A Bloody Bad Day

My day began normally enough: I got up at five and did an hour's worth of schoolwork before showering. But then I decided it was absolutely imperative that the bathroom wastebasket be emptied into the kitchen trash between the schoolwork and the showering, and since the kitchen trash was itself almost full I also found it necessary to reach into the can and press down on said trash. Which if I'd remembered the broken juice glass I'd tossed in there yesterday I probably wouldn't have done.

Needless to say, I sliced the shit out of my finger. And needless to say, I yelled, "FUCK!," mostly because it hurt like hell but also because I don't have time for that sort of thing in the morning. I have time for maybe one contingency, and that contingency is usually a line at the copy machine.

"That's probably gonna need stitches," I thought to myself as blood soaked through the tissues I'd grabbed in an attempt to stop the bleeding. Then I got in the shower.

Now, I've never seen Psycho, but I hear tell it contains a bloody shower scene where some chick gets hacked to death, possibly by an axe-murderer. My bathroom probably looked something like that this morning. (Minus the dead chick, of course.) Blood spattered against the shower walls as I washed my hair and oozed over the bar of soap as I washed my person. It swirled around my feet as it made its gory way down the drain, then took up residence on my towels (which, inconveniently, are white). It soaked through bandages and dripped into the sink as I combed my hair and applied my makeup.

Okay, so there was a lot of blood. Need I go on or shall I just skip ahead to the part where I take my bloody self to school to stand in line at the copy machine?

Fine.

There I was, there I was, there I was IN the copy room.* Actually, I was in my classroom because there wasn't a line at the copier this morning. To be more specific, I was in my classroom with 29 kids, 22 crappy laptops, and one student-centered internet-based lesson plan. (Oh, and one bloody finger.) All of which would have been fine if the internet connection had been working, but it wasn't. I know this because my kids told me 50 billion times.

The first student who attempted to log on to the internet announced, "My internet's broken." This announcement was followed, then repeated, by 28 other similar announcements. One girl even recorded herself saying, "Miss [my last name], the internet isn't working" so she could simply press a key on her computer to replay the message incessantly while I checked connections and tried to figure out why the internet wasn't working. Which I couldn't.

Oh, and if you're thinking my finger had stopped bleeding by this point, you're wrong. Still bleeding. In fact, my finger bled all day and well into the night (I'm just guessing here based on the fact that it's 10:15 and it hasn't quite quit yet). Shortly after lunch (which I was too busy to eat, by the way, and blood loss + no food = bad scene) I and my bloody finger consulted the school nurse. I knew the school nurse couldn't do much for me, but I wanted to know if I needed to go get stitches after school. "Oooooh," the nurse said, grimacing as she examined my wound, "they can't even stitch that. It'll bleed a little for a while. And it will hurt a lot. Take some Tylenol." Then she gave me some gauze and sent me back to my internet-connectionless classroom where my kids were happily engaged in the business of doing nothing.

So. It has been a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. My mom says some days are like that.

*This sentence, while serving as a fine transition, is included for the sole purpose of making my brother laugh. If you're not my brother all those extra "there I was"es probably sound pretty stupid.