My life in Quotes

  Friends,      It's been a while since we've spoken. The semester is at a close, with 2 weeks left and I've put in almost 2 years into my attempt to break what I thought would be a curse. I struggle with money, social cues, dating, being shy, (believe it or not), and asking for help. I'm proud of myself for maintaining friendships and creating new ones. I'm proud of my courage to sing karaoke without liquid courage. I'm proud of my grades. I am proud of myself in that I have made some friends in my program which has made school easier. This semester I ran for student government and I have an upcoming interview for The Student Advisory Board for the disability department at UNCC. I've come a long way in that I have constant anxiety that three strikes and I'm out. That's the negative side of my brain. In reality, it should be, Third times the charm.      Having friends on campus and wanting to do big things in the campus community has helped me even

  Joshua Harke’s Teaching Philosophy Introduction In 2019, I decided to go back to Central Piedmont Community College to get a transfer degree so I could return to UNC Charlotte as a pre-teaching student. I chose teaching because my marketing associate degree wasn’t cutting it as a career. I want to be a teacher because I want to give back to the community and be an advocate for the voiceless. I decided that I would like to become a teacher, in high school. I wanted to be a history teacher or a physical therapist and those are very different professions. I was a teacher aid for the PE teacher for 2 nd and 3 rd graders and 7 th and 8 th graders. I was a natural with the elementary kids. My family has an abundance of teachers in the lines of the Harke’s and Hughson’s. My mom was a teacher/administrator of a preschool up in Syracuse, New York called Little Lamb. She would read Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Suess, and they would serve green eggs and ham to the kids that day. I was al

 I wrote an entry that spoke to Amazon being the savior of retail. Not only was I wrong in regards to people having to work more on Thanksgiving but it made people crazier. The giant known as Amazon treats its employees with an unbiased and shitty disdain and I have friends that have worked or work for Amazon. The real savior of the holiday season/Black Friday is Covid and the Great Resignation. I never thought I would see stores like Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Belk, and so on be closed on the eve of Black Friday. I love it. My retail friends actually got to spend time with their families and that means more than angsty customers shopping for a deal and forgetting to treat workers with dignity and respect that they were there being mistreated by bad customers for longer shifts than normal. What a magical time to be alive.  I hope that the job market learns from this holiday season and as people return back to work during the pandemic that employees get treated better than ever before.

 Originally when I titled this entry I was obsessed with death or my own death. I wished I was dead and boy did I ever. I would think about getting t-boned by a tractor-trailer or flipping my car off the embankment. I am sober because of health reasons and that I would kill myself with alcohol and pills. It's a somber thought to think about. I also titled this entry because I binged "The Good Place" and it resonated with me as did it make me happy. “Come on, you know how this works. You fail and then you try something else. And you fail again and again, and you fail a thousand times, and you keep trying because maybe the 1,001st idea might work. Now, I’m gonna and try to find our 1,001st idea.” – Michael,  The Good Place I take a cocktail of meds and I haven't been thinking about death nearly as much. I feel like I'm winning and that possibly I'm in a good place. I take Vraylar, Lamictal, Zoloft, and Trazadone for sleep. They seem to be working together very w