BAD TIME TO BE IN MY JOB

I don't know WHAT I was thinking ... going back to school and spending all that money on my education.  Honestly.  I mean, I love what I do.  I truly enjoy teaching, but the state and the feds have made teaching a terrible, horrible, awful, impossible thing to do.

I'm wondering (fantasizing, really) about retirement.  Right now my retirement plan is to die at my desk of old age so my kids can afford my funeral with the paltry life insurance pay-out they'll receive.  Unfortunately, the money I'm paying back in student loans for my continuing education and for my kids' education, I am stuck working or perhaps living in a state park somewhere.  My back-up plan to dying at my desk is living in a beat-up van in Wal-Mart parking lots around the country.  Honestly, that is looking more and more exotic every day.

Right now at the Christmas break, it's flipping nuts with parents emailing and parents calling and kids suddenly realizing their grades are falling and administrators running amok and field trips and tests and the list keeps going on.  Because taxes pay my salary, people seem to think they own me, that they personally pay me, and that I am supposed to be at their beck and call, as if I don't have 100 other students and two hundred (plus) parents insisting that they are the one and only priority in my life. 

Newsflash:  I'm a taxpayer, too; I pay my salary, too. 

It's a damn crazy time to be in this profession.  It's a damn good time to start thinking about my exit strategy. So please, Santa, for Christmas this year, bring me a winning lottery ticket.  Not just any ticket, either, but a true winner, a million dollar winner, a winner big enough for me to write that letter.  You know which letter I mean.  The letter that starts out:

Dear Superintendent, It is my greatest pleasure to announce that I will be retiring right ... this ... very ... second.