Chapter 137: This isn't going to be a good week for me.

Tonight I went to Institute. I love institute, I look forward to it each week. This week in particular has been long and arduous so needless to say I was extra excited to get my weekly dose of Institute. My first sign that it wasn’t going to go well was when I drove up to the building to see the parking lot chained off. There were cars in the parking lot, but I’m not sure how they got in, so I drove down the street a ways and found a parking spot on the street, praying that I didn’t overlook a sign saying not to park there. As I was walking up to the building I started to climb over the chain and then proceeded to trip and had I fallen my hand or face would have landed scathingly close to a random pile of dog poo in the parking lot. So the silver lining here was that while I looked like an idiot tripping and hopping around on one foot, I didn’t get shit-faced. Sorry, I couldn’t resist the joke.
So I warily enter the building because maybe we don’t have class and for some reason cars got trapped in the parking lot. But I enter and there are quite a few people already in there, the teacher is gone so we have a substitute and amongst the crowd of students are N.T.R., Dog Whisperer, Coz, Tyrant, and MM…perfect, my favorite combination of people assembled into one room (sarcasm). N.T.R. and Dog Whisperer are doing their usual, taking any comment made by the teacher and turning it around to be all about them. While one of them was going off I got up and played my bathroom card a little too early in the game. I come back and the teacher is talking and I’m praying that he can pretend to not see N.T.R. and Dog Whisperer raising their hands, but he keeps calling on them and they are saying the most random things and I’m wondering if N.T.R. thinks that institute is an open forum to ask whatever random question he wants, and Dog Whisperer is doing a plug for comic books because he keeps whipping out quotes and antidotes from them.
As if that weren’t bad enough the two girls who came in after me are chatting up a storm so it’s either their constant whispering or it’s one of the boys and their outlandish comments, the teacher, who is supposed to be teaching on one individual is pretty much teaching on another, telling us stories we have all heard before but then thinking it’s okay because he’ll say, “And I didn’t know this, this is from her journals,” or something like that, weakly trying to relate it back to the person he is supposed to be teaching us about, which only bugged me more. So I’m writing down my thoughts for the blog and working on my story but the girls next to me won’t shut up and I don’t know who they are because they have never been before but I’m tempted on more than one occasion to say, “Not to be rude but could you guys please be quiet.” See, I would have said ‘please’. But I can’t figure out why they bothered coming, why not just go out to eat, Institute is not your free hang out in the city. New flash, you’re not cool, you’re annoying. At this point I was secretly wishing I hadn’t already emptied my bladder because it would have been a good moment to take a walk to the bathroom, possibly taking my stuff with me and exiting out the front door, but no, I mistakenly thought the worst part was when I first walked in. I didn’t know it could get worse than that. I’ve never left institute cranky but tonight I was cranky, I turned up my music and wondered what happened to the class I loved so much. I miss when the class was small and the people were normal, now it’s being infiltrated by individuals I spend a great amount of energy avoiding.
Usually after class I help put the chairs back and I hang out and talk to people, but knowing the list of people in the room I think you can understand that I put just my chair back and walked straight to the front door without saying goodbye to a single soul, I didn’t want Tyrant stopping me to order me to do something for church, I didn’t want Coz and his innate sleaziness approaching me, I’m sick of giving N.T.R. the ghetto high fives and Dog Whisperer pointing out the symmetry of my jewelry, and I’m sick and tired of MM acting like we’re best friends when I know it’s not that way behind my back.
We’ve got to stop announcing in church that there’s institute.

But it brings me to another point. In church on Sunday MM says, “So I heard your aunt is sick,” because I was talking to someone about going up to Michigan for the 4th. It doesn’t bother me that Diva probably told her because there weren’t many people I told, I wrote it in here. But I don’t tell people these things because I’m not a natural downer (I know, hard to believe) but I don’t like splashing my personal life all over the place, I know that’s a difficult concept for MM to conceive because she likes an audience and she likes to be the tortured victim, but that’s not who I am. But as I said, I don’t mind that she was told, what bothered me was that she brought it up to me. To me that’s just bad manners, yes, someone else may have told you my business, but don’t act like I directly told you and be so bold to bring it up to me while I’m talking to someone else. We’re not bonding here. So I nodded my head, “yes, she’s sick.” Then she asked if she was going to get better or if she was better and I shook my head, no, she’s not ever going to get better. “What’s wrong” ….information pumper. She’s got cancer, then she asks, what kind, I told her every kind in the book. Then I told her that she has 3-6 weeks without chemo, but even with it no more than 6 months…by the way, that’s the latest update, 6 months to a year quickly dwindled down to 3-6 weeks in a matter of days. I let her try to console me, but I’ve made my peace, I had the opportunity to go see her, to spend time with her. I was able to tell her I love her which to be honest I have probably never said, not because I didn’t love her but because I rarely get to see her. Finally I ended the conversation and went back to class. It just peeved me that she approached me with that, because honestly, if I wanted to talk to her about it I would have brought it up with her directly. Ugh, this is the longest week of my life.
Tuesdays suck.