Found "blog" from when blogs didn't exist 2

This dates from 2006-2007 before I moved to London:

"I often enjoy the freedom that comes from a full tank of gas. Thirty dollars spent, but O the possibilities! In my little Saturn, a full tank of generally means about 300 miles of cruising before needing to refill. Usually those miles take me to work and home again, the grocery store, to church, to visit friends, to pick up take out, but every time I see the hand up at F on the gas gauge, I think that maybe this time I'll head out for Saskatchewan or the Mexican border. Not that I could make it to those places on one tank of gas, but once I'm 300 miles into the trip, why not go the other 2000?

"Oftentimes I view life as a full tank of gas. Sure, I could drive toward being the next great novelist, war journalist, PhD candidate or world traveler, but more than likely I'll be a teacher, get married, birth some children and maybe finish grad school, and I definitely wouldn't be alone. Many people I know seem to have "I wish I would have" stories and "I should have instead" dreams that they share with me as we wait in line at the grocery store, the pharmacy or the bank. To use a financial example, it's simply easier to spend $100 in $5 increments ("It's only $5) than it is to slap down $75 on something more valuable. Similarly, it's easier to drive 10 miles to the video store to rent Bridget Jones for the umpteenth time than to drive 40 miles to the beach or state park. By the time we get ourselves ready to launch out on our great excursion, we already need to refuel, we make an excuse, and our very well-intentioned "I'll do it tomorrow" never comes.

"I work in the school system and nothing is so exciting and depressing as working with teenagers. Such dreams! Such potential! So full of promise! Yet it seems that more and more young men are flunking out of school and more girls are getting pregnant and dropping out. College is getting more expensive and I watch as dream after dream burns out like children's eyes when they no longer believe in fairies.

"I don't know if it's bad parenting or video games or increasing laziness or entitlement mixed with early burnout, but teenagers seem to know less and less what they want, who they are, and what they believe in. They don't seem to be able to distinguish between folly and something really worth working for. Whenever I assign any kind of assignment I brace myself, waiting for the withering sighs and unending questions while students calculate exactly how little they can do and still pass. Often I am accused of being too hard on them, of expecting too much; it breaks my heart more so when these remarks come from parents and fellow teachers. But rather than only breaking my heart, it makes me exacerbated; at this rate, the only thing young women will be able to do is impeccably apply lip gloss, (hopefully) avoid pregnancy, and barf themselves into a size zero! Our young men will know the intricacies of street racing and pirating music, but incapable of correctly writing a business letter or maybe even reading an age-appropriate book.

"But worst of all, the imaginations of the next generation seem to be sapped dry. Don't get me wrong, they can be witty if they need to crack off a dirty joke and can design the hippest myspace page around, but ask them to read a book without first viewing the movie or consider a painting and their minds go completely blank. It isn't that kids today are incapable of attention to detail and higher level thinking, it's more that their thinking is wasted on whether or not their bangle earrings are the diameter of their thighs and if their rims light up in unison.

"And the sad thing is that as much as we stare blankly out over these groups of teenagers as if they are rare breeds of mold that spontaneously spawned on our shower curtain, these children and their attitudes and lack of interest and ambition are our fault and our responsibility to change. As much as we would like to look the other way and imagine that these children must have played too many video games, must have had abusive mothers or absent fathers, as much as we want to blame it on lack of structure or religion and feel glad that our children will never be like these spoiled brats--we lie to ourselves because though children are products of their parents' combined sex chromosomes, they will also be a product of the society in which they grow. While we can control the other 1/2 of the genes our children will inherit through mate selection, it takes everyone in a family, town, country and world to change society, the community, the world village that our children will grow up in."

You can totally tell that I was a new and hopeful teacher.... sigh...