Fear….

There are two approaches to getting students to talk.  You can try and scare the hell out of them or you can be nice and kind to them.  I tend to lean towards fear, but as I have gotten older I have become a lot more relaxed and calm and kind.  Little do the residents know that I’m about to be a whole lot meaner to them if they steal my lounge furniture or if they are out on the roof vs. smoking dope or drinking.  I mean, I know students drink and smoke weed.  Do I agree with it or think its okay; no, it’s still against the law.  Yet, if you really want to piss me off….REALLY…REALLY want to piss me off, just take my community couch.  In your little head its “borrowing”, but years and years of my missing furniture has made me an angry person.  One time the students had a keg in their room and I would have never seen it, but they chose to hide it using one of my tables from the downstairs community room.  Here I am, focused on this table and it was not until later that I noticed that there was a keg underneath it.  Idiots, you would have been fine, but you took my table!!!!! Moral of the story; don’t steal/borrow/take furniture. 

Today the police found some of my students smoking weed on the roof.  Initially I thought that they were on the roof, but we have a suicide cage which they are allowed to be in.  When I found out they stayed in the suicide cage area, my anger went down significantly.  Poor little kids, the police told them they were being kicked out.  I watched for a little bit, but afterwards the little hooligans came to me and asked if they were going to be kicked out.  As joyous as it might be to see the fear until a conduct meeting, sometimes it’s just kinder to tell them the truth.  “No, you’re not going to get kicked out.”  Today’s rewarding measure would have to be that my little pot head angels gave me a little group hug of highness.  Albeit awkward, it was adorable.  They wiped away their little sniffles and went back on their merry way.  

It’s taken a significant amount of time (ten years), but there’s just a calm that entered me at some point.  Maybe it happened around my transition from punk music to alternative music or when I started to phase out the longing of country.  I went to the psychic recently, it was at the Ren. Fair.  The first comment she came to me was “what happened to you”?  I asked her what it is that she meant and she explained “there used to be a light shade on your head, but now…I can sense you take the light shade off others”.  I just smirked at her, but we all knew I used to have a lampshade, but part of that transition has been focusing on someone carrying furniture off rather than vomiting on my feet because they drank too much.  Perhaps I feel that small children are taught not to steal, but it takes a few years of young adult hood to determine just how much liquor an individual can hold.