Annoying or Entertaining? Nah, I'm Someplace In Between

    I pontificate. (That's a great word, isn't it?  Pontificate.) I pontificate at great lengths about history, about things no one cares much about, and about my life before Meniere's.  I'm known to ramble on about one historical subject or another even if people around me are beginning to roll their eyes and look annoyed.  I am used to looking in to the faces of the bored whose eyes glass over as they clearly are mentally someplace far from my impromptu history lesson. I can not seem to help myself though, and I carry on as if everyone wanted to know that the real reason we have stop lights is because they were invented to help deaf drivers in the early days, or what ever I'm going on about.

    I am not used to being told I should have taught history.  Yesterday I was told exactly that in line at Target while I was filling some poor cashier's head full of useless history knowledge. People tell me all the time I should work for a museum or I'd be happier doing some history tour in some super cool city like Charleston.  And they might be right, but most don't remind me that I'd have loved to have taught history. It is the "what might have been" that makes my heart ache.  Although I have teaching credentials, AND a degree in history, it would cost me thousands of dollars more to get credentialed in history for South Carolina, and then, well, there is the "no jobs" thing. Oh and the new curriculum standards that are a joke.  But someplace, in a perfect world, I dream about teaching history.  I imagine what it would have been like to inspire young minds with my enthusiasm for history. I imagine.

    I don't have the heart to be told what I can and can not teach.  I do not have the heart to be told I must not teach the truth and that I must not tell how it really happened in order to follow some political agenda.

    At least as I pontificate to those around me, some are entertained, and everyone learns something, even if they are annoyed a bit.

    Maybe one of these days I will write a book. I say that knowing full well that I'm too afraid of failure to actually get beyond that dreaming stage...


So I tell little tidbits of history like women gossip in the beauty salon to whom ever will listen, and smile with pride when I teach something cool to a stranger even if they didn't like history in the first place.