So, I Guess I Have no Future in Bad Web Poetry.

I was jumpy and over-emotional all day Monday, complete with a head ache. I actually lost some tears in front of my students, while launching into the narrative of Malcolm X’s death:

“On February 21, 1965, as he began to speak, two men rushed the 39-year-old father of four and emptied their guns into his body, shooting him fourteen times. Left bleeding there on the stage of the Audubon Ballroom, X was pronounced dead on arrival at New York's Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, ending two weeks of terror for the man who had foreseen his own death…”

As well, I had been nauseas all day, slightly, but I marked it down to just plain lack of food. (I neglected breakfast, which means no food until I get home at 11pm.) Or maybe it was too much coffee, or stress, or just the blues depressing my system.

We finished watching Malcolm X (1992) last night in film class. Then, when it came to that really stark assassination scene at the end of the movie, I had to dash from the class to keep from vomiting in my own lap.

Yes, I am sentimental about Malcolm X, and I usually get really broody and depressed when I think of the path he was on that was cut short. (I mean, post-Hajj Malcolm could have had the whole world in his hand, and made it so much better, but we’ll never know what he would have done with it.)

But, I am not exactly a wilting flower. I don’t swoon, and I don’t fake the vapours to appear “sensitive.” I’ve seen over fifty hours worth of concentration camp liberation and clean up footage. I certainly didn’t think myself vulnerable enough to be brought down by a dramatization of a murder.

I was actually quite touched; maybe I was getting softer and more empathetic in my advancing age! This could have been a new beginning for me. Maybe I’d actually be able to stay in the same room with someone who is crying without mentally making my grocery list.

Finally, I too could get a Live Journal thing going, and pour out sensitive young angst, while there is still time.

However, by the time I hit the hay at midnight, I realized this was not so, and I am still an emotional clod. Just one with a bad tummy. I have been overcome with waves of nausea every hour or half hour since 11pm last night, and can’t keep anything down.

Rats. It’s not sensitivity at all. It’s stomach flu.

Oh well. What has sensitivity ever earned anyone?