now i know what it must be like to be emo:

i feel a wistfulness in my soul as i stare at the map of rush hour los angeles traffic. i miss her. somehow, that image reawakens a yearning for the struggle, the time when the search was all that mattered. sure i knew that we were wrong for each other and i cursed her out for her shortcomings, especially the way that she treated the other men. somedays i thought that if i could just find the right path, we would be okay. other days i fought with her all the way home.

nowadays, working from home, i only take the car out a couple times a week. a tank of gas lasts at least a month. the podcasts pile up.

sigh.

of course on the other hand, i can walk over to the fridge right now and grab a beer. oh wait… what's that in my hand right now?

what if for the first 25 years of your life you were blind. lets say you were born blind, grew up that way, were accustomed to not being able to see anything but complete darkness and maybe some blurry shades of light here and there. lets also say that you got married. and your relationship with your significant other was built on personality alone. what sensual, erotic things would you experience with your lover? your knowledge of that person would be on touch, taste, smell, hearing alone. you would never had ever seen them. you would have felt their face, but you would never know color their eyes or hair was.
now, lets say that one day you go into surgery and have new eyes put in. now you can see for the first time. you are for the first time in your life being given a new sense with which to judge how you feel about different aspects of your life. do you think that your perspective on that person might change after seeing them for the first time? or would that be completely shallow and superficial. most people would probably say yes, of course, that would be shallow and superficial. but what if, you see the person for the first time ever that you've spent the last 20 years with, and they are so god awful ugly that you cannot stand to look at them one minute longer? what would you do?

the questions of morals and ethics -and conscience- continue. michelle told me tonight
that she spent awhile today reading all the posts i have written. this admittance was immediately followed
by an embarassed "i didn't know you hated people telling you about their dreams!" this is exactly the kind
of thing i did not wish to happen. since she does tell me what she dreams about, and often, i fear that her feelings
were probably hurt. i can't handle that. but i wrote that post trying to vent, not thinking that my ranting words could have
any kind of hurtful impact. even if it's not a big deal to her ultimately, it still is to me somehow. i'm going back to being
confused as to where some lines should be drawn. is this like a newspaper column? or a diary? should i always
keep in mind that people -people i know- could be reading my words, or should forget a potential audience altogether?
i'm torn.

there are some things - i feel like the letters should be capitalized- that i reallllllly want to write about but
a)i'm not quite ready to bear my soul; 100% b) i'm not ready for the world to know *all* my bidness c) writing down an admittance
makes it much more real and d) i'm scared - i feel like i have so much to lose. unfortunately every time i post it is the thing i most
want to write about…

moving on, for i must…vaughn moved back into the house
tonight. i surprised myself by feeling totally happy that he was here. i feel like a dick when i look back at the way i described heather a few posts back… i think tonight confirmed my beliefs that
i really no longer desire any kind of romantic entanglement with the boy whatsoever - this is a good thing! i also worried that
as a result i wouldn't care about him as much, which certainly feels like it would be giving him the short end of the stick as a friend.
but i was wrong, and it felt so good to sit on the balcony again with a couple bottles of beer and talk about everything in the
world as it occured to us. i think i sold us both short on this one.

tomorrow is my day off and i am excited to be planning
to spend the whole day working on my room at school. since i work at the kennel fri-sun and start the week of training back at school
next monday, tomorrow is basically the only time i will really have to devote myself to it. i am still at the dorky, over-excited phase.
i hope i always am…

i'm not sure i understand yet the ethics of being a young high school teacher. in fact, i'll admit i had
a lot of problems with it last year as a first year teacher. it was hard, and still is, not to see my students
as my peers. i am 23. a lot of my seniors are 18. while there is a huge amount of growning up that goes on
after graduating from high school. i found myself the teacher of kids i could, in other scenarios, hang out with
on the weekends.

the distinct advantages of this situation are obvious. i think i can relate a lot better to
my students than some of my older colleagues. most of them feel very comfortable with me, and are honest and open
with me. they think young = cool. so they look up to me, and for the most part, do what i ask. i can take the things
we're doing in class and relate them to things going on in their -our- world. i talk like them, and i dress like them.
(or is it that they do both things like me?)

there are also disadvantages. sometimes i feel like i need to struggle
a bit more than other teachers to have some students take me seriously. some kids probably think i have no idea what i
am doing, and others, i know, think i am *trying* to act like a kid. i have difficulty drawing some lines. i believe in a very
balanced teacher-student relationship; my kids teach me just as much as i teach them. i don't like the ideals of a hierarchy
or subservience in the classroom. but then, how do i break it down to a kid who is addressing me disrespectfully as a
teacher? *can* i do that? how do i balance the desire to maintain a sense of equality with my students while at the
same time acting in the position of an adult eduator??

i'm having an especially hard time at the moment trying
to figure out what's right in terms of the kids i had who graduated in june. i'm still in touch with many of them through
email, IM, etc. it really makes me happy that they bother to still keep in touch - i don't know many people who have ever
bothered to communicate regularly with a teacher after graduating. but i have a student who wants to have me take them
to the humane society to adopt a dog, one who said he'd be in the fan and wanted to stop by and say hi, one who i begging
to bum a ride with me next time i visit new york. what do i do?

truth be known, i really have no problems, as just
petunia, with any of those scenarios. i love the idea of seeing 'my kids', of catching up, of hanging out. but are these activities
'appropriate'? i'm scared because i have realized that i'm really not a good judge of that. i mean, i can definitely tell when
something is a horrible idea - more than once i have had students make subtle and not-so-veiled remarks about getting high with me
or going out drinking, and i have enough brains to just say no… but other things are not that black and white, and by no means
do i want to put myself in any kind of jeopardy. it's a difficult process sometimes to figure out for yourself all the things that
they can't teach you in college… but is there even a right answer to begin with?