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Counselling this week has been odd.  I have been meeting with a student who has been telling me a horror story about his baby brother swallowing bleach and being hospitalized while in his care.  And I have also spoken with his sister (informally) who tells me none of this happened.

I also met with my lovely girl, S, who brought me a terrible cookie she made which I felt compelled to eat and which contained walnut shells that required me to surreptitiously pick my teeth while she talked.  She told me an absurd story about going to a friend's church as a child, a church at which children earned "Bible Bucks" for memorizing and accurately reciting bible passages.  She told me her friend was saving up for a "BIONICLE", which allegedly cost a zillion Bible Bucks.  When S realised how many bible passages she would have to memorize to earn one of her own, she decided to cash in her five Bible Bucks for a plastic yoyo and stopped going to church.  I used to think I had to keep a straight face when people told me things like this in counselling.  I have learned that with S, it's okay to laugh.  It's good for her, it's good for me.

I did manage not to laugh when a child with the unfortunate name, Eric Chin, told me he was upset that his friends had been calling him "Erection", but it was a challenge, a real challenge.  I also managed not to laugh when I asked Erection about his English essay in which he wrote, "My life is a disaster.  I have nothing," and he explained that this referred to the fact that his parents refused to buy him a Play Station 3.


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I have made an appointment for two weeks from today to chop my hair off.  I do this from time to time, and then I always end up growing it long again because long is easier to manage.  Wash, brush, pin, go.  Shorter hair requires such things as styling and maintaining, trimming and so forth.  But sometimes I want to pretend I can do these things, even for a short time.  Of course I can't, of course I won't.  Of course I will soon have long hair again.  But in two weeks, it will briefly be short(er).  (I sort of hate that I even wrote that, as though it means anything.)



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I dreamed, for some reason, that I was living in T's basement, sleeping on an air mattress and wishing for something impossible.  One of those dreams from which you wake, thankful that it was just a dream, and resolving to never never never.


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LC spoke with me on Friday.  I asked her how she was doing.  I was not sure if she knew that I knew that her husband committed suicide.  But because she asked M to tell the counsellors, I think she might have.  I just asked lightly, not to imply any deeper question, just a how's it going?  I think it has been a month now.  I do not think she took any time off work.  She said, Putting one foot in front of the other, which is the answer I would have given if it had occurred to me when people asked how I was doing right after Colleen died, except that when people asked me that question I couldn't speak.  I was walking, I was going to work, just putting one foot in front of the other.  It keeps you alive.

I asked her about her potential retirement, which has been impending for a couple of years now.  She told me she will probably teach another year because she has nothing to retire to.  That really struck me, nothing to retire to, because I always think I look forward to retirement, but if retirement was just me looking forward to bagels and orange juice and watching television, I probably wouldn't really want it either.  We need to be important to someone, even if it's just colleagues and kids.  Even if it's nothing special, it's better than nothing.


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Some of my flower bulbs started to grow in the mild weather, sending up tentative green shoots to check out the sun.  And then it got cold, and now the ground is frozen again, and I think my bulbs will regret having been so eager to emerge.  I do not want them to die.


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