dead rat not ok

this morning i woke up and walked into my back garden to water my plants. it's lovely.... as i'm preparing to descend the steps towards my basement door to turn on the hose i spot it. "it" being a dead, decaying, fat, smelly, fly-coated dead rat. and if you don't know what a baltimore rat is like, it's not like your standard everyday "just scoop it up cus it's dead anyway" type of rat. these rats are rats of nihm-type rats. rats with neighborhood organizations and food co-ops and car pools. rats that weigh as much as your standard cats. rats that i have seen CHASING cats down the street. rats that are afraid of nothing... that saunter down the streets in broad daylight and heave their pulsating bellies onto the porches of unsuspecting home owners to get to the delicious bird food because SHIIIIIIIEEET, who is going to stop them? if i remember right, my response to seeing this rotting carcass/destroyer of my daisy-laden garden of delights was "ARE YOU SERIOUS?!" i think i yelled that for a couple of reasons: 1- i've got a dead fucking rat all up in my face. 2- i awoke last evening and had one of those oh-so-fun nighttime panic attacks. a panic attack that resulted in me hunched on all fours, watching some youvideo of a tibetan monk talking about how meditation helped him through panic attacks, then forcing proton to lay next to me so i could count his little heartbeats to try to calm down. it was a doozy.... and it's gotten to the point that i can feel them coming on... all day something was off... almost like all the frustration/emotional reeling/overwhelmingness of it all accumulates until BOOM. i wake up at 1:30 a.m. and feel like running across the street to wake up my neighbor friends to ask them if i can sleep at the foot of their bed because i'm just having a hard time. but as the monk said, learning how to make friends with these things, and not making them an enemy or something to be afraid of, is the best way to try to deal with them. i wish it was that easy to convince myself that these lovely adrenaline tsunamis are not the end of it all when i'm freaking out in my bed, trying to not think about my heart exploding or my lungs deciding to collapse.

and then there were my students today. i took them to the hopkins medical campus to see all the super fancy stuff.... peabody, the old hospital, the big jesus statue, STEM CELLS. yep. in an super surprise (for me, too) a researcher showed them pluripotent human stem cells derived from fibroblasts. AWESOME. and then on the way back to the hopkins shuttle, one of my quietest students is reading some bmore graffiti out loud. i hear him say "sucking di----wah?" then his face got red and i giggled very very hard with him and some other students. they also REALLY solidified their nerd status when many of them exclaimed "it smells like old books!" as they walked into the peabody library. they were so excited AND so upset that they couldn't get to most of the texts. same kid who saw the "sucking di--" explained how all he wanted to do was find an old copy of Dracula on one of the inaccessible upper levels and sit by a fire.

LOVE.