annual emissions.

Today was exhausting.  I had a student throw a continuous temper tantrum from 8:15 in the morning until he went home at 2:45.  I took some breaks from his tantrum (short ones) to deal with other students.  During my breaks from him, he considerately moved his tantrum into the Counselling waiting area.  And then when I was done, he would bring it back into my office.  This is just the beginning of my Counselling career so perhaps it is lack of experience speaking, but this surprised me.  I was surprised by how long he could spin round the same issue without having any new insights, without having any breaks, without budging even slightly from his belief that the world had conspired against him and he had no part in landing himself in a difficult situation.  I was surprised by my inability to get him to move at all.  He cried, he punched walls.  He punched himself in the face.  He cried more.  I took a lot of deep breaths but couldn't get him to take any.


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I spent Wednesday night cleaning my sister's house in my dreams.  I did this a couple of times in reality too over the years.  If you saw my sister's home you would probably assume she was a hoarder, but I do not think she truly was.  Her home was buried in junk, to be sure, but it wasn't the purposeful collecting that I associate with hoarding.  I think it was more like a symptom of her other illnesses.  Her depression, her drug addiction, her borderline personality disorder.  Garbage took over, but not because she hoarded it, more because she was uninspired to remove it.  And we could all be buried in garbage this way if we never had the energy to take our garbage outside.  Couldn't we?

I look strangely forward to Garbage Day because I like getting clutter out of my house, and out of my life.  Clutter makes me feel suffocated, which certainly does not mean I am a good housekeeper, but I do make a regular and concerted effort to move garbage from my house to the curb as often as the city is willing to take it away.

There was no progress made on the hoard where I wasted my night working.  The reason for my participation in the project (again) was unclear.


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By tomorrow evening we are meant to be buried in snow.  This city does not manage snow well because snow is somewhat rare.  And it is a different type of snow than the type with which I grew up.  Prairie snow is light, dry, and dusty, and drifts and swirls around the edges of the highway.  It accumulates, of course, because it is too cold for it to melt, but it remains powdery, ashy almost, and does not stick to itself or much else.

Coastal snow is heavy wet sodden dropping ice bombs off bridges and choking traffic, clogging the sewer system and suffocating the roadways.  We are frozen, but we are not frozen solid.  We slide, we collide, we lose control of everything.  Schools, however, never close.


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