These are my days these days

School starts at 8:30 every day and it goes fast or it drags like a chain in the mud behind something with four wheel drive but I always leave here at 4:30.  By the time I walk home, and it's not a long walk, I already have to be out the door again in fifteen minutes to sleep on a bus for fourty minutes to make it to band practice by six.  Six to ten I'm squeezing the neck of my new guitar and then it's back on the bus, not sleepy now but with my head down reading a book and listening to the ring in my ears.  By the time I'm home, full, flossed and washed it's half past midnight even though I always want to be in bed before 12.  I kill on average 1.4 mosquitoes at 3:00 am every night after they buzz me awake, having already bit my arm or ear or brow.  If the timing is right I listen to the rooster that lives somewhere close by crow, or the drunk man who lives somewhere nearby sing.  They lead, and in fact are the only ones gracing, my list of things to strangle (mosquitoes are left off, having made their way to an even more select list of things I want to curse and smash).  When I wake up in the morning at 7:38 after hitting the snooze twice I squint through the morning to the shower where I rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat,

***

Here is the premise for my 9th grade boys class today:

You are stuck on a dessert island with thirteen different people (examples: Manchester United's Park Ji Sung, a Buddhist monk, a teacher, the richest man in the world etc)

What is something positive each person can offer the group for their survival?  What is something negative about this person that might hurt the group?


We are deep in the lesson with only ten minutes left.  A very earnest boy puts his hand up to answer the question.

"Yes, you.  What is something positive about number 11, the pregnant woman?"

"She can give milk," he said.  And forty-one sixteen year old boys lost their shit.  Runner up to this response went to the boy, who when pressed for a negative about the Buddhist monk, told me that the monk would eat him.