College midterms are Wednesday and Thursday. I’ve been drawing up my own test, because after looking all through the book test, and the college files for these chapters, I’ve concluded that I don’t like any of them. So, I made my own. I always did that, anyway; no book or institution can make a test for a teacher’s particular students; good teachers make their own tests. Mine is tailored for my students. It covers everything that needs to be covered, including some things I just wanted to cover. It’s always a relief to get a test finished.

Every night I swear I’m getting to bed earlier but I never do. Even now that I have to get up early, I’m still up late.

I’m a little down, tonight. Not sure why. Well, actually, yes I do. Reaping the consequences of other people’s actions kind of takes it out of a person. I’m tired of it. Maybe I should just chuck it all and go wild, and do and say and act it all out. But then I’d be no better than ‘them.’ So, I won’t. Heaven preserve me from being like any of ‘them.’

One of my older students had an argument with me today over the difference between “two paragraphs” and “three sentences.” He walked away truly furious, and I walked away amazed.

The bank and I had a set-to this afternoon. Zappa got an overdraft, and I saw that yellow paper inside the envelope and something just popped inside my head. Possibly it was the one lonely assertive cell that usually hides behind all the big chicken-shit cells in my brain. I went down there and had his account brought up on the screen, and lo and behold: they’d been taking some stranger’s Discover Card payment out of Zappa’s checking account! No WONDER he couldn’t account for so much of his money! Stupid banks. They owed him a buncha money, and put it all back in immediately, while I was there to oversee it. Dumb banks. The bank lady was really nice, though. It wasn’t her fault. They never tell you whose fault it really is.

Tomorrow’s forecast: snow. It almost always snows, and deep, too, in southern Indiana in March. To see daffodils NOT peeking up through snow is unusual here.

I’ve been thinking tonight about retribution. Hoping that people get what they deserve to get. The phrase “What comes around, goes around” is rampant in my head. I wonder why, in this world, so many people who haven’t done anything wrong, have to suffer because of the people who do? I know, I know, eventually they’ll get theirs, but it would be nice to have people ‘get theirs’ out where the people they’ve hurt can SEE IT HAPPEN. I know there are some I’d love to see get their just rewards. Sigh. I guess that makes me as awful as they are.

No, it doesn’t. It just means I want justice, and justice is what everyone deserves. It goes both ways, you know. People don’t get all the good things they deserve, and people don’t get all the bad things they deserve. And by ‘deserve’ I mean ‘earn.’

Most things should be earned. I do not believe in privileges, etc, that drop down from the sky for free. Decent people earn things. The other kind of people expect them for nothing.

Why am I so judgemental tonight? But I am, and I can’t seem to shake it. There are people out there whose jury I would love to be on. And it will never happen. Life is never that fair.

I can hear the wind howling. It’s almost like being in a shanty on the prairie, like Laura and Mary and Carrie and Grace and Ma and Pa. It sounds like a living thing, furious, and trying to get inside the house and GIT us all. And then it calms down a bit and sounds like the sea. Or maybe, more like the sound of the sea in a sea shell.

I wonder, do people who live by the sea, have any sounds that make them think of the prairie? Or a meadow?

I told Mellie Helen an hour or so ago that I had a splitting headache, and my feet hurt (and probably stank, too) and I was hungry. And that maybe I should take off my shoes and let the smell take my appetite away. And that it would probably make my headache worse.

I did. It did.

I think I’ll try to get some sleep now. This is quite possibly the worst post anyone has ever made; there’s not a redeeming thing in it, is there. Many apologies, from the heart.

I’ll do better tomorrow.