Greg and Kat's blog

Do you remember Estelle Getty’s character in Golden Girls? The premise was that she had a stroke and lost the ability to filter what she said, thus always said what was on her mind, no matter how abrasive.

I think I had that stroke.

I have sent no less than seven potentially inflammatory emails in the last 24 hours. Tones have ranged from “has the potential to cause problems in the future” to “please increase your stress level right now”.

And it feels good.

Several things seem to have recently come to a point where they need to be dealt with. The options are pretty much “ignore”, “placate”, or “try to fix”. I am basically just opting for the third… and doing it directly.

I think this all started when I went on a co-op site visit with Harriet in the summer. One of the students we visited was a little awkward and kept playing with his pen and the desk chair beside him during the meeting. About 5 minutes after it started bugging me, Harriet said “Put the pen down and stop playing with the chair. It makes people think you’re not listening.” My internal reaction was “OMG, you can say that out loud?”

For example, I was talking to Amanda earlier today (who is, of course, in favour of this behaviour). We were, as always, discussing the functioning of the School. My argument in favour of giving myself a potentially horrible future task was “people’s lives get ruined all the time; why not mine?”

This cannot be healthy behaviour.