My favorite episode of the Simpsons was on today--I was home (for a change) and I watched it twice. It was on twice. Twice. The one with Sideshow Bob and his brother, Cecil, with Kelsey Grammer and David Hyde Pierce doing the voices. Excellent fun.

but anyway....

I am a master.

No, really. I passed.

I passed, but I feel icky about it. I didn't really do very well in the oral exam this morning. I tend to stammer a bit when I'm nervous, and when I think about stammering I automatically lose any semblance of intelligence or organization. Kinda sucks.

But I passed. I'm drinking a bottle of wine (Rabbit Ridge chardonnay '97--not bad at all) and lazing around for the night. Tomorrow I start on the serial composition that's due next week.

---

The Colorado thing is still pretty surreal to me. I look around at people 5-10 years younger than I and I think, boy, how desensitized are you, and then when 15 kids are killed by other kids I don't even blink an eye. Not until later. Not until I realize what the hell's going on. I felt like a big selfish jerk when I read the State News this morning.

I have such a normal reaction, too. Well, after the "not this again" moment. After that, I go through the typical disbelief, the "is this an Orson Welles thing?" And then I bring it home.

My mother is a teacher in a public high school. She's in the front line. Her students, the ones she loves, are the trench coat wearers, the loners, the outcasts, the generally weird. (I'm allowed to say that. They were all my friends.) She teaches an English class for non-college bound seniors who need English credits to graduate. Her classroom is on the main hallway, and she's the first teacher to barrel into the fray, breaking up fights and, well, couples, etc. The students love her; they forgive her for suspending them and failing them and pinning them to the walls on occasion.

But she's still in there. She's been injured in fights before. The kids who've broken her fingers or wrenched her shoulders always come back to apologize, after the fight. "I didn't mean to hurt you, Mrs. Jones!" If there was a kid with a gun in school--and I'm sure it's happened already, they just haven't caught him/her yet--it would be in that hallway and it would be one of my mom's students. And that kid wouldn't have the slightest intention of hurting my mother. Doesn't matter.

I guess that really sums it all up, anyway. It just doesn't matter. Doesn't matter to the kid with a gun, life sucks either way, huh? I hate myself for understanding what they may be thinking. I may have felt what they feel, being depressive myself. But I would never, ever injure another person, physically or otherwise, because of my own fucked-up head. I'm smart enough to know when my head is fucked up, and I'm smart enough to know that it's nobody's responsibility but mine.

Man I'm such a downer tonight.