Take a time out for a write-it-out.

I blogged on Monday, huh? It seems like it's been longer since then. Probably because this week sucks a giant dick, withered and pink and soft.

It's March, huh? The week started off slow, it did. Cold, windy. Yesterday was good, but too windy to convince myself to pull the reflective running tights over the solid calves and still-fat thighs. Instead I slept it off, slept it all off, and off and off. A four hour nap, two hours of grading papers, and back to bed.

I've decided that Elgin is inhaling my soul like a heavy puff on a glass pipe; it tries to inhale it so bad that it literally swallows after breathing in to make sure it goes down, fills the lungs and the stomach. It might be 40 today, but winter is still killing me. The house has been wearing down on me since everyone left (or, I suppose it was before, it's just now that I notice). The paint cans on the floor, my inability to clean because why bother because it'll never look clean anyway because there are cans of paint on the floor. The plastic on the windows makes the landscape outside look colder than it is, covered in two sheets of ice instead of just one. Yet, the bugs are already setting up home as though summer is around the corner instead of spring. The Asian beetles, the moths, the flies.

Surviving in the refrigerator. I've decided that much of my lack of enthusiasm for any day is simply because I wake up in a refrigerator every morning. I throw off the covers, the electric blanket, and I'm inside a Frigedaire. I walk on the glass shelves of the kitchen floor. I pull my bra out of a freezer and put it on, the clothes out of the closet as though I'm pulling ingredients from the drawer. Except I have to put these clothes on my body. Except it's 50 degrees in the Elgin house, and my body shivers so hard it hurts, shivers so hard I age another year every time I wake up. Shivers so hard I feel as though I put on thousands of miles of wear, like the Intrepid.

The Intrepid is dying, the cancer is worse. Dad rotated the tires when I was home last weekend, and they're off balance so I shake like a rig whenever I hit 35-40 mph. She bucks when any moisture gets in the engine, she still starts hard and sometimes needs a kick to the gas in order to start. My darling Intrepid. The check engine light has been on for two years. Please don't die. I'm not ready to let you go yet.

Today: for my nonfiction/issues in education unit, the students and I are looking at a variety of articles that relate to the high school experience. Day one was the importance of "being cool," and image. Day two was issues with America's education system. Day three, today, we're talking about bullies. We read an article about girl bullies in school and cyber-bullying.

And. Well. We know what bullies are like, what bullies do, how they ruin your life forever, how they just get off on having power and until you can stop that need you won't stop them. But a girl in class shared a story today--the entire school was against her, knocked out her teeth, even--and I don't think I've been so disgusted with humanity in my life. I can see the bullies in my class. I know who they are. They take light of everything I'm telling them, ignore the discussion, make jokes when we're done discussing it. But because I can't go off in class as much as I want to, I can say here that kids are horrific. Yesterday a couple of students told me that they're spit on every day from the balcony. Gobs of saliva and mucous in their hair. Seriously. I have to find a way to remember the adolescent mind to wrap myself around this again. Because the digust I have for kids who walk these hallways, who come to school everyday with the sense that they'll just destroy any child they want to--I can't deal with that without more of an understanding. Petitions to "hate" someone based on one small thing about her or nothing at all. Really. People do this. How can it be so easy to destroy someone, and how can it happen so often.

Think about the energy spent. Think about where it could go, how one could, I don't know--study for a test instead of plotting a way to spread a rumor about someone in school.If you think about it, we all have the power to destory someone. It's just that we have the human decency and the common sense not to do it.