A Bat to the Face

The phrase, "a bat to the face" immediately brings to mind a violent confrontation, but when hearing it, people tend to forget that the word "bat" has more than one meaning.

I started my work week by getting hit in the face by a bat. To be more specific, I got hit in the eye by a bat, and it happened so quickly that I didn't even have time to close my eye. I'm talking about the small, fuzzy kind of bat, of course. It was most likely a Little Brown Bat, but one with a faulty navigation system. The experience was sort of like quickly petting a mouse with my eyeball.

The bat bounced off and kept right on going.

This happened at the beginning of week number three of the outdoor school season, a week that is now mostly behind me. For the second week in a row, I've been tasked with waking up 5 incontinent campers in the middle of the night. That's a lot of potential bed-wetters. I'd rather have to wake them up than have to clean them up though. It does, however, sometimes seem that, with each successive year, the kids become younger and more helpless, not to mention more medicated. There was a time in history when kids this age already had jobs. Not that I'm advocating suspension of child-labor laws or anything like that, but it's interesting to think about how completely different the modern childhood experience is from, say, that of children living a hundred years ago.

Currently listening to: Marco Serrado Gallato "Taaru"