Prepoceros

I don’t feel like paragraphs. A list, in vaguely chronological order:

1. A long, complicated dream in which I was nearly run over by a train, nearly crushed between two steel beams wielded by angry construction workers, and nearly killed in a head-on spaceship collision. I was leading a team of girls who suddenly ganged up on me and mutinied, so I tried to join a commune, but I picked a blue flower and no one wanted to be my friend any more. I tried racing ice-carts (no, I don’t know what they are either), but I missed my exit, and everyone made fun of me because I didn’t know how to get to Wisconsin. Then I was a black man searching through a haunted house for bits of magazine cutouts that I could put together to solve a puzzle, but before I found them all a mafioso in an alligator suit shot me for being gay. I woke up when I was bleeding, but not quite dead yet. This was around 4 in the morning.
2. I woke up for real at 9:something when Wendy called to ask where my timesheet was. Hooray, I’ve neglected to do something important. Again.
3. Had things to do, but spent most of the morning obsessing over things I SHOULD NOT be obsessing over because I’ve DONE this before and I KNOW where it goes and it’s NOT PRETTY. Stop it stop it stop it.
4. The healthiest thing I ate today was a cup of yogurt. The second healthiest was a bag of fruit snacks.
5. Today’s Narnia class was nearly useless. The only thing I learned is that I become more defensive than I expected I would when “secular academia” is dismissed off-hand as a tyrannical, monolithic, closed-minded institution.
6. Having left class ten minutes late, I took a “shortcut” to make up the time, only to get my ass handed to me by traffic. I lost fifteen extra minutes trying to get around four exits of 59 and ended up *twenty* minutes late to my Kingwood class. I clawed my own arm hard enough to draw teeny tiny drops of blood. You might find this hard to believe, but I HATE being late to things. With a passion. It makes my chest twist up in knots.
7. Made a girl cry in class today. Not boo-hooing—I don’t think anyone else noticed—but still, I felt guilty. The reason won’t make sense unless you know a lot about the course to begin with, so I won’t bother trying to explain it, but this is the second time one of my students has cried during this particular lesson. I know what the problem is, but I haven’t found a way around it yet, so I always dread teaching it. I’m teaching the same lesson again tomorrow to 17 students I haven’t yet met. Fan-fucking-tastic.
8. The good thing about being able to switch into perky-fun teacher mode at the drop of a hat is that I can forget about the rest of the world for a few hours and concentrate all my energy on teaching. The bad thing is that when I snap back out of it, the weight of the real world seems extra-burdensome in comparison. It’s like Minesweeper, but slightly more fulfilling.
9. My entire life these last few days (weeks?) has been one big existentialist crisis. All of a sudden I find myself constantly reminded that one day I will DIE and then I will NOT EXIST and everything will be OVER and the world is RANDOM and MEANINGLESS and ARBITRARY and there are so many things that I don’t understand but none of it even MATTERS because it’s NOT REAL it’s all pretend and how can everyone go on living their lives and not be CRUSHED by the EMPTINESS of it all. I dare say there never has been a more depressing thought.
10. I’ve wasted a good chunk of yesterday and most of today, and now I have at least twice as much to do as time to do it. Same old same old. And now I’ve spent even more time writing this when I’d rather be asleep. And I feel like everyone’s stress level is running high right now, and there’s just tension tension tension, or maybe that’s just me, but anyway I don’t want to contribute to it but look at me I’m doing it right now.
11. Can the weekend be here now please? And by weekend, I mean two days in a row when I don’t have things to do. Or even one day in a row. One day? Maybe one day when I only have one thing to do?
12. This really isn’t a list of bad things about today any more. Now I’m just rambling. To think, I was happy(ish) this morning. (I didn’t remember the dream until right before I started typing this.) But somewhere along the way I got to feeling angry. Angry and sad. And if you know me, you know that I’m not an angry person. I hate anger; I think it’s pointless and only makes things worse. Like today. Ok, hush now. Go to sleep. You don’t have to type everything you think. Filter. Edit. Or they won’t come back. Ramble ramble ramble. Oh, I just remembered how I’d planned to end this post, but I’ve wandered so far off-topic that it doesn’t make sense any more. So I’ll stop here. Good night.

Tags: dreams, religion, school, teaching

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