REALITY BLURRED . . .

I had a full day of meetings with my students and their parents, one set after another. My role as truth-teller isn't easy. I have to sit each student down and basically tell them all the things that are wrong with them, in front of their parents who may or may not take deep umbrage at my honest words. This afternoon, I was meeting with a rebellious queen-bee middle school girl and her combative mother. I sat with the two of them in a claustrophobic meeting room and lit into the girl with "You are a bitch and you think you're popular now, but if you don't change, you're going to end up with no real friends" and "You can be a queen bee here in middle school, but in the real world, they don't put up with awful human beings like you." Then I turned to the mother with "If you don't control your daughter, you are going to regret giving birth to her in the first place" and "Stop being such a wimp and start being a parent, damn it!" I left the meeting with the mother's protests ringing in my ears to submit my report to the school principal. As I left the principal's office, I heard the girl and her mother enter behind me and start screaming at the principal to have me fired for rudeness. "I'm just being honest," I thought to myself as I exited the school building.

When I stepped outside, my prim suit was gone and I wore a tie-dyed t-shirt and plaid shorts. I started skipping down the sidewalk in a lightly-falling rain, and as the rain fell harder and harder, I raised my hands up to the sky and started laughing in freedom, so glad to be out of that school building filled with wretched little adolescent brats. And in a blink of an eye, the winds picked up and the rain was so heavy on my head and in my eyes and nose that I could barely take a breath. I could not keep my eyes open against the lashing rain, and I struggled to find my car and open the door to get inside. I was sopping wet as I lurched into my SUV, but before I could lock the door behind me, a student tried to open the door and get inside too, away from the driving hurricane-force wind and rain, but I pushed him away with both hands and slammed the door shut. Wiping my plastered hair out of my face, I started the engine and tried to drive out of the school parking lot, but pavement construction had closed various lanes and exit routes, so I wound around and around in the parking lot looking for the correct way out.

And as I tried to wend my way through the confusion of orange construction cones and re-drawn lane markings, I developed a violent craving for coffee-flavored soft-serve ice cream from Cold Stone Creamery. And not just the ice cream, but I wanted it in a bowl mixed with fresh strawberries and hot chocolate syrup. But I knew that would be too sweet, so I decided that I would order a child-size bowl instead of the regular small bowl which really isn't all that small and is actually sort of obscenely large. I tried to figure out how to work in a stop to Cold Stone Creamery, because I also had to head to Borders for the rest of the afternoon to work on an essay I'm writing for my church newsletter, so I thought that perhaps I could buy the ice cream first, then speed the ten minutes north to the bookstore and the folks at Borders would not complain about me bringing in outside food.

And then I woke from my two-hour nap.