Why I less than slash three the past two weeks

So, I've been putting up some extremely depressed Facebook statuses recently, and a lot of you have kindly emailed me wanting to know why. So here it is.

I am in charge of Whitman Academy's yearbook. I took on this project at the beginning of the year, blithely assuming it would be a one-day-a-week commitment to watch some kids copy and paste pictures on computers. What I did not realize at the time was that Whitman Academy is a school with less than 100 students that wants all the benefits of thousands. I'm expected to turn out a large-school quality product with a team of 8 kids (that comes out to 10 pages of yearbook per kid) and, until a desperate appeal to the board, no budget at all (more on that later).

The main problem is Adobe Photoshop. This is the software we're using to do almost all of our work, and the school owns one computer that can run it. This computer is located in the computer lab. Current school policy requires a designated teacher to be present in the lab while the student works. This is not "any teacher," this is "the teacher who is responsible for this student at this hour of the day." This means that for a student to work on a lab computer, I have to be physically present. I have one free period per day (out of 7), so this is typically not feasible. The alternative is for me to meet personally with each student and use the copy of Photoshop installed on my computer to do the work. It takes about 45 minutes per page. At 80 pages, that's 60 hours of work to be done by me. A few things can lower this number (two students also own the program and can work for themselves without me present) but it adds up to a heck of a lot.

Moreover, at the beginning of the year, neither I nor any of my yearbook staff nor any other faculty member, student, or parent at Whitman knew how to use the software. I had to outsource, hiring a photoshop trainer to give us a 1-hour seminar in the basics of it. I spend each day finding how an hour wasn't enough.

Yearbook is essentially devouring my life, with every spare minute being spent with one kid or another getting pages into the computer. It's eating away at my time for everything else. I haven't done laundry in a dog's age, or been grocery shopping. I'm not sleeping enough, and when I do it's fitful. I'm stressed, I'm exhausted, I'm malnourished because it's easier to buy fast food (not as unhealthy in the states, but not long on fruit or veggies either) than it is to bring stuff home.

There are bright spots in this grim picture. I have the most wonderful staff of kids you could possibly imagine, who are working all kinds of long hours just as I am, and finding solutions to problems I didn't know existed without even needing to consult me. On Monday, the school board voted me JD2000 in funding, which will allow me to cut the price of each yearbook from 25 JD to 8, still make money, and have some discretionary funds left over to buy the school some computers/cameras/USB drives (at the moment, yearbook runs on people's personal equipment, which is unreliable and also bad business practice). Also, next year will be a class rather than an after-school activity. However, none of that solves my immediate problem, which is having too much to do and not enough time to do it.

I think, in fact I'm fairly sure, we'll get the thing done. This is a new-ish development. Last weekend I spent all of Friday in a state of complete despair. Despair, however, is unproductive, and probably not warranted.

Happier news is that I have been singing in a choir, which did an Easter concert last night and tonight. While rehearsals have been eating into a lot of other activities, and taking time it's tough to justify spending, it has been of extreme psychological benefit. That whole music hath charms thing is an overused cliche, but it's become so because it's true.

Our concerts went unbelievably well, as in if you had told me at our last rehearsal that I'd be so satisfied with the performances, I'd have either laughed or cried. We performed in a stately old Catholic church (for decor style, think "the off-White House" and you won't be far off. Pictures to follow, inshallah) that had glorious acoustics and a ton of atmosphere, matching our largely liturgical music selections almost perfectly. I am not the second coming of Pavarotti, but I did ok, and our collective sound was wonderful according to every audience member I talked to. My only complaints were that the priest glowered at us menacingly the entire time from start to finish, and that standing for two 35-minute periods within a two-meter radius of a dozen men in the heat of the nascent Jordanian summer quickly approaches biohazard levels of body odor. It was worth it, however. I wish there were more shows.

Spring break is coming up, and I need it as I didn't think I could ever need anything. I'll be spending it in Cyprus, and internet access is not a given. I'll try to stay as wired as possible, we'll see.