Ugh, just, ugh

I need to stop reading the news about this "admissions scandal" where some Important people made donations (and apparently did crimes) to get their not-that-great kids into schools where kids with more potential might have got shoved out of the way.

Part of the way it is rage-inducing is I look at our students: by and large the first of their families (or first generation, or second generation) to go to college. Lots of them work. Lots of them have tough life circumstances. I have to be SUPER flexible. Like SUPER flexible about due dates and make ups and missed labs and everything because what are you gonna do when someone who has an unreliable car but can't afford a better one can't get to class?

And I am happy a lot of the times to help them, and a lot of them thank me for being flexible, but it DOES make more work and more effort for me. (And I totally blanked that someone had arranged a make-up at 2 pm today, totally forgot, and I feel terrible. We've rescheduled, but....I should not be forgetting stuff like that, something is wrong if I am starting to forget stuff like that)

And also, because I've had a few rather - entitled - students down through the years. Mostly as a TA at the school I attended for grad work, that attracted a lot of rich Chicago-burb kids who had been handed stuff all their life, and who got mad when they earned (or, as they thought: you GAVE them) a C or D in a class.

And also, just....today, because of a string of things, I am feeling very small and very sad and very unimportant, and like all the hard work I do is for really nothing, and I'm a chump because I follow the rules, and....I don't know.

I was really hoping my Doki Doki crate might come today to cheer me up, but it did not.

I am trying to motivate myself to do a workout in a few minutes because then I would not have to rise at the buttcrack of dawn tomorrow to do one, but I am failing in motivation. Maybe I just go to bed tonight at 8 pm and count on getting up early again....

I need a hug and am sad. And this is not one of the things that hugging a stuffed animal really fixes.

I mean, on some level I have always known there have always been double standards out there, but...this feels so egregious.

***
Edited to add:

Forced myself to do a workout, on the grounds that (a) it might make me feel better (it did, though these days I don't know if it's endorphin release, or instead satisfying that howling sense of duty within me) and (b) now I don't have to get up at the crack of dawn, seeing as I am going to be facing down pretty much a 13 hour day with almost no breaks.And also, while I was doing it (I have run the dvd so many times I can do the workout on autopilot and think about other things) this popped into my head:

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,

We people on the pavement looked at him:

He was a gentleman from sole to crown,

Clean favored and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,

And he was always human when he talked,

But still he fluttered pulses when he said,

“Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich--yes, richer than a king-

And admirably schooled in every grace:

In fine, we thought that he was everything

To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,

And went without the meat and cursed the bread;

And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,

Went home and put a bullet through his head.

Edward Arlington Robinson, of course, and yes, the cleverest trick the devil ever came up with was getting us to compare ourselves with others and find ourselves wanting somehow, or hard-done-by somehow.

then again, the cynical and burnt-out part of me adds this coda to the lesson of the poem: