It has been an extremely quiet week here at Inkreadablle. I have been a little busy with English Center administrative work but the clients have all fallen ill. As I only have two clients and both of them canceled lessons for the week, that meant that I could concentrate on my private clients. I have scheduled Shinwei for Friday evenings when he comes to me and I give a lesson. Then we have dinner. That will change in April as he will go back to Taiwan for a month and so we will go online. That suits me quite well as I will be in Greece for 10 days in April from the 10th until the 21st for the Greek Easter holiday. My Japanese client has also agreed to go online and so I will give her four online lessons. I am going to have to cancel George and Jerry on Easter Sunday as there will be no possibility of giving a lesson that day.
My students being sick, meant that this week wass off to a very slow start as neither Jean or Helene have let me know when they want to come back for a lesson. In addition on Saturday, I realized that this weekend is daylight savings time in the US which means that a couple of appointments that I have in the US will be an hour earlier for me as we don’t change until the end of the month. That meant that I had to ask my Japanese client if we could make it earlier on Thursday. At this point, that meeting is up in the air because she is currently also ill with a fever and we canceled Tuesday’s lesson. I’m not too upset about any of this because I can always find the time to write.
This week’s session at the library was one of the scariest I have ever experienced in my life. I do not scare easily and generally, I can deal with writer weird. But this week a young man walked into the library and up to our table and didn’t stop talking until he left. Generally, I ignored him but then I started listening to a little bit of what he was saying and all he talked about was how horrible his education was, how he felt duped by all the teachers in Ireland and the upper class. I’ve heard this stuff before so I was able to turn it out until he started referring to women as females and I caught a drift of some of his incel ideology. He scared me so much, dear reader, that I didn’t get any writing done. I left the meeting at about 8 and as I was walking to the bathroom got a text from my co-organizer Mark, saying that the creepy guy had left and taken the elevator and suggested that I take the stairs. I decided to take the elevator but as I got downstairs to the lobby and exited the library, I thought I saw the guy who was hanging out outside having a smoke. Needless to say, I walked as quickly as I could to the tram stop that would take me home but I was literally looking over my shoulder the whole time. I didn’t actually feel safe until I was in my house with the door locked. I cannot deny this guy the library as it is a public space and I am very worried that he will come back. My writers’ group is the tribe that I chose and they generally have my back so I think it will be ok even if he does come back but he freaked me out quite a lot.
On Sunday I taught George and Jerry after a week away and then went to meet some writer friends. We met at the bookstore where we used to meet and I got a couple of hours of writing done. If I can maintain the schedule of writing on the weekends then perhaps writing on Thursdays will become a bit easier as well. On Thursday evenings I have a tendency to get distracted by the tasks that I didn’t complete for the English Centre during the week. We also talked about the creepy incel guy and they gave me the suggestion that if he comes tp the meeting again we make it a silent write-in, so that at least he won’t be able to talk. It’s not a bad suggestion, but I really just hope he doesn’t come back.
That’s all she wrote for this Inkreadable installment. But stay tuned. As always, there is more to come.
Inkreadable 