Today, I was highly disturbed by something. I'm a Junior in college technically .. or maybe a Senior... I'm not sure. I think it's a Junior. I'll graduate in either December of this year of May of next year. For the first two years that I was in school, I attended a small community college. I got to know a lot of my professors well and I liked a lot of them, but one stood out as my favorite. In a small town like the one I was living in, there aren't that many people who are open minded about issues. It's usually a lot more like, "Hey, let's send all the gays to an island and nuke it and while we're at it let's also send everybody who isn't white!" I'm so sick of that kind of thinking, and this one professor was the harbinger of change it seemed. He flat out refused to tolerate any kind of racism in the class and always encouraged fair thinking. He was an english professor, and I took him for two english classes and then for a Literature class, just because I liked him so much. He got me a job as a Writing Tutor. He was like my hero.

The other day, my best friend R, who I had told to take several of his classes (and who listened and also loved him as a professor) told me that he had left his wife. I was sad, but that wasn't all. His wife had just a few months before given birth to their baby, and he left her for a girl I've known and gone to school with since we were in the fifth grade. For some reason this Really upset me. If he'd just left his wife, I'd have been sad for them because he always talked about her so fondly. If he'd just left his wife who had just had his child, I'd have been sad and wondered how they would work out things and would have felt bad for the kid. If he'd done those things to be with any other girl but the one I'd gone to school with since I was 10, I would have wondered what the story behind it was and not automatically mind-condemned them for it. Since none of that is the case and he did leave his wife who just a few months ago had his baby for this specific girl, I am Hugely disturbed by it.

I kind of have to wonder if this makes me a hypocrite, but in the end, I don't think it really matters. Today me and my good friend R went to Starbucks to hang out while I waited for my husband to get off work so that we could go mail some letters. R had told me that my professor and his new love interest came to Starbucks a lot and just kind of gazed into each other's eyes lovingly and sickeningly for hours, but I don't often hang out at Starbucks so I'd never seen it. So of course, you know what happened. Just as I had finished ordering my Tall Mocha Frappucino, R gasps and points out the window at his station wagon pulling up with my old friend from school, his new love interest, in it. R knows how upset I am over this. I fretted quite a bit and told her I wished she'd never even let me know about it when she did tell me, so when they showed up, she immediately offered to leave so that I wouldn't have to see them and say hi. I had always been very friendly with the guy (though I never got the more than friends vibe from it so it wasn't anything like that) so that was a likelihood. I started freaking out because although they were taking a while to get out of the car, my drink wasn't ready yet and I was going to have to wait.

Luckily for me, they walked in and walked right past me and my friend. I looked very different from when I was in his classes, as did my friend R, and so I guess he didn't notice us. They were ordering as my Frappucino was finished being made, and I snatched it off the counter and shot a pleading look to R. She just nodded and we left. I'm quite stymied as to why this even disturbs me so much, but it does. I couldn't even be in the place. It's one thing to be told that this happened; it's quite another to see it in front of your eyes. There's really no more to say about it, so I'm going to end this here, befuddled though I may be.

~*S*~