california dreamin'

well, it's been a difficult day so far, it has it has.  couldn't wait to get to the news from california, which was exactly the result i expected.  deplored, but expected. strange fruit to swallow so early in the morning.  then off to get blood drawn (at 7:30 a.m, for pete's sake) by vampire lab techs.  fasting never improves my mood.  my first class started late, because of the lab appointment, so i was racing the clock to take them through a review for a major test tomorrow.  one of my favorite students was doing an irritating trick i've several times asked him to stop  (when he is aware that someone doesn't know the answer, he mutters a wrong answer to them, and they usually take the bait and deliver the wrong answer.  he's very smart, and knows the right answer.  he just loves to mess with the other students' minds. i actually understand the personal entertainment value he derives from this trick, but it's not doing the others a bit of good.) and i totally lost it.  yelled like a fishwife (haridan, shrew, harpy, etc.  all those bad antifeminist epithets) at him. it was a really wrong way to handle it, and i immediately felt like shit.  i've never done that before in a class.  when the class was doing some written work i took him out to the hall and talked to him.  i told him he knew that he had to stop the behavior, but that i shouldn't have gotten so angry and apologized for doing so.  he sulked all through the rest of class.  i hope he's recovered by tomorrow.  this is a great kid, a young korean, smart as a whip, great sense of humor.  gotta get a better grip here, start sleeping more than five hours a night.

so, now i'm depressed by the california recall and by my own aberrant lack of control.  but calpundit has a pretty level-headed assessment of the recall, in which he includes a link to our own john scalzi's writing about the recall on his real blog, whatever.  the mild-mannered, lowkey scalzi of bytheway morphs into someone entirely more radical, loosed from the constraints of AOL.  really, go check it out.