It's just shaping up to be a cruddy week for me. I'm sad, I'm tired, I am letting all the miseries the human race causes and suffers from get to me.

This evening was an example.

I thought the youth group was going fairly well, everyone seemed happy.

The lesson was one from 2 Samuel - about David sending a group to condole the Ammonites on the death of their king. The new king, counseled by some princes, humiliated the group, because they believed them to be spies. The lesson was on humiliation - why it's bad to humiliate other people, to think before you speak, and to deal with humiliation by ignoring it and accepting that sometimes people just plain act badly.

After the game (volleyball) was when everything fell apart.

A couple of the boys were just batting the ball around. One kid missed a shot, or hit someone with the ball, or something. And the other kid shot back by calling him a name - apparently something he called him regularly at school. That was bad enough. But then the kid who got called the name just snapped. He suddenly - I mean, like over two seconds - became enraged, started screaming, and headed towards the other kid.

It was scary as hell.

I sat there, frozen, unable to do anything. I don't deal well with other people in the grip of strong emotion . It really did scare the hell out of me. I didn't know what to do. Luckily, a couple of the OTHER boys there held the angry kid down and walked him off the playing field.

I didn't hear the whole story until later, from my co-leader. Apparently the name-calling had been going on at school as well. (She smoothed things over and got the two boys talking. I let her; I went in to supervise the younger children and also she is more of a disciplinarian than I am, she has more experience with the age group (retired middle-school teacher), and she's just generally less easy to scare than I am).

So I don't know. I feel like a failure on several fronts - first, that I didn't hear the insult and stop things right then; second, that I didn't jump in and try to calm the kid down (but for all I know I might have got a black eye or punch to the gut for my trouble; he was so angry I think he would have swung at anyone). I feel like a failure for not going and having the discussion on Why What Happened Was Bad with my co-leader and the kids. And most of all, I feel like my lesson on Not Humiliating People had absolutely zero impact - it was like I was spitting into the wind.

And I wonder if the kid will be back. Or if his mother, who visited church last week, will come back.

Why are people so crummy to one another? I'm sorry, but they are. All I've heard this weak is death and destruction and meanness and it's really getting to me.

I felt with this group that I was beginning to have an impact, to make a positive difference in these kids' lives. I realize now I can't make much of a difference at all, if any. I'll keep doing the youth thing, I guess, until I can find someone better at it than I am, but I'm going to have to try to give up any illusions I have about improving people's lives.

I'm sick of the whole human race tonight. I wish tomorrow was Saturday so I could spend the whole day holed up in my house with a book or my knitting.

It's probably going to be a good long time before I get to sleep tonight, if I sleep decently at all. These kind of things bug me; I can't let go of them. All I can see are all the points where I failed.


On the knitting front (to live up to my promise to be All Mood Swings, All The Time), I'm closing in on finishing the multidirectional diagonal scarf. Other than that, I've not done much for myself this week, which is probably why I feel like an appliance with a frayed cord - touch me the wrong way, move me just a little too much, and I'll short out and melt down.