Indigo Children...

...can bite my chubby white ass. This appears to be a term invented by hippies to describe their whacked-out offspring. If you're unenlightened (yes, that is a dig), read on:

INDIGO CHILDREN

• Have strong self esteem, connection to source

• Know they belong here until they are told otherwise

• Have an obvious sense of self

• Have difficulty with discipline and authority

• Refuse to follow orders or directions

• Find it torture to waiting in lines, lack patience

• Get frustrated by ritual-oriented systems that require little creativity

• Often see better ways of doing thing at home and at school

• Are mostly nonconformists

• Do not respond to guilt trips, want good reasons

• Get bored rather easily with assigned tasks

• Are rather creative

• Are easily distractible, can do many things at once

• Display strong intuition

• Have strong empathy for others or NO empathy

• Develop abstract thinking very young

• Are gifted and/or talented, highly intelligent

• Are often identified or suspected of having ADD or ADHD, but can focus when they want to

• Are talented daydreamers and visionaries

• Have very old, deep, wise looking eyes

• Have spiritual intelligence and/or psychic skills

• Often express anger outwardly rather than inwardly and may have trouble with rage

• Need our support to discover themselves

• Are here to change the world - to help us live in greater harmony and peace with one another and to raise the vibration of the planet

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Yes, that's right. All of those kids with anger issues and ADHD who are needy and unempathetic, easily bored and distractible, are impatient and have problems with authority--they're SPECIAL. They are teaching us to live in harmony by driving us up the fucking wall. I can only assume "oneness" in this sense means my head will live in oneness with the brick wall next to my desk at least once a day. If they're special, why are there so goddamn many of them?

Look, folks. I had a label or two slapped on me in my day, and I've had the dubious pleasure of having met a whole lot of people in my travels across this country. I have met some amazing people, some very memorable people. I have friends who could or have taken human lives. (You know who you are.) I have friends who are so rocket-science brilliant that they couldn't hold a real conversation with mere mortals. (You are oblivious and don't know who you are.) I know people with the strangest job titles ever: leather armor maker, brewster, gemologist, lithographer. We all went to school, we got through in our various ways. If we were Indigo Children, we damn sure didn't know it. And this is doubtless a bias from being a teacher, but I'm much more prepared to reward a child who treats me with respect and makes an effort to do the project than one who is bored, impatient, and defiant. I can tell you without a doubt that the oppositional-defiant, mean, and rage-filled children that fill my days with stress and woe are NOT gifted little Buddhas-to-be; they are unstructured, chemically imbalanced kids with crack-addled parents who watch South Park and play extremely violent video games.

The irritating part is that I stumbled across this dreck while I was looking for age-appropriate creativity exercises for my (non-indigo) students to do when they finish their projects. According to the website, as many of 95% of children born after 1999 are considered "indigo". I would say that's an environmental problem, not the dawning of an age of enlightenment. It's something in the Chef-Boy-Ar-Dee or the dozens of inoculations routinely pumped into most infants (gee, about 95% of them).

apparently, I hate myself

I will not do the after-school program. It's too much work for no payoff, the kids are just whacked, and I'd have to deal with the Sociopath. Besides, the logistics of speeding from one school to another with no prep time in a borrowed room...it makes me cringe. Plus, I write a brilliant curriculum every time--no, really!--only to watch my lessons fall apart because attendance is spotty, I can't assign homework, and the kids who are there only show up because they're made to. They eat their free snack, socialize, ignore the lesson and ask me to give them things. Anything. They want art supplies, they want books, they want my drawings, as long as they don't have to pay for it. I am a softie in that department, because although I grew up poor, my dad would always make sure we had paper to draw on and some decent markers/ pastels/ watercolor pencils. I have shelled out no end of my own cash to buy kids sketchbooks, paints, brushes, you name it. I gave these kids everything I could for the last three semesters...then I realized they were playing me. There's one girl who sketches independently, and she comes from a family with nine kids. She uses what I give her, so I keep her well-supplied. All the rest of 'em just take what they can because it's free. They won't sketch, they won't write, they won't even do the assignments. Screw that.

So what happened? I got roped into doing two days a week of the afterschool program, because they're lacking art people. Hmm, I wonder why. (Why are there no emoticons for syrupy sarcasm? O yes, that's right, emoticons are wretched and awful.) I thought I had hardened myself sufficiently to call the shots in this area of my life. Yes, I would do almost anything for my grant coordinator, who was my first friend in this shithole, but I thought that "almost" meant "but not that lousy afterschool nightmare".

True, I'm in a rough place financially, and this would take a little pressure off, but the added stress is really not something I need. They really buttered me up, too, telling me how kids are asking for me as a teacher, what a great rapport I have, no one else can do it...actually, it's that no one else WANTS to do it. The Sociopath sees herself as an instrumental part in this program, and just keeps micromanaging more and more, and she's utterly clueless. Thus, the great teachers are being driven away, and the decent pay is attracting the townsfolk, thus we wind up with classes on Scrapbooking and Acrylic Nails. This is just blissful to the Sociopath, as she feels that the kids need something they can relate to, taught by people they can relate to (read: people like her).

Why, then? This is a new zenith of self-loathing. Damn this rainy weather.