What is this, Thursday?

Okay. Thursday.

I'm having one of those "talking to a brick wall" moments. Mainly from Youth Group last night. There are a couple of kids who have a tendency to be low-level disruptive, and it makes all the kids squirrelly. It's not anything so very BAD - mostly making faces at people across the room or poking at their neighbors. But it still changes the group dynamics, and frankly, after a day of dealing with students who STILL sort of do some of the same things (even though at 20 or so they should know better), I'm ready to be done with it for the day.

I've broached the subject of setting up rules. One person (bless him) suggested the Golden Rule as a good group rule, and another said "Respect other people." But I told them, I think we need to be more specific - like, instead of simply "respect other people" we need examples of good and bad behavior. Like "don't talk when someone else - especially an adult - is talking." That's something they have trouble with.

I guess we need some kind of useful consequence or maybe a carrot rather than a stick.

And yeah, I do understand the kids are tired at the end of the day too, and have spent the day being talked at by teachers. But my lessons are like 20 minutes, and I ask for their input and ask for their opinions.

Also, I'm kind of baffled/upset because one of the kids used a racial epithet against one of the leaders. (it was the "n" word, to be precise.) Thing is, this person isn't of the ethnicity the epithet is generally used to refer to. She was, however, apparently raised in a foster family where her foster father was Black. And she came quietly over to me, and told me (I guess I am the de facto leader) about it, and she remarked, "We would have NEVER said that to my foster father." So I guess I need to haul out the old "no Jew or Greek, no slave or free" verse for next week and build a lesson about racism. Ugh. The thing that really baffles me is that the kid who used it is a member of ANOTHER group that often gets picked on and epithets applied to it. So I don't know if it was a case of "kick the dog" (i.e., he's been picked on so much he's doing some picking of his own), or if he genuinely thought it wasn't a bad thing to say, or if he was trying to shock the person into doing what he wanted her to do.

I remind myself: two steps forward, one step back. And I remind myself that I may be having some influence beneath the surface that I can't see, that I may never see. But it's hard. In the absence of positive feedback it's too easy for me to feel like I'm shooting rubber bands at the stars, or spitting into the wind, or whatever metaphor you want to use for a pointless and quixotic task.

And the fliers for the environmental wacko group have come back. This time they're less scary than pathetic - when I look at them, I get the sense of an emo-boy-without-a-sense-of-humor-about-it. Kind of like Comic Book Guys in training, but without the self-deprecation. It still annoys me though: we do not give free advertising space. That bulletin board is for job postings for our students who plan to DO something with their lives - something more useful than sitting around posting anonymous threats and comments like "you are obsolete!"

And it strikes me that there are basically four attitudes that people can take when they look at the world. You can look at all the bad stuff out there and you can stick your head in the sand - get totally engrossed by celebrities or your own little corner of the world or your family or something and pretend bad stuff doesn't exist. Or you can become a total nihilist (or pretend to be) and lash out and talk about how bad and evil and spoiled everything is, and generally be an unpleasant person. Or you can look at it, shake your head, and say, "someone [presumably The Government} should do something to fix that." Or you can look at it, shake your head, and say, "What can I do to try to help fix it?"

And you know, those ideas kind of fit in with the war strategy/love strategy dichotomy I posted about yesterday.

I tend to think the last course of action is the best. It's the one I try to take. But sometimes the Fourth Course gets too overwhelming and I admit to sticking my head in the sand a bit - going home and caressing my stash of yarn, or cracking open a good book, or trying to look out through the one-inch picture frame of my research. But I hope to God I never enter that second group, who can only see filth and destruction, or the third group, where I sit on my butt and complain but never do anything to try to help.

I don't know. I'm just thinking out loud here. I spend an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out the world and the course of Right Action in it. But, as I've said several times over the past couple days, I'm just one person. How much can one person do? How much can a person do before they totally burn themselves out?

I'm also thinking about Therese of Liseux again - in the novel I'm reading Frankka writes a bit about her - how she knew what she wanted (there is a famous story of her declaring, as a young child, "I choose all!" when presented with a choice of ribbons. And somehow that is presented as an affirmation of life, sort of a faithful carpe diem, rather than the remark of a spoiled child), how she was demanding until she got what she said God was directing her to do. And then how she died young - and was seen by some as a failure. And Frankka makes some comment about asking the St. Therese (which she became) to teach Frankka to be as "kick-ass" of a failure as Therese was.

And that's something that stuck in my head, because one of the most primal feelings I have - one of the most deeply rooted things in there, is "Failure Bad!" Some of the things I don't do - or don't get done - are done out of a fear of failure and a desire to protect myself from the feelings that failure engenders in me. I have several journal articles sitting in the hard drive of my computer - I COULD pull them out and polish them up and submit them somewhere else - but I remember the feeling of being told "no, this is not good enough for our journal" or "this is not innovative enough" or whatever. And I know on one level it's something I have to get past - ironically, my life will be a greater failure if I do not weather the little failures and publish. But again - it's hard. It's putting yourself out there and either not getting any positive feedback or getting only negative feedback. And then it becomes tempting to pull in, to not risk, to go home and lock all my doors and ignore the larger world.

So I don't know. Maybe working on being a bigger and better failure - in the sense that, even though I failed at something, I tried - is another goal to work on. (And the ironic cynic in me laughs and says, well, bigger and better failure was something you achieved last night with your lesson...)