I'm armed with the past and the will and a brick...

The word of the day (usually posted at the END of the post. I don't want to bore everyone with edu-ma-cational bilge and all) is peripeteia--an unexpected reversal of circumstances or situation, especially in a literary work. The mythological influence of a former student (yes, YOU, sir Perseus) notwithstanding, I am tempted to call it Serendipity at work. Last night, I railed and ranted and shook my teeny, ineffectual fists at the sky (and I do mean teeny. Seriously...you'd think I was a carny). I've been sick for about three weeks. You know how I get at least one HUGE sick "episode" a year, and it's usually because my relationship with my body takes on a "casual strangers" type of feel--I don't sleep enough, I don't eat well, etc.-- and it turns into a scene from Fatal Attraction..."I will not be IGNORED, Patricia!!" whilst anxiously clutching a kitchen knife. Sometimes, the only way it can get my attention is by shutting down.

uh oh...digression.

*ahem* (the cough is NOT fake. I am suppressing what can only be described as "mentholated tubercular hacking")

So anyhow...I suffered through ANOTHER day of zombified faces carrying the rigor mortis of stupefied boredom (we're winding down our last few weeks before NO CHILD GETS LEFT BEHIND <snicker snicker>, and the lessons seem to be all test prep) ANOTHER argument with an only partially interested participant about why I "shouldn't, y'know, like, complain, and should be, like, grateful to have a job-n-stuff" (I AM, and if he had been in my class, I would force him to speak more articulately...y'know?), and was walking out the door. In my mailbox, a delicate slip of paper, the most genTEEL shade of pink. GASP! Could it be? Rapture! I had NOT been forgotten on Valentine's Day!

Wrong.

It wasn't for me. It was for the guy whose mailbox is next to mine, though I can see how the mistake had been made. It read, "Mr B_______, You are the BEST English teacher, and I am SO glad I got you and not Ms. B____!!" Evidently, Cupid saw my name on the paper and assumed it had been written TO me and not ABOUT me.

Sigh.

I did ol' Cupid a solid and dropped the paper in the right mailbox, now with a Charlie Brown-Eeyore-esque raincloud following me out the door. On the way, I ran into our Union rep (I know, I know, Unions/thugs/goons/etc. Mea Culpa). To make a long story short, budget crises (plural) dictate that, for the fifth straight year in a row, my salary is going to be cut again. So I packed up myself, my diphtheria, my shattered ego, my abject poverty, my eight ba-ZILLION ungraded papers, and my coffee cup and drove home to sulk, convalesce, fester, fume, and grade.

After congested sleep plagued by chest rattles and interrupted by recurring dreams of suffocation each time my nasal spray wore off, I was, suffice it to say, tepid about going in to work today. I had a lesson planned about Elizabethan sonnets and how to write 'em. Good times. At the end of my fourth period class, a shy but BRILL--EEE-YANT girl approached and handed me a slip of paper...
of the same
genteel
pink.

Understandably, I turned it over with as much enthusiasm as if it were a court summons. On it she had written, "because you deserve it". It was a simple gesture and a brief message but, to borrow a line, "it turned the etch-a-sketch of my day upside down and shook it, and suddenly made everything else worth it".

...she may never know the impact of that one clause...and a SUBORDINATE clause at that. See today's word of the day at the top.