Do Teachers Get Depressed Too?

The other day I watched this movie about signs

it's this movie where Jessica Alba eats soap

except it’s not her it’s her character

and it’s when her character is 10 

and she’s played by Bailee Madison. 

And so she eats the soap because 

her dad gets really sick

and she makes a deal with the universe 

that she’ll give up everything that makes life worth living in exchange for his health

and while she’s eating the soap Jessica Alba is telling us in the narration

how the “more she liked something the more she needed to ruin it”

well not Jessica Alba it’s Mona, her name is Mona in the film

So I guess she just liked soap so much that she had to eat it

but see, the thing is

it’s nice to think about eating soap

it smells so silky and feels like fresh laundry

you want to have it, feel it slink down your esophagus 

like a spoonful of pudding

but you can’t do that 

because when you eat soap all you taste is bitter

that’s why it’s a flavor in the Jelly Belly Bertie Botts Every Flavor collection

it’s thoroughly disgusting, gross

in that, it’s not what you expect

Soap is not supposed to go in your mouth 

and when it does it does not make you feel clean

that is what mouthwash is for,

it makes the soap feel dirty and evil

I know because I tried it

but not because I thought it would make me feel clean

because I felt so extraordinarily dirty that I thought

“what would make me dirtier?”

and I took a bite out of the dish soap

It was my first Jessica Alba movie 

or at least the first one where I understood her as being Jessica Alba

She’s an elementary school math teacher and she hangs up an axe in her classroom

but she covers it with blue paint and these white cumulus clouds 

and really it’s fine because it just becomes the sky in the shape of the number 7 

until one of the girls in the class tries to slice another girl’s head open

then it’s an axe again 

despite it Mona is actually pretty good at her job

This other teacher is falling in love with her 

and her defense mechanism of choice is regression 

so she starts picking up her childhood habits along with her undeveloped logic 

and she’s 

eating soap again

but the kids are kinda digging her whole quirky thing

so it works out