this night went horribly wrong

it started heading in the wrong direction when the target didn’t give me the bag with the candy cane oreos in it and it took half an hour to get around the block and to the 380/280 from the tanforan target, who kept my cookies.

i was planning to meet a friend at the bar and it was all pleasant and optimistic until someone had to just be awful and someone else had to be disappointing.

i have such a philosophical problem with being bad…i just don’t get that some people are just mean and that’s what they want to be.  i want to make it be right and i can’t.  also, as a person committed to nonviolence, it just gets other people into messes that i also don’t understand.

i hate the way we are sometimes.  it just confuses me and breaks my fucking heart.

realization

through a variety of bad choices, i found myself driving home through daly city, on el camino and mission, the way, i’d imagine, most people find themselves there.

i was super fucking fist-shaking mad at the horrible driving and i couldn’t find the very basic thing i wanted–a frozen vegetarian lasagna–that would work at any of the three places i tried and when i finally found one i at the ridiculously giant lucky’s store, i ended up in the line one of the slowest and most inept grocery checkers i remember experiencing in my life in the bay area…so, you know, to be fair to daly city, i wasn’t in a very positive place as i drove through that part of town, hating it.

now that i’m home and comfortable, i hate DC less and i’m thinking about how different it is from what i see every day.  how aggravating and irritating and depressing it is…it’s not like the san francisco i know.  not just that my neighborhood is “better”–i’ve been in bad neighborhoods before and only one other i can think of made me feel like this.  mcclaren park, i think it was?  i’ll have to look it up to be sure.  anyway, it feels like a bad urban neighborhood in a 70s crime show.  it’s like it’s a depressing time warp and no one can get out of it…

what i was initially thinking was that this daly city is not the one i see all the time and think of our students as coming from…this place is nothing like pacifica and it’s not like san francisco, either.  it doesn’t even really seem like the peninsula towns, though i don’t know much about them.  it seems like i am making an epiphany out of something that is really obvious, but on having that general thought, i immediately thought of my 3rd period TA, who is so incredibly hard to understand.  habitual truant but not at all–as far as i can tell–a “bad” kid.  rarely if ever does he initiate any conversation with us, even now, though i know now that he’ll totally chat with me even beyond just answering my questions, so i try to do that now and again.

at rest he has one of the blankest faces i’ve ever seen.  absolutely no emotion, with a slight tip of the scales toward looking mean.  if you get a chance to see it, a completely luminous smile. 

i don’t know, i just saw for a moment how unresponsive can also be guarded in a more literal way than i had before. i know he’s close to his family and likes afl better than national league baseball…and that he asked to read _the illiad_ on his own, which was last week’s surprise…a tough-looking latino kid that has all this going on coming from a place i saw today, on a very bad day, is a really different thing, somehow, than a tough-looking latino kid coming from pacifica or westlake or whatever.  kind of a reality check.

anyway, time to leave reality behind again.  it’s a long weekend.  i can learn something on tuesday. 

such a relief.

the election went as well as it possibly could have yesterday…well, practically, at least. 

i am so relieved that prop 30 passed.  this should be the ticket to a sense of job security again, though who really knows these days?  between this money and the parcel tax juhsd passed last time around, we should be solvent and not worried about mid-year cuts at all or cuts next year, either.  i hope.  i’ve been afraid so long i don’t think i’ll get over it any time soon.

also incredibly happy that obama was granted another term.  i still have faith in him.  i still think he is a good person who is trying to do a good job.  he’s not a savior or a perfect president, but i think he is trying to improve the world because he thinks that’s a worthy goal, and i appreciate that.

okay!  now i need to get through one more scary thing tomorrow and then it should be smooth sailing for a while!

unexpectedly pleasant evening, despite my earlier pique.

once things got going last night, they went well.  tasty pizza, companionable video games, bar time involving a hand repeatedly on my knee–we’ll come back to this later–and then more of the above after, with a side of “twin peaks”.  this morning i woke up and baked the always-amazing cider bread with most of a cube of butter either in or on it and it was good.

somewhere along the line, i think i could have traded my video game pal for my hand-on-the-knee, but that suddenly seems like a bad idea.  it seemed like a good idea a couple weeks ago.  did i change my mind for valid reasons?  and who cares what my mind thinks, anyway?  but bar things are awkward and he would not appreciate my messy charms, i fear.

but when a straight man puts his hand repeatedly on a fairly straight woman’s knee and thigh, that still means what i think it means, right?  that’s less ambiguous than, say, walking a girl home, right?  right?! 

a lovely beginning to the weekend–fully worth putting on mascara.

i hate waiting.

i hate that feeling when you’re just hung out to dry and there is nothing to do but wait.

for someone.

for something.

for a pizza.