They say I’m never going to be rich.  Well, if I were after money, I’d have skipped college and gone into labor work right here in Alaska.  Dig a hole in the ground or drive a truck back and forth and you can make double what I’ll be making.  Don’t get me wrong.  Money’s important and the ones who say it can’t buy happiness have never been broke.  Besides, I spend my summers commercial fishing for wild Alaskan salmon.  I get by just fine. 

They say I need to find a good woman.  Well, if women were my life’s ambition, I’d have stayed in Spain.  Beautiful brunettes with dark complexions and petite figures are behind every corner in that country and they aren’t stuck up about it like Italian girls… or a lot of American ones.  I only put effort into a girl who’s really worth it, but girls don’t find me to be worth much myself.  Well, they’re right.  Like I said, I’m never going to be rich.  That’s something I’ll have to deal with.    

See, A guy has to have his priorities straight.  After all, if I wanted to spoil myself and lose any toughness I might have, I would spend all year in the softest place someone can live without the returns to Alaska.  That would be the continental United States.  I’m headed back down once again, but this time I’m headed right into the heart of it, about twenty miles away from the geographical center, actually.   There’s nothing more I’d like to see other than a revolution that turns the world into a scenario described by a popular John Lennon song, but although I’m a dreamer, I’m no messiah – or anti-messiah, however you want to look at it. I’m not a persuasive celebrity like Bono.  I’m not going to change the world overnight on my own.    

But while I was a Writing major at Northern Michigan University, I realized something.  An English class is a course in personal philosophy using literature as a springboard.  I could turn around and facilitate the same effect it had on me with my own students.  Now I’m humbly going to teach English and Literature at a highschool in rural Kansas.  It’s only where I’m going because it’s the place I was able to finally land a job, but if it’s my life’s mission to make a scratch in this country’s apathetic and ignorant structure, what better place to start than the very heart?