The maddest I've ever been was prob'ly eleven or twelve years ago, when I had moved in with my friends after the cheating ex had done the cheating ex thing. And she had the nerve to call me there and tell me she was coming over.
And I hurled myself in my truck and drove all of about three blocks to the Pacific Super--which is a most fabulous asian supermarket at Alemany @San Jose--you can see it from the BART--and where you can buy coconut ice cream and balikbayan boxes, and tremendous produce, and pan de leche, but no tortillas--and I get out in the parking lot and proceed to grab shopping carts and smash them into one another. SMASH SMASH SMASH SMASH SMASH. a great feeling of destruction without actually destroying anything. i mean, shopping carts are pretty sturdy little vehicles, and part of their design is for them to smash into one another. SMASH SMASH SMASH SMASH SMASH.
I was that mad today. I had visions of shopping carts. and my brain was sending me one message: call L*. She was there and it made all the difference
and it was 5 minutes before I had to teach a class, and i had visions of smashing those desks into one another. But L* had given me me a lifeline, and guess what, class isn't all about me. Plus I looked into their little (20-year-old) faces and remembered how last class they were saying how I'm not a scary profe
if they only knew how much work it is to keep the scary well-hid! that the scary demon inside of me could turn their hair white with words alone...
miércoles, marzo 08, 2006
The maddest I've ever been
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boy if this is the maddest you've ever been, you sure are lucky lucky. hee hee, i've outdone you chica. i've outdone you by about five hundred times!!! but seriously tho, my husband just can't figure out why i always have to slam the door (it's his pet peeve), but you described it perfectly. the most satisfied i've ever felt after being angry is when I smashed a broked light bulb agianst a wall. The explosion was fantastic and it cheered me up immediatly.
:-)
(ps hurray for L*!!!)
See, the thing is, I think of myself as Dr. David Banner (Bill Bixby), a mild mannered person capable of turning into THE INCREDIBLE HULK when enraged ("Don't make me angry: You wouldn't like me when I'm angry.") And so, smashing shopping carts together was a substitute for, say, ripping someone's throat out with my bare hands, which i felt fully capable of doing--and which, of course, she certainly deserved. but she wasn't worth my life--and i was pretty sure I would land in jail if i did it. so i protected my freedom and my manicure.
Mind you this tends to be tied to my need to feel noble ("I *could* rip her throat out with my bare hands, but that would bring me down to her level") Also, I come from a long line of scary people.
Yeah, L* rocks!
She occasionally sees the demon behind my eyes and does the equivalent of holding up a comic book bubble that says "Yikes! There's a scary demon behind your eyes!" and that usually brings me back to myself.
Chama, it is hard to contain oneself sometimes when one walks into the classroom and must become the blank scrim of student projection! At my last post, at Sadistic College, I was always emoting in class (was part of the institutional game there), and then had to suffer with students thinking they were just a little too close to me.
Now, in Cold City, I am much more circumspect about sharing, really, anything about myself. But that makes it hard when you are mad enough to spit nails, and wanna talk/rant/scream about it. The trick is how do we show enough of ourselves to be human but not enough so our students take advantage of us (or alternatively, our white colleagues dismiss us out of hand as unprofessional). Ah, the dilemmas of the professoriate of colour!
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