Bad, worse, and despicable…

A kid shot himself in the head at our Junior High the other day.  Dead bang, took himself out ten minutes before the morning bell in a hallway in line of sight of the area where the cliques like to congregate.   Gave a lot of now very shocked kids their first real exposure to blood and violent death.  Movies just aren't the same.  My niece was around the corner from him at her locker, heard the gunshot but thought someone had popped a plastic bag in the cafeteria.  Maybe fifteen seconds later she turned the corner headed for class and got to good a look at the body, the spray and splatter on the wall.  Not something anyone needs, much less a fourteen year old kid.

Needless to say, she came home in a state of shock.  Her best buddy and I nursed her through the day as she rode across the waves of tears and horror as the shock wore off in stages.  The shock isn't fully gone, but it's fading, into the once every couple of days stage instead of once every couple of hours.  Tough kid, she's handling it very well.  She'll never forget what she saw, but I don't think it's going to be a lasting trauma, just a lasting sadness. 

That's the bad part.  A very bad thing, but still sooner or later almost everyone has to deal up close and personal with death.  It happens… a car crash, a shooting, a fight, sooner or later something shocking like that will happen and the living have to deal on the subject and then go back to living.  Like the saying goes, "they're history now."  The kids at that Jr. High are learning that lesson a lot sooner than they should have to. 

I'm going to keep a very close eye (and ear, and heart) on her for a while yet, but I'm not to worried.  Not for her.  But I am very worried for the kids who were not quite so close as to know the full and gory truth of the matter.  I'm worried for them because of what the damned grown-ups are doing.  That's the worse running into despicable part, the hip deep euphemistic hypocrisy flowing like a mud slide across the entire affair.  I watched the local evening news for a few minutes tonight, that was about all I could tolerate.  Watched the news media (damn them to perpetually inflamed hemorrhoids!) spinning plastic fantastic propaganda around the word-thought "school" to misdirect and overwrite genuine public concern, watched the sides getting picked out for the finger pointing political blame game, watched the kids who most desperately need the truth being shunted off to become victimized pawns as the surrogate psyches of the adults trying to white wash the facts into one form of political mileage or another (yea, three local stations, three networks, take your best guess as to which was playing which angle). 

Before all is said and done they'll probably do deep if not lethal damage to another fifty kids, and those kids will have to suffer a whole lot more than the kid whose unknown despair led him to end his own life.  At least he died quickly.  The others won't be so lucky, unless they take the same option he did.  And if they do?  There'll be no way to connect their deaths back to the initiating event, because after all, everyone did everything they could.  Yea, right.  They sure as hell did.  But it wasn't for the kids, that's for damn sure.

Sabotaged...

Yup, I was.  Blindsided. Teach me to make assumptions and not calibrate the instruments.  I do know better than that, at least in some environments.  The culprit shall remain unnamed until appropriate vengeance has been both executed and celebrated.  The point of the sabotage?  The *bleeeeepin* meat thermometer.  The confession?  The child (at breakfast) admitted one of her crew on a weekend sleepover stuck it into live flame to see how fast the needle would swing.  Several times, and it's mechanical.  At this point it's most likely about as linear as the bottom curve of a well shaped breast, and I ain't talking turkey.  Drat and phooey on it.  Down to the store where they sell such gizmos for another one.  I want some platinum dammit, a true RTD that checks it's own battery voltage and will read accurate to 1/100th of a degree, and that coarse only if they built a cheap circuit.  At this altitude water should boil at 211.85 or so, and I want a thermometer that will say so in so just so many numbers. 

Winners, Losers and Sphere of Empathy...

Sometimes it is the most obvious of things that escape being set into words.  But, sometimes even the most painfully obvious of things will trip, miss a turn, and you'll actually see what you've been looking at for literally years.  One of the things I've been overlooking tripped this weekend, I got a good look at it.  It's part of the human condition at such a low level, such a foundation factor in so many things I'll share it here, perhaps it will help someone else open an understanding of something they're looking at but having trouble seeing.

The title of this post is really kind of backwards, because the last term in the title needs a definition before this thought will make much sense, and that's the idea of the sphere of empathy.  The sphere of empathy, as I've come to call it, is a conceptual measurement from the realms of geometry applied to the emotional, a way to visualize and to a degree quantify and plot the emotional interactions between the various peoples of earth which might be summarized as "humanitarian."

Let me begin by asserting to you that "Humanitarian" is not really a mode of thought, not thought as a fully rational function, but is in point of fact a word describing an individual's spectrum of emotional response to the observed state of life of those who live within that individual's sphere of empathy.  Considered in this manner everyone is a humanitarian, everyone, where they differ is in the scope, the range within which they apply that word.  The most barbarian of them all, the most greedy, self serving, vile and vicious individual on the planet is still a humanitarian, and his definition of humanity, his sphere of empathy, consists of one individual… himself.  The rest of the world is outside his sphere of empathy.

On the other foot…

It's a very standard question I'm sure, standard world wide.  "What do you want for dinner?"  And of course worldwide the standard answer is usually "I don't have a clue, hadn't given it any thought."  Or words to that effect.  Until recently I'd always been the second voice.  Truth be told I was telling the truth, dinner was six or eight or twelve hours down the road, and between now and then there were dragons to deal with, of one sort or the other and shucks, I wasn't spending any thought on what I was going to eat for dinner, I was worried about not becoming dinner.  Food would be preferable to motor oil or ETBBA, but that was about as far as my thoughts went.  Generally by the time I made it to dinner I was really to tired to care.  But that was then, and this is now.  Now I'm the one asking, and compelled to a wry chuckle at myself (and others of my gender/role) for finding a bit of a "hmmmphhhh…" at the stock answer coming back at me.  Karma, particularly the instant variety, can be a bitch.  Oh well, food it is.

I'm now give or take two weeks into this "Mr. Mom" gig, and finding it an interesting comparison to the other things I've used to fill my days.  Name a trade and I've probably worked in that world for at least a few weeks, I used to change jobs every ninety days just to keep life interesting, back in the BC days when I was the only one I had to look out for, before the factory took me into isolation for a quarter of a century.  You can learn an awful lot bouncing crew to crew being strong back labor and a set of extra hands for the journeymen.  The gypsy days of my misspent and totally enjoyed youth when adventure was the unsung standard and boredom the enemy don't you know.  I'm coming to realize I covered a lot of turf in those days, I really did.   Only in my later years have I've realized just how much ground I did cover, and this Mr. Mom gig is tapping from virtually all of it.

Yea, the last bolt is tight (hopefully), there's oil in the pan, gas in the tank, all the odds and ends are clear of the rotating parts and someone says "contact!"  The starter kicks in, things start to turn.  A few seconds later there's a cough, things speed up, slow back down, two, then three coughs in a row, things are waking up… talk to me sweetheart, bring it to life… the guy on the throttle risks a bit of a pump shot, the guy under the hood brings the timing forward a bit to match… anyone who's ever brought one back up from a rebuild knows the scenario.  You don't want it to idle, you want it to roar, snap up to three grand or so and run in all those new parts before they have time to revolt and break.  You break 'em in like you want 'em to run.

That's about where I am with the Mr. Mom gig right now, except it's not new steel getting acquainted with old iron, it's a 14 year old child's old attitudes getting acquainted with new ways of doing things.  It's a rebuild on attitudes and expectations, attitudes on the world and attitudes about herself, her expectations about herself that I'm working on.  You look for different things, listen for different things when the job is turn a house into a home, turn a headstrong feral child in the general direction of a lady.   But hey, the idea is the same… bring it up quick, clean, don't let the old patterns linger on, seat it quick and solid.  Don't tell 'em, don't even show 'em, let 'em live the truth of the old saying "Today is the first day of the rest of your life." 

Tiss the Season...

Yup, it is.  The season of Podiatric Sex.  Yup, it's football time again.  Uooga booga.  Our gang gonna beat down your gang take all your food and females.  Drat.  Not that I mind the boys out knocking heads, what the whale, the young bucks do the same thing out in the woods.  You know, lock horns and wrestle so the does can decide who gets to father next year's fawn.  That's pretty stock stuff in nature.  But (you knew there was going to be a but…) what is not found in nature are the freaking fragging f*ing fans living on reflected glory, those identity challenged idiots flooding into town every other weekend or so hauling in mock malice and seasonally adjusted profits.  The  next four months are gonna suck… manic traffic, overcrowded everything, gas prices bouncing like bra-less whore on a trotting horse, drunk children of all ages howling at the midnight moon to show their politically prescribed loyalty to the tribe, the pack, the team.  What a needless nuisance.  Drat.  Double drat and damn.  It's football season again.