Anxiety Monday

Monday mornings are always bad for me. Not just in the start of the work week way; I get bad anxiety on Monday mornings. It's part of the self-consciousness of being a new teacher (freshman comp, by the way), having an uncertain financial existence, and the stupid habit I have of arranging all my problems in my head so that I'm thinking about all of them simultaneously. I'll call it lumping, this ridiculous practice I can't seem to shake, though I know I'm just freaking myself out. In honor of this, I'm starting a new series for Mondays dedicated to horror. I'll start with a free-write my students did together as a class.

I wrote the first sentence ("It was a dark and stormy night") on a piece of notebook paper and the students passed the paper around the class. Each student wrote only one sentence to add to the story. They were instructed to add on to the previous sentences so that the class built a story together. Sort of like the telephone game, if you're familiar with that. After all students contributed, I took the paper and wrote the results on the board. Here are the results:

It was a dark and stormy night. I began to head for the vault. It was raining really hard. The lights went out in the house. All of a sudden I heard a loud noise. I went to check to see what the noise was. It was a scary man. From fear of the scary man, I crossed the street and ran down to the subway to get away. I saw the man creeping from across the street. There was a mysterious phone call and he said, "I am going to get you, little girl, no matter how much you run." She kept running and went into some church. There was an old priest lighting candles. He was dancing to Black Eye Peas "My Humps." When he turned around, he saw other people dancing to the same song.

I think it's a good starting point. I like the mysterious phone call. I would definitely be anxious about being followed by a scary man, and I would certainly feel horrified seeing a priest dancing to "My Humps." There is room to build here, and there are more stories waiting to be told from this beginning. Anxiety-Horror Monday begins.

The shit will continue.