Suddenly

Sometimes things happen suddenly. That's not too profound in and of itself, but a lot of things have come up suddenly for a lot of people I know lately. I only check Facebook once a week to see if anyone left a message for me. Usually there's no message and the first post on my newsfeed doesn't interest me, so I go back to work. Today the first post was that my friend was hit by a train, was on a ventilator for 7 months, but is being taken off the ventilator and allowing nature to take it's course. Going back and looking at her posts before the accident and the posts on her page by family and friends after the accident on her behalf illustrated how unexpected and life-altering/ending things can happen. It made me think of an exchange I had with a former student who was studying to be a music teacher, when she was in a car accident and died. She was from the same class as another student who died driving to work one day. Another friend had been out of work for weeks battling Crohn's disease and she had to leave at 11 AM on the first day she returned to work because a family member committed suicide.

Aside from these life and death issues, another friend who I had worked with at Freedom was recently forced to resign by the superintendent because he took incriminating emails from the superintendent to HR. He has a lawyer and it sounds like it will turn out in his favor in the end, but to have a job one day and be unexpectedly forced out the next day is still stressful in the interim while it is being worked out. Another friend who was unjustly fired from Plum will get her job back, with back pay, which is good, but still had to find a way to make ends meet because it took over a year to fight the legal battle.

I wish I had the time to compose a better introduction, transitions, and, for that matter, a conclusion, besides this, but I do have to get back to writing Algebra work.