there's literally nothing i can do about it

September 1: The couple in the apartment next door brought their newborn baby home from the hospital today. We saw the husband while we were walking Addie and he wondered if we had been hearing the baby through the walls. He seemed surprised that we hadn’t noticed anything different. “Well, let me know if it ever gets too loud for you guys,” he told us. “But there’s literally nothing I can do about it.”

September 2: George and I walked ahead of Nick and Addie. Nick told me later that while that happened, Addie was watching us the whole time. He said that a woman passed by us and she gave a soft growl. Because I have been in San Francisco so long, it took a few more seconds of conversation for me to realize that Nick meant that Addie had growled, not the woman who passed me.

September 3: Before he walked home, David made a point of coming into my classroom to hug me goodbye. I miss him in my class so much.

September 4: It was a dramatic time during day school. One of the teachers got ringworm and the police were called when the people on behavior duty couldn’t find two lost students who turned out to be in a classroom the entire time.

September 5: My class got a punishment of practicing lining up for two minutes during recess when they kept trying to shove each other off the benches attached to the lunch tables. When I announced that, one boy screamed “fuck!” right in my ear. I thought it was Dea’madja and he spent his recess with Miss Melissa, proclaiming his innocence. I found out I had accused the wrong kid when Mauricio was overheard bragging that Dea’madja was getting in trouble for something he had done. Vivi was right. That kid is sneaky.

September 6: Every Friday during snack, I pull out two raffle tickets from the prize box. Every Friday, my kids want to be the ones to pick the tickets, but I don’t let them. I tell them that this is because raffle drawings are one of the few things I do that doesn’t make them upset and I’m not giving that away. The truth is that I pre-plan which two students will win the drawing every week. There’s a secret pouch where I put the pre-selected winning tickets so that I can hold the box over my head to prove I’m not peeking. I’m surprised that none of them have picked up on the fact that everyone in the class wins once before anyone wins a second time.

September 7: When I meet people for the first time, after finding out their name, I try to get to know them a little. I ask them what their job is or how they know the person we are there to celebrate. The first thing people ask me is about what race I am, like that is the most important factor to figuring out who I am as a person. A lot of times, they way they word it is hurtful. They ask “What are you?” And every time, I just want to look at them confused and answer, “I’m a human. Why? What are you?”

September 8: My new therapist suggested that I send her some of my writing because it’s been helpful with some of her other writer patients. It was weird reading through the short stories I wrote in college. I wasn’t expecting them to seem so sad to me now. All of them were about people who didn’t fit in with the world around them and had trouble finding a safe place to call home. I wonder how I didn’t see that when I was writing them.




much love,
hedgie