I have a very strange job. Working with kids is strange business, especially with a lot of them. Its sort of like working with a flock of monkeys. You never know what they’ll do, and even though you might manage to train them that’s actually all it ever is. There’s always that possibility that their do, say, eat, poop something that is so shocking that you know no one is ever going to believe you.
There are several children who I work with that I love dearly. Many of them have nick names. There’s a little baby that I love named Pooh Bear that I’m convinced will grow up to be a genius. Not the kind that’s all stuck up and becomes president or something like that. The kind that wont ever be discovered, but he’ll in his own way change the world and only his friends and family will ever know.
He’s a cutie.
And then there’s this other child I like to refer to as: The devil reincarnate.
Don’t judge me! If you think its not possible for a child to be so naughty that you think they might be evil then let me tell you this, a child that has drawn blood BLOOD with their own hands off of other children and yet you have never seen them hit or bight anyone, and then managed to flush something down the toilet every time they come into the same classroom with you, and THEN almost gets two coworkers fired because, during outside time the devil child gets back inside and then starts to scream and cry so that they get found….
I lost my train of thought.
NEways.
This kid is evil. That’s my point.
And there are others whom land on different rungs of the love/hate ladder of my heart.
One of these children is a sweet little boy who rides the bus at my work. Today while I drove him from school he randomly and yet thoughtly posed a statement that I thought rather profound for a child of his age.
“Miss Melissa! My grandpa is 100 years old! He’s older than you!”
At first, I tried to understand why he would say this to me. Afterall, I hadn’t brought up the subject of my age nor his grandfathers age or even any grandfathers age. And yet he felt the need to present me with that statement.
I am not a woman who likes to talk about age much. I cried all day when I turned 20, and then 21, and now 22. I don’t like being old at all. Sure I like the freedoms that some with responsibility and all that, but I kind of miss the days of being a kid. Maybe that’s why I left my journey towards becoming a Broadway director and started driving buses and changing poopy diapers for a living, so that I could be near them. I figure its some feminine version of the peter pan syndrome.
ANY WAYZ….
I kept driving and thinking. 100 years are a lot of years to be alive. I don’t know what I’d do with all that time. And then it hit me again that I hadn’t even lived half that long yet. I never really thought that I’d want a long life anyways. Once I start needing my diaper changed in a nursing home I think I’d like to have someone shoot me in the face.
(Which BTW could very well happen. In 10th grade I told a druggy and yet awesome female friend of mine that I wanted this and she looked at me very seriously and said, “Ok. I’ll do it.” So I expect upon the first diaper change some crazy Hispanic lady with failing kidneys and no teeth will jump out of the bushes and shoot me.) (((No I don’t know why there would be bushes in a nursing home but it could happen OK!?)))
NNNNNNEEEEEE WAAAAAAS!!!!
The point is, in three years, I will have lived exactly 1/4th of my life. I’ll only have 3/4ths left. That is, if I end up living to be 100.
What have I accomplished in this time. Sadly I cant say too much. I wanted to have a book finished. Namely that one about the fat girl and the ghost. I wanted to be a star on the stage. I wanted to have experience true love and gotten married. But none of that has happened for me.
I also wanted to have an award winning movie shown at the Sundance film festival and meet Jack Black there so that my dad could see him, but that’s a detail I’ll save for another blog.
Still, I’m trying not to loose heart about it. I figure I’ll really start to worry about that if I reach the 3/4ths of my life mark and still haven’t accomplished any of those things.
I was going to make a list of things I have accomplished next, but I’m too embarrassed to write them down on here. I’ll do it in my private journal.
My point is. I don’t know if its healthy to look at our lives on a timeline. After all, we all could be dead tomorrow, no one knows. But it is sort of interesting to reflect on the possibilities.
I don’t know why, but just now I realized that the voice in my head narrating these words sound like an old Jewish woman…
OIE!
THE “Give me a word! Any word! And I will tell you how the root of that word…” END!
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