Post the link to your blogged slice before the start of class on the due date (Thursdays = Creative Writing; Fridays = 9th Honors).
After getting up early-ish to help some friends and colleagues with some minor details of a workshop they were hosting, I headed to ye olde T.J. Maxx to check my main "to-do" list item off for the weekend: purchase more light-up topiary spheres for the Prom Committee. When I walked to the back of the store and happily spotted seven or eight balls of various sizes, I quickly decided there was no way this haul of decorations was going to fit into the relatively puny cart and I instead began placing the fishingline-like loops on the top of the spheres onto both of my hands. Just as I'd gotten the last one in my possession and turned to head back to the check-out, I looked up and recognized the face of a fellow shopper as someone I'd worked with years ago.
My "Hi, how're you?" was reciprocated, and then the ghost-of-colleagues-past quickly transitioned from a brief synopsis of what she's doing now into a wave of unjoy as she - seemingly gleefully - tried to lure me into a conversation about the misfortunes of people I'd known years ago; her rhetorical question, "You know why he left, don't you?" was met with the first of a litany of adamant, "I don't care to know," "I'm not interested," "Do not even tell me," and "I don't care," coupled with my body language of waving wrist at a 90* angle, palm open and flat (a la "Stop!") as four or five decorative balls hang from my standing finger tips. It was like when a cartoon octopus curls a leg around the protagonist and tries to pull him/her away into a dark, rocky cave. But, in this case, there was no shadowy lair, just the fluorescent-lit space of a chain store, and I wasn't buying what she was selling.
Though I wish I could have been even more firm and said flat-out, "Stop. You don't need to tote around a highlight reel of people's poor choices and misadventures; it doesn't do anything for them, and it doesn't do anything for you...." I am proud of myself for not wanting to hear and redirecting the brief run-in so that I came out with a clean conscience and only put good vibes into the world. Everybody has troubles and makes just plain mistakes, but reveling in others' struggles is wrong beyond.