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.