The tiny light in the bleakness
Reason #243425 why the high school kids I work with are awesome:
The students are not allowed to bring any food or drink into the classrooms. This is ridiculous for a lot of reasons, but mostly it’s just impractical and annoying.
Today, the students were given candy as a prize for a game they played. The teacher shut the door and told them that if they heard a knock on the door, they’d have to stash the candy quick so that we wouldn’t get into trouble, because the director of the program was so uptight about food in the rooms.
The program’s director is also my boss. I’ve started to refer to her as Il Duce. Believe me when I say that this is an insult to Mussolini.
One of the students, Cherish*, started talking about her. “I don’t like her attitude,” she said to the teacher.
I burst out laughing. It was, verbatim, the same comment I had made about Il Duce just a few hours earlier at breakfast.
*Obviously, this is not her real name.
Trace them to your youth.
Yesterday, I attended a pool party thrown by one of my aunts for the entire extended family. It was a huge party, with quite a few of my second cousins present. It was also a way for the family to meet new additions to the fold (in the form of babies, wives, fiances, and boyfriends) in a semi-non-threatening environment. Me? Well, I find any event that requires a bathing suit to be a threatening environment, but I’ve been told that I have issues.
The party itself was pretty standard fare. People sat around having the same conversations over and over again, drinking soda and munching on chips and salsa. A meal was served at an awkward time of day, around 3:30, when it is neither lunch nor dinner and thus ruins your appetite for the rest of the day. Some people swam.
Perhaps the best moment of the afternoon came when my cousin V. was getting ready to dive into the water. She was still dry and well-made up, and was standing near the edge of the pool, fussing with her bikini and getting ready to do a showy swan-dive into the water. Out of nowhere, her boyfriend came running at her from behind and fucking tackled her, taking her sideways into the water, catching her completely by surprise.
She surfaced a few seconds later, spluttering and clearly pissed. “That was NOT fun!” she managed to get out, but everyone was laughing.
I nearly peed myself with glee, so perfect was his execution.
