I just finished eating Thanksgiving leftovers and it feels like Sunday night. I have, like most of us have, two more days to hang out before work begins and I need to have my Christmas shopping done. What are you going to do with those two days?
I plan to clean up a little bit, pretend I’m going to put up the Christmas tree, and read a book. I doubt I’ll get much Christmas shopping done.
I’m reading It Gets Worse: A Collection of Essays by Shane Dawson. A student recommended it. It's really good. This guy is so funny and so incredibly vulnerable.
I have to tell you that I always wonder if a student is trying to tell me something when she recommends a book to me. A book choice is so personal that I always feel I’ve learned something about the person who recommended it. So there I was, at that good spot in the book when I started crying, as if it were my student telling me about herself instead of the author.
Maybe I can blame my insomnia. I get so tired that tears come easily, that my emotions are on the surface. Did you ever know one of those old people who cry easily? One of my grandmas was like that. I never understood how she could start crying as she talked about seemingly ordinary things. I didn’t know until later that she’d gone through multiple traumas when she was a girl. And maybe, I think these days, that she could have had insomnia and couldn’t keep herself together because she was just so tired. That coffee that she drank all day could keep her moving, but it couldn’t keep her from sounding a little tilted. I know what that tilted feeling is like.
So yes, I cry in the desperate spots in the books that I read. What is that? I have thinning skin, both physically and mentally. Am I going to be totally transparent in a few years?
I’ll have to work on that. Plus, I’ll have to assume I don’t know what the book taught me about my student.
Because maybe it didn’t.
Thank you for listening, jules