I normally try not to complain about the price of things like gas because it is a necessary expense and there isn't much I can do to pay less for it. But I just stopped on my way home to fill up and I was stunned that it cost me $39.58 to fill up my little car. When I bought this car two and a half years ago, it cost me between $20 and $25 to fill it up. Gas was around $2 or $2.50 a gallon here then if I remember correctly. And I had been driving an SUV so I was thrilled to get this little Scion that gets 30 - 35 mpg. What a treat!

I put a new bumper sticker on my car not long ago that says "WHEN BUSH TOOK OFFICE GAS WAS $1.46" but that isn't really true. Here where the cost of living is about the most affordable in the US, gas was 99 cents a gallon when Clinton was in office. I can still remember people freaking out when gas reached $2 a gallon here. And not long ago it passed $3 a gallon. I will be shocked if it isn't $4 a gallon by August.

I was listening to some obnoxious right wing radio show last night (sorry I turned on in the middle of the show and didn't get the guy's name) and he said one thing we forget when we complain about the price of gas is that a lot of middle income tax payers own stock in the oil companies and they are enjoying watching the price of gas go up. Well my mom was a big stock market player and she owned lots of oil company stock but I don't remember her ever rejoicing when the price of gas went up. I do know someone, though, who is a millionaire several times over, makes her money off of natural gas wells on her family property and she cheers every time the price of gas goes up. My mother used to say she felt sorry for the working poor who were barely surviving and didn't understand how they afforded to put gas in their cars. My mother was a liberal Democrat to the day she died. My friend is a lifelong Republican.

I feel selfish complaining. I had $39.58 today to fill up my car. What do the poor do? This city has shitty public transportation and you can't live and work here without a car. As I watch them come to school to pick up their kids, I can't help but notice they are driving older cars that don't get 30 mpg like mine does. How do they survive?

One of my students is an adorable little first grader. He came to class today with an automatic pencil and a little container of leads for it. My first thought was who in their right mind would give this little bundle of energy an automatic pencil to play with when he should be concentrating on learning to read. But he was so proud of that pencil. So I showed him how to replace the leads and helped him put his name on the pencil so no one else could pick it up and claim it when he laid it down. Then he sat down to work and stayed on task for longer than he normally does. (One of my goals for him is to stay on task for 5 minutes without being distracted. All year long I say to him "Has it been 5 minutes yet?" and he says no and gets back to work.) Well today he went way past 5 minutes and I was thinking well maybe that fancy pencil was all he needed, when he came up to me holding the pencil in pieces in his hand. Huge tears rolled down his face. I still don't know how it happened but his pencil was broken and he wanted tape to fix it. I tried to explain to him that it was beyond repair and he said "But my mom spent her last dollar on this pencil for me!" And I think that was probably true. His mom has 4 kids and is pregnant with number 5. They live right behind our school and have no phone and no car. One day when he got sick, the nurse had to walk him home because we had no way of contacting his mother.

So after I filled my car up today and was driving down the street cussing about the $39.58 it cost me I thought of him and his heartbreak over that broken pencil that cost a dollar. And I stopped at a store and bought him a new mechanical pencil. I hope his leads fit it.

I can't help but thinking how nice it would be if my biggest problem was a broken pencil. And the price of gas doesn't seem like such a huge problem anymore.