Tangled Green Thoughts

So here is the bad. I made a student cry today. I gave her detention and didn't take any juvenile excuses from her when she shoveled them at me. I countered each excuse with something she couldn't defend and then she did what I didn't think the tough girl would do: she cried. I felt like crap. I brought a 12-year-old to tears. I felt like a small man. I asked her what I could do to help her focus more. How could I help her? I made a deal that I wouldn't tell Mrs. R, her real teacher, what happened if she understands why I have to isolate her from certain friends.

And now the ugly. A long time ago our family went to Vietnam together but we never got around to converting it from miniDV to VHS or DVD, so we have never seen it. The only problem is the person didn't just straight convert it like I had wanted. He thought he was doing us a favour by editing it and putting in whiny music and amateur special effects. The whiny music muted some essential parts that he didn't think was essential, like the sound of our Thailand tour guide's voice. The tour guide, to me, wasn't a face, he was a voice. Or the editor left long strips of other people in like some Vietnamese show where people were playing instruments, but took out scenes of the family just joking around or saying/doing stupid things. What pissed me off the most was that he edited out the "nasty stuff." I was livid. Our family is not sugar and angels. We had so many classical family arguments over the most trivial things. Those arguments epitomizes us way more than some of the stupid stuff he decided to leave in. Please, I wish he didn't try to decide what is important to us.