2020, Part 1

“It’s been a while,” you say to yourself. “A long while. You should probably write something, so they know you’re not dead.”

Dead. Dead. I mean, you mean, you’re dead on the inside. That’s the kind of gallows humor you’ve had lately. You don’t know how else to handle everything.

—

One

You’ve been working at an instructor at the coding boot camp for eight months now, three ten-week cohorts, about 75 students total.

It started rough, and the negative student feedback was a wake-up call that you were in way over your head. You are matched up with your two coworkers, both of whom previous public school teachers. You learn what SWBATs and CFUs are, methodologies for student engagement, while trying to cram Ruby on Rails, a tech stack you hadn’t done for a couple of years. But you don’t want to look bad — that’s losing face, after all, and you maybe three time zones away from your Chinese parents, but you will not lose face.

You work six days a week, ten to twelve hours a day. You win over — or …