It’s absolutely wonderful, this feeling that your brain is betraying you. I know how tomorrow is going to go. It’s going to be fine. I might have a minor technical hiccup or two, possibly involving a photocopier or the ancient projector in my classroom or the fact that I haven’t touched a Windows device in, probably, literal decades. That’s the worst that’s going to happen. The kids are going to be fine. It’s going to be honeymoon time and beyond that I took some time today to go through my kids’ discipline records and something like 75% of them have no referrals at all, and my worst kids have maybe one a week, with a lot of those being something called “refusal to identify self,” which … well, I’m actually going to ask them tomorrow or Tuesday how it is that I have kids who have no referrals other than five or six refusals to identify themselves, because that doesn’t make any sense to me– if I’m mad at a kid for refusing to identify him- or herself, I feel like there’s probably something else going on that I could have put on that referral? Something that maybe trumps the refusal to identify?

I dunno. At the moment it’s a minor mystery.

And nonetheless, despite the fact that I have changed schools many times, despite the fact that I have had nineteen first days of school and this will be the twentieth and I can do these things in my sleep, I am crawling out of my skin with anxiety right now. Like, I’m getting physical manifestations of it. I’m sweatier than I ought to be and jumpy as fuck. I’d take a brain pill except that the newer emergency pills have a bad habit of turning me into a slug the day after I take them (they are listed for “up to four times a day” on the bottle, and I cannot imagine what the fuck would happen if I took four of them in a day) and I cannot be a slug tomorrow.

I’m also being deeply stupid about having to get to work earlier than normal. I generally got to my previous school at 8:30; I have to be at this one at 7:30. That’s an hour earlier, and I don’t have to drop my son off. So I get up an hour earlier. This isn’t complicated. I’ve already changed my alarm and everything. And yet, bullshit abounds regardless. It’s just before 8:00 right now and I’m genuinely concerned that I should be starting to get ready to bed.

Just shut up, brain, I’m tired of you. I know it’s been a stressful week and realistically it’s about to be another one, but Christ, enough. We know how to do this. It’s going to be fine.