I ever thought possible. Turns out many don't even know my name. Is it because I don't strike up conversations? I try. With some, I'm successful. Oh, well.
I just finished Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle". Good book - though it couldn't seem to make up its mind whether it wanted to be a journalistic piece, a good Odysseus-in-rags adventure, or a Socialist doctrine. I think the combination goes together like a Danish and mayonnaise. Which sounds like a horrible combination, but until you've tried it (and I have, voluntarily), you never know. I did find it interesting that the copy I have was published with a relatively scathing review (however honest and balanced) as an introduction. What better mark of the greatness of something than when it can be bound to its antithesis and be stronger because of it? Even Superman couldn't say that...
In any case, reading about someone who reached rock bottom and still came out happy (though I realize it's a nice fictional device, the reality is it did occasionally happen) made me once again fully realize the situation of many of those around me. It seems to me that I'm inextricably in the upper class, whether it be skin color, profession or nationality. I can never truly relate to those who I might visit once, and I will forever remember it as a shining moment (as happens in Sinclair's Chicago and on present-day Earth), simply because of what I represent, not who I am.
And when I hear other teachers say that they're nobody if they don't have a phone number - speaking as one just lost his phone and feels like a lower-class citizen because of it. So people who barely have enough to eat, save just enough for a phone to prove they exist. And those who don't are made to feel that they don't exist. It's disgusting. But I only feel that way because I haven't been there and I don't understand. In a culture so fixated on communication, changing the fabric of how that happens is downright godly - as a hundred years ago the West found out with land lines.
Peace
John
