Inways

I have a good job. My last day is on Monday and I'm pretty sure I'm gonna miss it. I know I have a good job because I get paid to have Snack Time twice a day. But I know I have a really good job because I can duck out of Snack Time to go goof off even more.

I left the Snack Room to use the bathroom on Thursday and as I was walking out of the bathroom I was drying my hands with a paper towel and I saw this one kid turned away from me sitting in the lobby of the building. So I go up to him and throw the wadded up paper towel at the back of his head and say in a really bored voice, "Oh. I'm sorry. I thought that was a trash can. Turns out it's the back of your head. You see, I was confused because the back of your head looks like a trash can. So I threw my trash at it. Because. Trash can head."

And then he starts chasing me around the building throwing a sunshine yellow Crayola crayon at me.

But the thing about kids is they don't quite know where the line is. Or, maybe it's that my line has shifted as I've gotten older. Like, I'll be sitting in the gym and these two kids will come up and stand beside me and one kid will be pushing the other one into me. And the kid that's getting pushed will say, "He's pushing me!"

And I'll give them my half-hearted, "staaaahp". It's more of a whine. And then within five seconds I'll have a pile of three kids falling over on me and I have to bust out the intense drill sergeant, "HEY! NO!" And it scares them but it also scares me at the same time. Because I never yell at people in real life. It's ingrained in me that if I actually yell at someone it can only lead to terrible things. So when I say, "hey! no!" there's the immediate silence of the kids getting startled and stopping but there's also the silence of me who is a little afraid the world is about to collapse. Or that the kids will assemble into a mob, realizing the strength of their combined forces, and destroy me. But you can yell at children. You can yell at children because they have terrible organizational skills.
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I had this weird dream this morning about a text I sent late last night and in the text I used the phrase, "cool beansness." Which is a combination of 'beans' and 'business'. And in the dream I was trying to imagine the sound at the middle of that word: "-nsn-" The 'n' sound to the 's' to the next 'n'. ENSNUH! And that was the whole dream. Just trying to isolate that part of the word "beansness". It's like a whimpering...snotty...crying...beatboxing...sound.

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I go about my day with a pretty sleepy, kinda detached disposition. So I've noticed that people often have a hard time imagining me doing things. Like, the idea of me being at any sort of extreme is surprising to people. I'm kinda like a manatee with surfer hair. You can't picture in your head a manatee yelling at someone. Or swearing at a lawnmower at three in the afternoon on a Saturday. Or throwing up on someone's kitchen floor. But most of the time I do go about my day with this sort of tired, blank look on my face. And strong emotions do kind of look weird on me. My face muscles don't quite know how to react and my brain can't keep up with the emotion. It'd be like if a manatee finally decided to fight back against the power boats that hit and scar them. They'd get really angry at first and be like, "RAAARGHHH!" but then they'd  get to the boat and be like, "I'm gonna...get....you!" and then they'd just be embarrassed and start hugging the underside of the boat.

That's my natural progression of strong emotion. Over-reaction to anti-climax to embarrassment to misplaced awkward affection.

Here's to the cows of the sea!