Ya know that stuff you remember doing, or being a part of, or even just standing by and failing to step in and put a stop to it that makes you feel badly when you think about it years later?

I’m not going to write about that.  Everybody writes about that.

I’m going to write about some of the stuff I KNOW I SHOULD feel badly about, but don’t.

I was, originally, going to try to do it without justifying myself…but let’s be honest, that’s not going to happen.  ‘Cause little old Jiminy EmmerEffin’ Cricket is sitting here staring at me, and even though I don’t feel badly about this stuff, it’s all I can do to keep from locking him in the closet with the Venus Fly trap I just recently bought.

That would be thing number one.

I generally don’t kill bugs.  I usually set them free outside or ignore them, depending on my mood.  Sure, I’ll flush a woodtick down the toilet…but I WON’T burn them with matches.  That just seems psycho to me.  That, and I grew out of torturing insects when I was 8.

OK, 10.

Anyway, I bought a Venus fly trap.  Because we have this perennial problem with Boxelder bugs and those darned Asian Beetles.  They’re everywhere, inside and outside of the house.  I’ve even taken to spraying bug killer on them the last couple of years to try to thin them out…with very little success.  Sure I kill hundreds of them…but you don’t even notice a dent in the population.

They’re still all over the place, crawling around on both the inside and outside walls, wiggling their way in through cracks and crevices.  They’re in the shower, on the couch, in your hair…IN THE BUTTER (upside:  people are getting better about replacing the cover on the butter dish).

So I bought a Venus Flytrap.

You might think this is a sort of nice zen solution to the invasion of hordes and hordes of bugs.  You know, letting nature solve the problems caused by nature.

But I have to confess…I don’t just let the hapless bugs wander to their doom as nature intended.  No, I have captured some of the bugs…

…and FED them to the Flytrap.

It’s not like they’re cockroaches, or termites.  They don’t hurt anything, they aren’t pernicious and they’re just a seasonal annoyance.  The worst they do is die and leave their bodies around for me to sweep/vacuum/dust up.  Killing them is completely pointless, and not at all necessary.  It’s completely against my ethics to kill something just because it is an annoyance.  But I did it anyway, and so I should feel badly about it, but I don’t.

So much for cleaning up the karma.  But I don’t care.  It’s really SATISFYING to see the trap snap down on one or two representatives of  those effing annoying, endless, invading armies of bugs.

When I was in highschool there was this Home Economics teacher.  She walked around clutching her books to her chest like a shield.  He beady little eyes would dart back and forth as she hunched down the hallway.  As if she expected a sasquatch to leap out of a broom closet and maul her lace ruff, or hand-crocheted shawl, or her freshly-polished brown, sensible shoes.

A friend once described her as being a walking, open wound.  I’d never given it a lot of thought, but my friend was right.  Something in the rabbit-like appearance and demeanor of this poor excuse for an authority figure cried out for harassment.

She could not manage a classroom.  She couldn’t keep order, and she couldn’t stick to a lesson plan.  She wouldn’t call on students nor answer questions, because of many years of having the students provoke her with inappropriate or galling questions or statements.  Her most frequent in-class activity was to assign reading from the text-book, and then wander around the room, eyes darting to the left and right, muttering “shut up.  Shut up.” Under her breath, in her tense little voice.

I’d always assumed that she was talking to the numerous kids who talked and goofed around in class, not caring about anything they were supposed to be doing or learning.   In retrospect, maybe there were ethereal voices involved.

Anyway, This poor woman was persecuted mercilessly.  Like most frequent targets of bullies, I sympathized.  Also like most frequent targets of bullies, I kept my head down and enjoyed the relief of the attention being diverted elsewhere.  I didn’t participate, but I also didn’t speak up on behalf of this teacher.  Like any other prisoner of an institution, I was just there to do my time, and keep myself to myself.

Until one day.

I had opened my back-pack to take out the homework work were supposed to do for the class, and hand it in.  I’d brought my lunch to school that day, so that I could enjoy the outside-air and a cigarette by the lake rather than endure the cafeteria.

There was a school rule against having food in the classrooms.  Nobody paid much attention, but on this particular day, the neurotic bird woman of Home Economics decided to enforce this rule against me.  ME!  Who sat quietly and didn’t cause trouble.

Not against the boys who had placed a condom on the doorknob (a lubricated condom) of the classroom door.  They knew she never turned her back on the class, so when she reached out to open the door, she didn’t see that she was about to touch a slimy condom.  The bastards got a LOT of amusement out of the feverish hand-washing that ensued.  She didn’t go after the people who had threatened to kidnap and kill her cat, or the people that spit-wadded her whenever she walked down the hallway.

No.  She picked the person she knew she could harass without anyone objecting.

She snatched my lunch-bag out of the back-pack and “seized” it.  I wasn’t supposed to have food in the classroom, you know.  She took my lunch, and she wouldn’t give it back. 

That was it.  I became her worst enemy.  Even going so far as to create a shriveled paper-machet hand puppet which I dressed in a dowdy old doll dress, and took it out when doing a slide-show and bobbled it back and forth in  front of the screen, saying “shut up!  Shut-up!” in a very good imitation of her quavering voice.

I got detention for my escapades, unlike the cowards who harassed her in their sneaky way.  I think she was glad to have a target for her bile. 

The next year, the poor woman had to go on an extended “vacation”, from which she never returned.

I should feel bad about my part in her inability to handle her class, because I wasn’t helpful, and I didn’t “rise above” to be the better person when she chose me, of all people, to assert her bit of control in a world that was too big for her…

I should feel bad, but I don’t.  Is it enough that I feel a little bad about not feeling bad?

I guess I’ll just have to settle for knowing, intellectually, that I was wrong and working from that.  I’m not sure that that particular little bit of corruption in the heart is terribly tractable. 

There’s a few other things, I know, but the inspiration to write about them hasn’t struck at this particular time.  So stay tuned.  There might be another episode of “I’m not sorry.”

Anyone else have some “I’m not sorry” stories?

Feel free to be anonymous.