A New Year Begins

 This will be the second article of the next chapter, but I am actually writing it at the end of 2025 just after Christmas.  I wanted to just give a couple of parting observations of the close of 2025 that I had not planned on doing, but there are just a few things I needed to talk about as they affect the course of the coming year.  This will also be remarkably candid, more so than other posts I have made, so bear with me. 

2025 was, for lack of a better description, a mixed year for me.  A lot of good things, but also challenges.  It was by no means the worst year I have ever experienced, but it also was certainly not the best either.  A lot of decisions hang in the balance as the new year dawns because there is much going on even as I write this. For one, I have essentially decided to not limit my prospects to Baltimore, as in all honesty I hate living in this city with a passion.  I mentioned before that often this city - a city that is ironically an integral part of my own early history - is like a foreign country to me.  It is not even the same place it was in 1975, when I last lived here and went to kindergarten less than 2 miles from where I am sitting.  Further, it also acts like a different entity from the rest of the state of Maryland too - one only has to travel just outside the city boundaries and a difference is noticeable.  I have lived in Maryland now 9 years - as a state, I have always liked it despite some liberal politics and high cost of living.  However, I had lived in western Maryland, which has a lot more in common with my home state of West Virginia than it does the inner-city streets of Baltimore.  Hagerstown, where until approximately 14 months ago I had lived for 8 years, was comfortable to me, and even traveling over there now I feel like I belong there.  I don't feel like that in inner-city Baltimore in all honesty.   Also, where I work at, a private nominally Catholic high school, has frankly been getting to me and I am starting to put feelers out for other options.  As that unfolds, I will talk more, but for now it is just something "in the works," and I have yet to see what happens - that is in God's hands.   But, there are some other things to mention as well. 

One major issue I am having now is looking into a new home, as in all honesty the place I am living in now is not ideal.  I was not particularly happy with moving here in the first place, but at the time I had no choice.   However, over the past year I have gained both the income and the credit rating to start looking into a possibility of home ownership, and I have already looked into some things already but nothing materialized yet.  However, after talking with Barbara and a couple of other close friends, I began to realize that my options are not necessarily limited to here - I have a doctorate now, as well as two years of teaching high school, under my belt, so I have in essence increased marketability.  I also realized I am not limited to just teaching in schools either - I already have the credentials I need to be a Faith Formation Coordinator for a parish, and started looking into that as well.  Our trip to DC a couple of weeks ago, when I had my Templar ceremony at the Basilica, also sparked interest in a few things as well.  DC is, by all standards, as big of a city as Baltimore if not even bigger.  I know DC well also, and have worked there as well as doing a lot of business down there.  DC, although not perfect, is not Baltimore - its status as the nation's capital has made it a self-conscious city that wants to keep up its appearance, both reputationally and physically.  That is a huge reason why President Trump did a major cleanup on the city earlier in the year too.  Many of us were hoping he would Federalize the troops in Baltimore too but that hasn't transpired yet.  Baltimore does need a lot of reform, and the fact that decades of a corrupt political establishment which has bled the city dry necessitates reform.  A reform in the crime rate, the political establishment, and the aesthetic of the city - it is all vital.  But, will anyone listen?   Let's explore that further.

If you walk on almost any street in inner Baltimore, some things become painfully evident.  Trash strews the streets, ugly graffiti defaces property, and there are blocks after blocks of abandoned boarded-up rowhouses that would be best put out of their misery by demolishing them.  It is also not uncommon to see huge rats crossing streets in broad daylight as well - that was disturbing when I saw them on occasion.  Now, I am no stranger to inner-city life - after all, I lived in downtown St. Petersburg, FL, for over 5 years in a high-rise apartment building, and although St. Pete had its own issues then (including racially-motivated riots only blocks from where we used to live there, as well as a murder occurring at a convenience store just across the street from our building), they paled in comparison with what I have seen in Baltimore.  Also, in recent years, St. Pete has actually been revitalizing its downtown, and the last I saw of there it looked better.   I also spent a year of my childhood living on the west side of Baltimore, and back then it was a different city - the neighborhood we lived in was largely made up of families with roots in western Maryland and West Virginia, including many households of my own family.  Also, there were vibrant ethnic communities all over the city - from a prolific Jewish community just north of JHU's Charles Village campus, to a large Polish community in Fells Point, a vibrant Little Italy near the harbor, and actual Greeks in Greektown.  The Black community at that time in Baltimore was different too - it had a vibrant cultural atmosphere then, and was generally low-crime and not politicized.  Many older Blacks I talked to in the city in the past year noted this, and the city is actually as foreign to them now as it is to me - they are not happy with the trajectory of the city.  "Old Baltimore" was indeed a much different place from this odd atmosphere the 21st-century version of the city has.   And, recent demographics I have seen shows that Baltimore has been bleeding population.  Whenever someone proposes a revitalization of the different communities adjacent to downtown, they are accused by the leftist powers-that-be of being "racist" and promoting something called "gentrification."  Apparently, leftists love decay and filth, and it makes sense - the ultimate objective of a totalitarian ideology is the subjugation and depression of the masses it wants to control, only enticing votes from them with the occasional proverbial carrot held out to them in the form of some benefit.  Baltimore has a legacy of this failed leftist corruption, and why people keep voting these crooks into power here escapes logic.  You would think that most people would begin to have the realization dawn on them that nothing changes and the same talking-head bureaucrats keep getting voted into power, and the next cycle of corruption starts over again.  Stupidity and complacency are powerful narcotics, and the powers-that-be are the ultimate pushers of these dangerous intoxicants.  It is why a huge segment of the population of this city never learns anything, and the same old, same old, keeps going on, only getting worse.  It is in other cities as well, but in Baltimore for some reason it seems like it's built into the fabric of the city.  I went down that rabbit hole to make my own points about decisions I am facing.

The current house we live in now - an old rowhouse built in 1920 which is in desperate need of some structural refurbishment - was only meant as a temporary residence until I found something better.  That realization was in existence from the first day I moved into this place, October 23, 2024.  It is not my ideal neighborhood, and since living here we have been at the mercy of porch pirates and other nonsense - I call the porch pirates "black buzzards" because nine chances out of ten they are Blacks who want to steal from others and don't care what they steal or how.  I actually caught one of them a few months back circling around erratically in the street just outside our front door - he looked like he was also on some drug too, and was just milling about coincidentally at the same time the mail carrier was making rounds, so the connection was not hard to make.  I have a low tolerance for riff-raff like that, and it's yet another reason why I am looking to get out of this neighborhood soon.  Whether it is moving to one of the more amenable suburban neighborhoods outside the city, or far away to another more comfortable place, there are two things that need to happen:

1.  I have the credit for it, but I need to secure a mortgage that would preferably be 1% down maximum/

2.  An employment opportunity that would facilitate a move - the stability of a place is contingent upon the right income. 

This means I am contemplating staying at my current place of employment, and after some serious prayer I have decided that if God wants me to stay in that position, doors will inevitably open up.  If not, then God will open a door somewhere else for a much better opportunity for me.  I am OK either way, just as long as we get out of the inner city and I can feel safe in a place I can confidently call home.  Ideally, I would love to go back to western Maryland, or even West Virginia, as that is my comfort zone and I feel connected there.  But, only time and God's will determines that.  2026 will be essentially navigated for me with these ideals in mind, and we will see where it all goes. 

As the closing days of 2025 rapidly race toward 2026, I send everyone my best New Year's greetings, and pray the best for you all.  So, will see you next year!

Combatting Corporatism

 Although the official book of articles has gone to press, this is being written in December now and will be included in the 2026 book later.  I just wanted to reflect on a few things that have transpired since last writing, and I felt they needed to be addressed here.

I wanted to begin about how things can be taken the wrong way if they are said, as an incident came up last week which affected me personally.   As you know for now, I work at a parochial college-prep school as a teacher, and an accepted fact of life is that we have to interact with the principal of the school, who in essence is our boss as teachers.  When a principal comes from a different type of background, or perhaps has a management style which can be something to get used to, it can create some communication issues.  I had one of those with the principal this past week, and it was somewhat intense.  Our principal here tends to have - and how shall I put this delicately? - a bit of an authoritarian leadership style.  He is not a micromanager, which is good, but he does tend to not receive feedback well when it is given.  The particular issue that came to mind entailed a malfunctioning heating system in the classroom, and to be honest it was a bit uncomfortable and the students were feeling it - in all honesty, I almost had a riot on my hands in one class as the students were really uncomfortable (as was I in all honesty, so who could blame them?).  Now, in our particular working environment, trying to get some help with something like this can be a bit of a process, as due to meetings and other things the appropriate authorities to address things to may not be readily available.  However, I was getting a bit flustered as the students in the particular class were acting as if the heating issue was somehow my problem, and to try to elicit a response I wrote the following message - "is anyone else in the building noticing how hot the rooms are?"  It was an innocent question, and as I found out later, some of my colleagues were having a similar issue in their classes.  However, the principal really took offense at it, saying the comment was "unprofessional" and "sarcastic."  Everyone else I showed the message to did not see that at all - it was just an informal inquiry as to the condition of the classrooms.   I ended up having a meeting with my principal, and it was a series of head-butts in all honesty - the principal refused to budge on his opinion (as of late, he still is), and things were compounded in that there was an incident in the front office earlier that exacerbated things.  I honestly felt like walking out the door that day after all this, and for me nothing was resolved although I tried to do so.  

A second issue with the same principal came up that weekend, when a proposed agenda for the upcoming midterms for our students was discussed.  For some reason, whoever had put together that schedule at the beginning of the year really did not think through the implications of it, as it has the midterms at the end of the week before Christmas break and no room for make-up exams for students who might be absent.  I mentioned that this current plan was not good, and I was chastised by the principal for "unprofessional communication" again - in other words, the message was the principal is infallible, and he did not like questions or criticisms.  This time, the communication was solely with him so there was no one else involved in the communication except us.  This led me to an inevitable conclusion - this principal has made himself untouchable and unreachable with criticism, and therefore I am thinking that any communication should be made through other channels.  In all honesty, we do have an assistant principal who is more approachable, so the resolution in this case is to air concerns with him instead.  This way, if the principal must be involved, any communication can be filtered through the assistant principal instead.   As to the midterm issue, I later found out that they at least did allow for make-ups in January, and had our principal addressed that and offered that solution, I would have been satisfied - I still don't think it is the best idea, but I could at least work with it had I known what was going on, hence avoiding a lot of unnecessary conflict and stress.  This has led me to make a few observations as I reflected on this.

Long before working in this school, I had approximately 27 years in the corporate world as essentially an administrative consultant.  Much of that was worked in temporary assignments for a variety of companies ranging from multi-billion-dollar corporations to tiny mom-and-pop offices.  I learned a lot of things through observation in doing this work, and I want to share a few insights now:

1.  For one, the bigger corporations have leadership that is so out-of-touch with their employees that often they cannot relate.  Therefore, the corporate head-games are something one inevitably faces in the corporate world.

2.  Once a person is promoted to an upper management role, it seems like one of the requirements of the job is to jettison common sense.  An upper-management corporate person finds foreign the most mundane of reasoning, and to them everything has to be made far more complicated than it should be.  They appear at times to be more about creating issues rather than resolving them. 

3. Consistency is often preached but rarely practiced.  Many corporate types are all about drilling the ideas of "consistency" into those under them, but then they lack it in principal.  Despite all the "life-coaching" and other faddish trends corporations use, much of it is just fluff to make the company look good, and at times it only benefits the employees, who can apply good principles from those things into other areas of life. 

4. The bottom line is the numbers.  People matter little to upper management, and this is true whether the setting is a multi-billion-dollar corporation or a private school.  The stats, the money, and the flowcharts are all that matter, and often employee satisfaction is sacrificed on the altar of the idol of subjective success.   Let me give an example here.  If a school has a 100% college acceptance rate for a graduating senior class, the powers-that-be tout that as "success."  What is often overlooked though is the retention rates of those graduates - how many of them will actually complete a higher degree, and how many of them will simply not be able to cut the college experience?  This is something that I personally feel needs to be re-examined in the field of education.  The same is true of standardized testing - does that truly measure the retention of knowledge of the students?   It is perhaps time for us to look more at the long term rather than impressive numbers, and this can be applied to any industry, not just education. 

5.  Communication - the huge problem with many in upper-level management is that when someone reaches that level, they lose touch with those who are subordinate to them.  Communication on the part of upper management is reduced to a lexicon of buzzwords, technical jargon that usually doesn't encapsulate the actual meaning of the word, and the annoying way that employees' concerns are often dismissed as being either "expressed unprofessionally" or they are explained away by a word salad of corporate babble which often leaves the poor subordinate more confused than before.  The bottom line to this is always the same - the management is always right, and the employee is always wrong.  What is really tragic about this entails two things.  First, a lot of brilliant ideas are more or less tossed into the rubbish bin by management because they don't like them or it may expose their own weaknesses and they don't want a lowly subordinate getting credit for solving a problem they may have created.  Second, if an employee is really upset about something, they are not always going to address the issue in sterile "professional" corporate-speak - a human being has emotions, and also everyone has limits, and if a problem festers for too long it causes some distress for the person.  Managers should really stop scolding people for "unprofessional communication" and instead exercise some empathy for whatever the underlying issue is.  A little of that would go a long way.  

6. Treating Employees like Automoton Robots.  Companies tend to, due to the other factors listed above, view employees as a commodity rather than as human beings, and thus they push, and push, and push people until they wear out.  This is the result of a toxic combination of Herbert Spencer's social Darwinism and the faulty economic policies of John Maynard Keynes, and it is a big reason why so much dissatisfaction exists in many industries.   While many entities try to buffer this with attractive benefit packages and such, it doesn't address the underlying problem of workplace discontent.  Other factors that led to this problem are both Enlightenment thinking itself as well as the Industrial Revolution.  When I read Josef Pieper's seminal text Leisure: The Basis of Culture, he focused on a point that a lot of corporate types really miss, and that is the idea of acedia, or the busyness of sloth to put it in my own terms.  Acedia causes complacency, discontent, and it also makes an idol out of a subjective definition of success, and that starves the person of both spiritual and intellectual growth.  The big criticism of capitalism comes from this in all honesty, and when leftists decry the whole system of capitalism, it goes back to this (although, the question is posed as to what they offer to improve it, as the leftist totalitarian model actually makes this worse).  The problem is not capitalism as a system, but rather the corporatist variation of it, which is not in reality true capitalism at all - that is the point people like Chesterton, Belloc, and the late Pope St. Leo XIII make.  Dignity of personhood is not a convenient option, but a vital necessity.  And, it is time the corporate types rediscover the importance of dignity of personhood. 

These are only six things I could mention, as there are many more if time permits.   Needless to say, toxic corporatism is a cancer in our society, and it does affect overall quality of life.  While some of my personal experiences may flavor what I am writing, I think it is something many of us can relate to.  I only pray that those who hold the power would learn how to use it responsibly. 

Thank you for allowing me to share again this week, as this was an unanticipated post.  I may or may not post again, depending on how the remainder of the year goes, so if not, I will see you in 2026. 

The Year Ends

 This is my last official blog post of 2025, given that I have written quite prolifically over the past year.  I am not really sure why I have so much content, but with 90 total posts, I have broken a record in the past 15 or so years of doing this.  That being said, let's retrospect a bit on the year.

2025 was a complex year - it was a year of transitions, recovery, and healing from the mess that happened in 2024.  There were many good things that happened - I became a Templar Knight, I was renewed for another year at the school I teach at with a nice raise, and I did get some much-needed dental work done last month.  However, it has also been a year of a lot of things happening too - stress at my current job, a crackhead ramming into the front of our house and destroying Barbara's car in the process, the loss of our beloved little cat Mickey, and to be honest, I have felt like the proverbial "fish out of water" living in central Baltimore.  I am in the process of making a few changes happen that may turn things around, so we will see what happens.  Oh, and I cannot forget that I also was able to get myself out of debt too!  All in all, the year has had its ups and downs, and while I would not call it one of my worst years, it cannot be considered one of my best either.  But, in essence, that is life too isn't it?

With this only being the second day of December with around 29 days of 2025 yet to go, we still have Christmas yet, and also there is a possibility I could gain a bit of prestige at my workplace as department chair of my department - the lady who taught our Freshmen Theology class has left to pursue other opportunities (I cannot blame her for that) and she was the department chair.  As a department chair, Claire was really good - in the short 11 months she was with us, she streamlined things and we actually felt like a department.  I also got close to her as a friend as well, as she was a stellar human being.  She had her own reasons for moving on, and I don't know enough about her personal situation to elaborate on it with any credibility, but I also don't judge.  I pray the best for her as she pursues other opportunities - she does have a husband and kids, and she also is planning on completing her own doctorate, and she deserves the best.  She was also the one who suggested I take her place as department chair, and while a part of me is very reluctant, I am also thinking about how that will look on a future CV when I eventually do move onto other opportunities myself.  So, what of that?  Let's reflect on that a moment.

I have this feeling that Baltimore will not be a "forever home" to me, nor do I want it to be in all honesty.  There is going to come a time when I will be presented with another opportunity, and I am preparing for that now.  I am also starting to look seriously at home ownership too, as I feel it is time - I am making a decent salary now, I have my doctorate, and it is time to begin looking into long-term goals for myself, as at 56 I am not getting any younger.  I am frustrated, a bit lonely, and I want to have roots again, which I badly miss having.  While there are some things in the works that I will share at a more relevant time, there is still much to do.  I am needing to rely more on God than at any time in my life, but I also feel like my devotional life has suffered - I do attend Mass regularly, and I pray every morning as well as every night before I go to sleep, and Barbara and I even pray a prayer traveling of a morning while we commute to work.  But, the enthusiasm of my earlier faith feels a bit, well, tethered.  I don't know how to get some lost fire I had back, and that is something I desperately need to do too - I faith is still strong, and I know I have supernatural grace with me, but I just feel so bleh lately.  My spirit needs a spring shower, and perhaps I need to give it one.  I may commit something next year to doing just that, because God is truly my lifeline and I need him with me always.  These are just some things I ponder and where I am at as the year winds down.

Now, about Barbara.  As everyone knows by now, Barbara and I separated and divorced five years ago, but in all honesty, our friendship didn't die with our marriage thankfully.  If anything, we are closer as friends now than we ever were as spouses, and I view Barbara like a sister I never had.   She is still a huge blessing in my life, and perhaps the only family I have close to me now, and I am very thankful she is still part of my life.  Of course, when people hear our story their eyebrows shoot up, but why is that so strange?  To me, Barbara's and my friendship demonstrate the spirit of Christ in both of us, and although we have moved on in other aspects, we will always be close and I feel an integral part of each other's lives.  We will never be married again obviously, because I myself have moved on and have some future plans of my own in the making, but the fact we are still an integral part of each other's lives is no accident.  So, if there were something I could be very thankful for as the year ends, it is the fact that Barbara is still close to me, and I thank God for her friendship and sisterhood. 

With the pressures of life always there these days now, I feel a bit worn-out, tired, and long for an extended rest - thankfully retirement for me is about 11 years away, and I may take full advantage of that when it comes.  2025 was definitely a new chapter though, and there is a lot that has happened, and continues to happen, as the year closes.  When I revisit in January, I will do more retrospection once I have some time to really ponder things, but suffice to say, it has been an adventure. 

Given that after this is published and I can add final edits to the copy I am sending to be bound, I want to extend sincere Christmas greetings to everyone who reads this.  Your visits are what makes this blog tick, and thank you so much for that.  I am currently looking into new venues to transfer this site to, as I want to consolidate this and my other blogs together, but that is still a work in progress.  So, may you all have a blessed remainder of 2025, and may 2026 be a good year for us all.  Thank you, and will see you next year.