Actually, you don’t have to care, not exactly in the mushy, heart-rending way you’ve come, because its impossibility serves as a convenient excuse, to think you have to. All you have to do is become a logic board. You have to decide on the rules, and then—CALMLY—insist on them. You have to in fact NOT care about their “suffering” as you go over and over the most basic procedures. All you have to do is refuse to practice their mistakes. The weird thing is, insisting on perfection in this cool, machine-like way is actually much less stressful than opting out and doing nothing. It’s doing nothing that makes you angry—you get angry when they take advantage of you, even though you’ve basically given them, given their physiological state, no choice. OS X is brighter, faster, prettier, easier; more consistent, discoverable, up-to-date, compatible with my existing hardware; just as Unix-y as any Linux distribution. So why am I about to reboot into Ubuntu, again? It's a stroke of freakin' genius, yes it is. Barbecued brains. Whosoever says practicality and ideals can't coexist has never had a barbecued brain for lunch. Should I reverse the behavior of the command and control keys? Does it really F-ing matter? Dude. Fuck this. (Would I say that if they were *my* kids?) Is it that I don't care or that I don't have the energy? Or does one of those cause the other and if so which? Or do they cause each other, viciously? Do I really want to quit? Besides the obvious yes, I mean. Every time I am tempted to stand behind that sentiment, the other voice says, Baby. Jesus was a killer app, but atheism is open source. But suffering can also make you egotistical. smoke smoke smoke smoke smoke smoke smoke smoke fire My main failure as a teacher is that I can't demonstrate progress. In a conference if a parent or student wanted to know not just the grade, or does she do the work, but *what has she learned*, I would be hard pressed to present that data, even if she had learned something. "In real life, it's not enough to compare options, you have to generate the options in the first place."