You know what’s great about this blog? Don’t think too hard.

Answer: You never ever know what to expect!

You know what? (Again don’t think so hard.)

I never know what to expect either!

Isn’t that fantastic?

Just nod.

For instance, I thought I’d be writing about the blustering Winnie-the-Pooh day outside, with fallen trees and cresting waves on the Puget Sound. Instead, I end up comparing my experience at the university with the impaling of a vampire. How cool is that?

Just to be completely honest, before I type on, I’ve been working very hard at out-witting my own dang rules. Having seen the dilemma of me against me, I’ve decided to lighten up some. Today, I’m quite gleefully typing in my pajamas and socks. Who wants to get showered and dressed to blog? Who was I kidding?

This is good, or rather beneficial, this rebel mood I’m in, because today is the big day I’ve been both anticipating and dreading, for around three or more weeks. I’ve lost count. And it’s not worth my time to look at the calendar. I’ve spent enough time and energy on this whole university blowup event.

That’s what I’m calling the happening: a huge blowup. Blowup as in filling up a balloon with so much helium that it bursts. Blowup as in a tire’s thread worn to the bone causing the tire to bust. Blowup as in a restless volcano blowing its top!

I’m pretty darn proud of myself that I haven’t blurted out all that transpired in black and white on this blog. I like the mysteriousness surrounding what I have offered, and the respect I’m giving the villains.

I’m feeling okay about calling them villains, even though I know we are all God’s (Universe’s, String Theory’s, what-have-you’s) creatures.

I know these people have taught me plenty; especially about how I don’t want to lead and teach like them. And I know these lessons will carry me far, that the experience has already given me that extra sheet of armadillo-layer across my soft-bellied-sensitive-tummy.

Still, something feels so delightfully good about calling them villains.

Some words for villain are anti-hero and contemptible person.

I picture a little ant with a small red cape that reads HERO going up against a grotesque giant in a huge white nappy (diaper) that reads Anti-Hero. And I envision the ant winning by some divine intervention from the Roman Gods.

I like the term beyond the pale, too. It’s a word related to contemptible and means an unpardonable action. I believe I am in the right to say the professor was beyond the pale.  He was outside the acceptable and agreed upon standards of decency. And dang it, if I have to constantly adjust my actions and phrases to make others feel comfortable, then he ought to have at least had decency.

A little word origin lesson, as I’m a teacher at heart, and always shall be: The pale means a stake or pointed piece of wood. Think vampire. I’m thinking a sexy vampire. Pale is in the word impale, like in the Dracula flicks. A paling fence represents an area enclosed by a fence; so to be beyond the pale is to be outside the accepted home area, or designated safety zone.

Fenced areas or regions were set up for people for safety, such as when Catherine the Great created the Pale of Settlement in Russia.

So the message is: “If there is a pale, decent people remain inside the pale.”

Look what Crazy Frog Found!

By the way, my professor, he jumped the fence.

Now I’m stuck on word origin again. I just reviewed the origin of flipping the bird, ducks in a row, and, you might be happy to know with all my rambling, I’m reviewing that’s all she wrote.  Okay, done.

Last night I dreamt that I parked my ten-speed bike in front of a quaint neighborhood house. When I returned to retrieve the bike, I found it broke into two (repairable) parts. I knocked on the door of the nearby house. An older man answered. (He looked like my professor but way uglier.) The man explained that he took the bike apart because I left too much of my bike sticking out in his driveway. I hadn’t. He then offered to fix the bike for a large sum of money. I knew he was applying trickery and trying to gain from my loss. I declined, and instead had him carry the pieces into my van. I drove away.

Hmmmm? I wonder how my subconscious is feeling about my dumbass professor?

Another thought: How in the world can I produce such deep felt all-loving, nonjudgmental prose like The Wounded Healer and On Leadership one day, and then turn around and have the audacity to call a professional a dumbass?

Oh! I’m raising my hand! I know. I know. Call on me!

Answer: Because I’m human (just like you’re human, I hope), and I refuse to act like I’m not human to earn some semblance of self-manipulated respect. Plus, who hasn’t wanted to call at least one teacher in their life a dumbass?

Okay, just so you know Melancholic Little Me is still around, and obviously Sir Brain (as I’m still rambling). Little Me is carrying an index card that reads:

My Authentic Self: “…caring, nurturing, kind, creative, intelligent, beautiful being who doesn’t wish harm on anyone and wants to be the most beneficial light wherever she is.”

I said those words aloud during a group therapy meeting (in the college course I’ve dropped) when asked by the professor, “What do you wish to share in this group?”

But I didn’t share what I truly wanted to share. I had wanted to say, in group, how my heart had been impaled by two professors and by my classroom study-partner. That would have been authentic!

 

Who is Van Helsing? A protagonist in Bram Stoker’s 1897 Gothic horror novel Dracula.