I'm a Mess

You would not believe the week month I’m having.

My first year of college was easy.  It’s easy to ignore homework.  It’s easy to avoid studying and pretend like you’ll do fine on the test anyway because you’re smart.  It’s easy to curl into a ball and/or crawl into a hole and hide from your problems when you realize that’s not actually how things work.  It’s easy to stare at your failing grades and pretend that as long as no one knows, they don’t exist.

It’s easy to say you’ll do better next time.

Then, sophomore year, I failed a class in my major because it was harder than I expected it to be.  It was as simple as that.  The second time around I passed it with an A because I knew what I was going into.  But I’m out of grade exclusions—I can’t fail any more classes because I disagree with the workload.

This semester, I’m trying.  I’m really trying.  I’ve spent hours upon hours at various libraries writing code in two different languages.  I met with my advisor and determined that I’m about a whole semester behind where I need to be, and I don’t know how it happened. 

I wrote a genre fiction story for a literary fiction class.  I learned the difference between genre fiction and literary fiction.  I have two projects due on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving break, and two presentations to give the next day.  I’m currently in Ohio, stealing away time from visiting my family to work on said projects (my cousins have faster internet then we do, so that’s a plus).

I had two tests last week that I did not study for (because I forgot, or didn't have time, or both) and probably did very poorly on, which is extra irritating because those classes are stupid easy and I should have A's in both of them.

I went three days with crippling stomach pain which made it difficult to do much of anything let alone finish the programming project I was working on.  And because that's not something you talk about to the guy you just met who wants to get this thing done as badly as you do, my partner probably thinks my face just exists in that contortion of pain.  Then I did a bad thing and googled my symptoms.  WebMD told me I had gastrointestinal bleeding.

One night last week I left my phone on a university bus and spent an hour chasing it around.  I did manage to recover my phone.  I survive on coffee and Chipotle’s steak burritos and guacamole (it’s good guacamole).

Sometimes I even sleep.

But I’m not failing anything.  I’m working really hard to pull a C out of my C (the programming language) class, but I’m not going to fail it.  I had a conversation with my fiction writing teacher about my passion for writing and she mentioned that perhaps I was in the wrong major, and for the first time I didn’t feel the urge to question the course I’ve chosen. 

I like computer science.  Through the downpour of awful C projects and deadlines sneaking up on me, there are still bright moments of exuberance when an algorithm I’ve been working on for hours begins to work correctly.  But I’ve accepted that I don’t have to love it all the time for it to be the right major.  I know that even if I chose to major in creative writing, there would be times when it would become laborious and dull and I would long for the cool logic of computer science.

So it’s not easier now.  It’s much, much harder.  But it’s better, I guess.  I am physically exhausted, and so sleep-deprived that I actually stepped into the sunlight one chilly afternoon and became genuinely concerned that my shadow extended far enough into the street to be hit by a car.  My shadow, you guys. 

But I no longer carry the debilitating guilt of knowing that I’m failing classes.  I am not plagued by the helplessness that comes from feeling like you can’t ask for help, and the dread that settles it when you know it’s too late.

I’ve traded one form of exhaustion for another, but at least this way I’ll graduate.

Paint a Bridge and Get Over It

My sister graduates in a few days, and we're having a party because surviving high school is a really big deal.  I'm painting these king-sized sheet backdrops to go along with the Japanese-garden-generally-Asian-probably-not-politically-correct-but-whatever theme of this shindig.  Two of them are fairly simple.  One is a silhouetted pagoda against a pink and orange sky, another is a tree and a sunset.  The third, however, wound up being far more detailed than the other two.  This is what it looks like:

I can't in good faith say that I'm not extremely proud of the way it turned out.  It took a ton of work, I think it looks great and I'm downright impressed with myself.  However, I can in good faith say that it has a ton of problems.  And those problems bother me every time I look at it.  So I'm going to share them with you guys, here, because I think it's good to be critical of yourself, and also because nobody else wants to hear it.

The problems I have with it are mostly perspective issues to do with the bridge.  This comes from the fact that I basically freehanded the bridge rather than basing it off of a specific photograph.  I looked at lots of photos to figure out roughly how a japanese bridge should look, but I never pulled out my ruler or anything like that to make sure it was geometrically logical.  And if anyone asks (no one will ask), I'm citing MC Escher as my inspiration.  The truth is the bridge is a mess.  Here's everything that's wrong with it:

Perspective is based on where the viewer is standing.  I'm not exactly sure where I put the viewer of my bridge, but I know that you could be, visually, in any of four places based on where the bridge seems to shift. 

1. Where the top rails appear to cross.
2. Where the far post is hidden completely by the near post.
3. Where the bottom rails appear to cross.
4. Where the underside of the bridge becomes visible.

In real life, all those things should happen along the same vertical line.  In Raz's Magical Paint Land, the rules of geometry are more like guidelines.  This brings me nicely to my next point:  If all of the far posts are to the left of their respective near posts, there should never be a point where the far post is hidden completely by the near one.  That just means my bridge is missing a far post:

See?  Right in the middle.

Also, if the far posts are to the left of the near posts, it means that the left edge of the posts should be visible (and therefore shaded), not the right edge, which I have shaded dark.  If you could see them, though, they would be dark, based on where I sort of arbitrarily decided my light source was.  So I got that right.  Yay.

Now, let's look at the slats that run horizontally along the bottom of the bridge:

The posts are supposedly right across from each other, this means they should line up with the same horizontal slat, like they do at (1) in the above image.  But by (2) the posts are quite obviously misaligned, and it gets worse as you proceed along the bridge.  This is because I drew the posts where I thought they sort of looked about right, then added the slats so that they, too looked about right, and noticed later that they did not look about right together.

Finally, I have issues with the horizon.  Because if there was any geometric planning I did it was to make sure my lines receded toward the horizon.  But when I did that, the horizon was about where the bushes meet the water (yellow line).

But making the water go all the way to the horizon made it look like the little stream opened up into some ocean (probably the Pacific, if we're in Japan), not a cute, intimate little pond in a garden.  So I put bushes there, instead.  Now, it looks like a pond.  When I did that, however, I inadvertently moved the horizon up quite a bit, so that now it's more where the white line is.  So it no longer makes sense for the far post to appear shorter than the near post, because it should appear closer to the horizon.  Now, my bridge is just crooked.

I like the moss on the water.  I like the reflection of the rocks.  I like the way the leaves in the background look where the light comes through from behind.  I even like the bushes, despite the fact that they ruined my horizon.  But the bridge and I are still not on speaking terms.  But hashing all of this out felt really good.

Figuring Feminism

I'm continually surprised how many people shy away from the term "feminist."  Many men think that you have to be a woman to be a feminist.  And an alarming number of women are hung up on the bewildering notion that femininity precludes feminism.  Others believe that to be a feminist you must hate men, or at least believe that they are inferior to women.  Still others find the term to be archaic, and that now that women have the right to vote and to file for divorce, that the word has no practical application anymore.

image from alicepaul.org

Alice Paul:  Feminist

After one American History course, I decided I was a feminist.  I’d read the stories of women at the turn of the century fighting for equal rights and was inspired by them.  I’d immersed myself in the debate between tradition and equality and which was “better” for women as a population.  I couldn’t have fathomed how far from complete my knowledge of modern feminism was, but I had been undeniably inspired by these feminist historical figures, so surely I was a feminist as well?

When it came time to choose my classes this semester, I wanted to make sure I had enough hours that I could drop any course if things started to go downhill.  I needed three more hours.  I needed a humanities course.  Enter Intro to Women’s and Gender Studies, stage left.

As long as I’m holding the honesty stick, I never considered Women’s Studies a “real” major.  I’m a computer science student (as most of you know), following, despite my valiant efforts, in my mother’s footsteps.  And when family and friends would ask me what classes I was taking, Gender Studies was always accompanied by the rider, “I know, but I needed an elective.”

It wasn’t that I didn’t expect to enjoy the course.  If that had been the case, I would have picked something different.  I thought I would just quietly show up every week, enjoy, learn, get a good grade, and get on with college.  But I soon realized that there was no way to leave the class in the classroom return to the (metaphorically) quiet existence I’d been leading.  This information was not only important but also urgent.  I could no longer sit idly by while someone said “man up” to someone else, or while the word “girly” got tossed around like an insult.  These people needed to have their eyes opened!  They needed to be made to realize the implications of the things they were saying! 

Basically, I’d been bit.

image from Wikipedia

I spend about as much time cavorting with fictional characters as I do with real people, so the context in which most of this information really hit home for me was media representations of gender.  For example, Katniss Everdeen (from the Hunger Games) is cited again and again as a strong female protagonist and role model for young women (especially when contrasted with Twilight’s Bella Swan, but if any undead horse has been beaten enough, it’s that one).  But I was (like others) frustrated by the presence of a love triangle in the story.  I thought, Couldn’t we have just one story where the heroine stands on her own without being dragged down by romantic tension?  Don’t we see all sorts of stories where the male hero saves the day without love getting in the way?

Then I realized that “save the world, get the girl” was easily just as common a trope for male protagonists.  So the question I’d been missing was:  Why does a romantic subplot weaken a female protagonist, while it doesn’t have the same effect on a male hero?  If the men and women in fiction were truly equal, there wouldn’t be a difference, but we as a culture are still having trouble separating women from the dependent or inferior role in a relationship.  So when we see a strong woman with a strong man, we groan and roll our eyes and say “not again.”

If we change gears dramatically and look at the show America’s Next Top Model (yes, okay?  I watch it sometimes.  Usually the photo shoots and runway shows outweigh Tyra’s vacuous monologues), we find a gold mine of media messages relating to body image.  And while the show makes an effort to include women of various races and body types, it takes the liberty of labeling “plus size” models as “real women” (or “fiercely real” as I recall the exact phrasing in one season).  

Unfortunately, this trend is not limited to inane avenues as Top Model.  “Large” or “curvy” women being are repeatedly labeled as “real” in an effort to combat the fad of girls starving themselves in pursuit of beauty.  This is taking one step forward and two steps back.  The day we realize that beauty is subjective and that no body type is more “real” than any other will be a beautiful day indeed.

A problem a lot of people have with feminism is that it flies in the face of chivalry.  I would argue that it is, in fact, chivalry that flies in the face of feminism.  And many who feel that chivalry is simply courtesy are misrepresenting the two as synonyms.  They are not.  The World English Dictionary defines “chivalry” in this way: 

1. the combination of qualities expected of an ideal knight, esp courage, honour, justice, and a readiness to help the weak 
2. courteous behaviour, esp towards women

This draws a troubling parallel between women and weakness.  Why can’t we hold the door open for our fellow human beings?  Why does it have to be a gendered act at all?

I saw this picture a while ago on Facebook:   

The response looked something like this:

At first I was outraged.  It took a long time, but I eventually realized that this rebuttal is entirely fair.  If women are going to hold men to an archaic standard, then those men have the right to remind those women what the equivalent standard is.  The bottom line is that we should hold car doors for people and we should make sandwiches for people, but not because we're expected to because of our gender.  Just because it's a nice thing to do.

I've learned that trying to define feminism is like trying to solve a problem like Maria.  You kind of just have to stand back and let it do its thing.  Because beyond "gender equality," the goals of feminism are fractured and inconsistent.  Because feminism isn't a wave; it's a whirlpool.

Recently, I was again asked about my courses this semester.  Here it was—the chance to redeem myself.  I listed my classes, finished with Gender Studies, and I left off the disclaimer.  But my inquisitor scoffed.  "Let me help you," he said with an dramatic roll of his eyes.  "'Men are bad.'  There.   Done."  The rest of the dinner table looked at him fearfully, knowing that he did not realize what he'd stepped in.  I smiled.  I smiled because I knew that for a long time there would be people like him that were confused.  I smiled and I explained to him how he was mistaken.  

The sigh of relief from everyone else at the table was audible.  It was about that time that a third person jumped into the conversation with a wildly sexist accusation and things descended into chaos and anarchy.  What can I say?  I get worked up.  But the bottom line is this:  if you believe that women are not inferior to men, you are a feminist by definition.  Whether or not you decide to take up the banner and solve the rest of the world's ignorance is up to you.  But it's one of those things that's difficult to un-know.  As corny as it sounds to say that my eyes were opened by my Gender Studies class, there's truth to it.  And even as my understanding of feminism continues to grow, perhaps the greatest understanding is that I can never know all of it.  It's moving too fast.  Growing too quickly.  And it's too late to stop it now.  It's a like a horrific genetic experiment that's escaped the lab and is mowing down every sexist moron in its wake.  But... you know... a good horrific genetic experiment... You get the idea.

"Feminism" continues to be an inflammatory, divisive, controversial word.  Curiously, "equality" doesn't have nearly the capacity for starting arguments that "feminism" does.  This proves that the issue is largely one of vocabulary, not bigotry.  This is our first hurdle as a society.  We need not simply to leap over it as individuals, but pick it up and remove it from the track so that no one trips over it behind us.

I Work Out

Special thanks to my sister for taking this (amazing) photo!

Recently, in an effort to become the best possible version of myself, manage my struggles in a productive and positive way, and mostly to fit into last year's shorts, I decided I needed to work out.

About five years ago, I had a fairly regular workout routine.  I would go to the gym once a week, and while I don't know that I was ever working particularly hard, I was also growing a lot and was just more physically active in general.  It was effective enough.  Since then, things had slowly been going downhill.  When marching band season would roll around, I would get reasonably in shape.  I would go to the gym just often enough to quell my mom's threats to cancel my membership.  I liked the idea of being physical and healthy better than actually putting it into practice.

It's not that I have an aversion to physical activity, it's just that I really love good food.  And maybe some not so good food as well.  The problem with living in a first world country is that there's usually an abundance of good food available for me to stuff into my face.  Plus, my sister, who is supermodel skinny and has concerning affinities for cheese, chocolate, and steak (usually not at the same time), only ever works out when forced, and never gains any weight.  She's not exactly the best motivation for getting off the couch.  She just makes me angry that I don't also magically look like that.

So I've discovered that I really love granola, yogurt, and yogurt with granola in it.  I'm also a big fan of fruit and fresh veggies.  It's not necessarily a chore to eat healthy; it's a chore to avoid eating everything else.  I am usually an equal-opportunity eater.  I don't like to discriminate against a food just because of its fat content.  That's just unfair.

But I've learned a valuable lesson in the past couple of weeks.  Perhaps it was something of which I was always aware, but never really found application for until now.  Whenever a tasty and gloriously unhealthy something enters the house, all I have to do is debate eating it for a day or two, and my 12-year-old brother will usually have consumed all of it before I can decide that I really did want some and decend upon the sugary morsel of goodness in question like a swarm of locusts.  It's working so far, except that when my brother has finished devouring all of the sugar in the pantry, he turns his preteen appetite on my granola bars.  There will be a throwdown one of these days, and since I'm basically ripped now, he won't stand a chance.

Up in Flames

Oh, the irony!

Let's get something straight.  Kindles are not books. Books have pages. Real ones. Made of paper. Each one is different, an individual facet of the book's personality. Some of them might be crinkled or folded, the covers are probably worn and torn a little. The spine or binding is almost certainly destroyed, depending on how gentle a reader you are, but when you look at that book, you remember reading it, or lending it to your friend, or finding it under your bed. You remember the story, because that story is the only story inside that book. And when you open the cover and flip through the pages, the smell hits you and whether it's a new book or old book smell, or whether it just smells like mildew, it's the best smell in the world.

What does a kindle smell like? Plastic.

Kindles are cold, heartless, lousy impersonations of books. They lack personality and individuality. I know that the words are the same no matter how you read them. The experience is not. Haven't we let technology encroach upon enough of our lives? I am especially disappointed with the success of this invention because I had faith in my fellow readers. I imagined us standing strong, defying Kindles and all of their disrespect because we would never sacrifice the experience of reading a book. A real book. We, I thought, would halt this attack on our reader's integrity.

But I've been abandoned. I stand, seemingly alone against this massacre of books. Borders is bankrupt. The one near my house has closed and been replaced by a glorified flea market. I will not buy a kindle.

Ray Bradbury couldn't have been more right.  No, we're not literally lighting up books and watching them burn, but I mean come on; it's called a Kindle for Pete's sake!  And it gets better.  Do you know what the latest installment of this irreverent little machine has been dubbed?  The Kindle Fire.  

The Kindle FIRE.

If the comparison felt forced before, it sure doesn't now.  Bradbury himself said, "You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture.  Just get people to stop reading them."  Well, Bradbury, people are not reading books anymore.  They're reading screens.

So if I am solitary in my resistance, so be it.  I shall not be moved.

Tough As Nails

Painting my nails is not something I do. Maybe that's because of the ineptitude of my left hand to do anything other than shave my right armpit; I don't know. I can ocassionally be threatened into painting my toenails, but my fingernails have not been painted in years. So the nail salon on the day before graduation was very much not my idea.

For a significant amount of time after I learned about these plans to beautify me, I was firmly resolved not to go.  Every once in a while I get deluded into thinking I'm actually in charge of my own life.  Then I tried bargaining.  I said I would go without a fuss if I could get black nail polish.  I'm not goth, but mourning the death of my free will would have called for such gloomy glamour.  The answer was no.  I therefore felt justified in protesting vociferously all the way there.

When we got there, I decided if I couldn't have black, I would pick something blue.  And it was going to be the absolute darkest shade of blue I could find.  There was a large collection of nail polish on the wall near the entrance, containing approximately fifty thousand shades of red, twenty-five thousand shades of purple, and three and a half shades of blue, and a rather curious assortment of colors I don't even think I've ever seen before.  I ran through several and actually briefly considered an electric green color that resembled toxic waste before settling for a very normal-looking navy.

I won't lie; the massage chair was nice.  The feeling of luxury ended when my feet were removed from the agreeable little gurgling tub and sanded down violently until they were smooth.  It was mildly concerning whenever the lady would disappear and then return with a misterious pink goo and rub it all over my legs and feet, which happened more than once. And as much as I enjoy having my feet tickled while listening to the plotting of my demise in a language I don't understand, I do actually use the bottoms of my feet occasionally and would have preferred to keep them.

I was also apparently not supposed to pick the same color for my fingers and toes, because the lady seemed really confused that she only had one bottle of polish to work with.  While my toenails--or what was left of them--were drying, I was given a little dish to put my fingers in, and then it was fingernail time.  She clipped them, along with most of the surrounding skin, and then painted them navy.  Never have I felt like I have such inadequate extremities.  My mother and sister certainly did not require the amount of work I did.  And I guess I was in the massage chair for too long, because every ten minutes or so it would cut off.  It wasn't hard to press the button to restart it while I was having feet pruned, but with a fresh coat of poison on my hands, it was a good bit more difficult.

When I was finally done, before I could be relocated to the drying station, my feet were slathered with something resembling vaseline and then shoved in my new flip flops.  My new flip flops!  I mean, I guess I waived rights to my feet but my shoes?!  They didn't need to be moisturized!

I wound up having to leave before my nails were completely dry because the appointment had taken much longer than anticipated and I had graduation rehearsal to get to.  I guess I was prettier, mostly I just felt like I had a lot less skin than I started with.

Rules and Regulations

I just spent about forty-five minutes in English class--and about fifteen earlier in history--learning how to properly format an MLA style research paper. It felt like four years, although in that length of time I probably would have finished my doodle of Percy Jackson (which reminds me: I need to post a list of all the fabulous books I have been reading lately). The biggest thing I took away from the lesson was a renewed appreciation for blogging and other informal, non-structured types of writing. I understood suddenly (although I've no idea why it took me this long) why pretty much everyone else hates writing. They only write when they have to, and when they have to, it's miserable!

Blogging is good. In my blog, I can write however I want, about whatever I want, and it will be whatever spacing I want it to be. I don't have to worry about how I'm going to format my works cited page when I've finished this post. I can use the word "I" if I want to. I can use the words "you," and "your," and "our," and "we." I can have as many or as few paragraphs as I want, and I can block them off like this instead of having to worry about whether to indent them using the tab key or by pressing the space bar five times! I don't have to have a thesis statement at the end of my introductory paragraph. In fact, I don't even have to have and introductory paragraph! I can just jump right into it! I can use exclamation points as often as I like and use as many as I want at a time!!! And question marks: why use one when you can use three???

I don't have to worry about whether every single sentence I write supports, either directly or indirectly, my thesis statement! I can have random, ridiculous sentences that relate to nothing in the middle of a paragraph. Samuel Morse invented the telegraph. Writing is an art, not a science, no matter what you're writing about. I think (also a phrase I'm not supposed to use) more people would enjoy writing if it wasn't so structured all the time. Remember being children, when the best games were the ones you made up as you went along?

Now, just so we're clear, a word on proofreading and revising (my history teacher told us today not to start paragraphs this way): Proofreading is almost always good. In fact, I'm having a hard time coming up with an example of when proofreading isn't good, so I'm just going to go ahead and say it's always good. Proofreading is going back over what you've written and making sure you haven't made any embarrassing mistakes that will make others question your command of the English language. For example, I just tried to spell "embarrassing" with only one "r," but Firefox gently informed me that it was incorrect with a little red line underneath it (which I personally prefer to Word's Auto-Correct assaults). I'm glad I went back and changed the spelling because a mistake like that would have been very embarassing indeed.

Revising is like proofreading for structure. This is also good because it helps you make sure that whatever piece of writing you're working on is as good as it can be. That doesn't mean making drastic stylistic changes to fit some arbitrary style of formatting. It means moving words, sentences, and even paragraphs around so that your audience may understand you more clearly. I, admittedly, don't do much of this on my blog as I tend to simply spew whatever is in my mind into the little post box in whatever order it happens to come out.

I'm the editor of my school newspaper. I may have already told you that, but I'm too lazy to go back and check. If I have, I apologize, I am not telling you again to toot my own horn, I promise I am getting ready to make a point. Here comes my point: Editing is good. I would sooner have many horrible things happen to me than let some of the stories I've seen go to press unedited. I even have to correct according to style a lot of times, because it is a newspaper and it is better if everything is consistent, writing-wise, throughout. Still, I prefer writing and editing for the newspaper to even thinking about this MLA-style essay. Maybe it's because the AP (Associated Press) style is far more practical, IMHO (ooh, an acronym, those are super-extra not allowed), than MLA. But that could just be me. I wonder if the world would explode if we just let everybody write his graduation project paper how he pleases, without having to worry about whether his in-text citations are formatted properly.

Dress to Impress

Lately, I've been trying to find a prom dress.

That doesn't sound nearly as difficult as it is. I could have said "Lately, I've been whacking bee hives for the sport of it," and given a much more accurate description of the problems this is causing me. But then you would have pictured me valiantly wielding a stick of some nature, moronically but heroically battling bees. Dress shopping has yet to become that exciting.

Here's what really happens: I walk into a store and immediately decide that I don't like anything. Then I pick out one or two dresses and carry them around awkwardly while my mother (and/or anyone else who is with me) picks out five or six and hands them to me as well. After about ten minutes, I am not even visible anymore, and what finally squeezes into the dressing room more closely resembles a large, expensive pile of tulle and organza than a human. (Also, I now know what words like "tulle" and "organza" mean. I've become at least 2.7% fancier since I started this adventure.) I usually wind up hating everything or falling head-over-high-heels in love with the one that is so expensive there is no way I can get it and go to college. I hate prioritizing.

Due to the difficulty of shopping in real stores, I turned to the magical world of the Internet where anything is possible. Except, apparently, finding a dress. No, I take that back. I found a ton of dresses online. Several of them were even reasonably priced. But it's never that easy.

It's always a little sketchy when the return policy is written in broken English. Apparently at least half of the dress websites out there are owned and operated by the same company in China. They are able to sell dresses for less because they make each dress the way you order it: your size, your color, everything. A cheap, custom made dress exactly for me? Why, thank you. Wait, what do you mean I can't try it on and decide if I like it?! No, I have to look at the picture on the computer and decide, once and for all, that I want the dress, because once they send it to me, it's mine and I probably couldn't pay them to take it back, according to the return policy (but they might have just meant I couldn't get a refund--there's really no way to be sure). Thanks, China Wholesale.

I started looking on other, more expensive, non-Chinese websites. I'm constantly reminded that I'm fighting this year's "prom style," which is clearly straight, print dresses. I've probably waded through hundreds of pages of these dresses looking for what I'm interested in. I'm not even exaggerating. Hundreds.

Let me tell you, trying to be true to your personality when dress shopping is a mistake. Conform. Go with the flow. Surrender individuality. It will be okay; you will still have a soul when it's over. At this point, I've invested too much blood, sweat and tears to give up, but if you are reading this in time, save yourself. Really.

Another Brick in the Wall

I'm feeling rather disenchanted with school today. It started in first period, and each class after that built up a wave of apathy and depression and just general all-around misery that overcame me. Nothing matters anymore.

Grades are just about the worst thing that ever happened to adolescents. Tell us we're all equal, and then score the value of our brains--our thoughts, opinions, ideas--with a number. If your number is lower than that of the kid at the desk next to you, you're not as good as that kid. You are not worth as much as that kid. You may as well crawl into a corner and cry, because unless you manage to raise your number--your grade--next to that kid, you are dirt. That's what the school would have you believe. Sorry, not buying it.

I'm not usually like this. Okay, maybe I'm always a little cynical, but I'm not usually this bad. I am even capable of realizing the fact that this will probably wear off as soon as tomorrow, but right now, I can't make myself care.

When lunch was drawing to a close, my friend asked me, "What time do we get out of here?" I'm pretty sure he just wanted to know what time lunch ended.

I dejectedly replied, "Never. Not really." The face he gave me was pretty great, but it only slightly improved my mood.

I'm so over high school. I was over high school years ago, but it didn't matter then. Now, I'm really done. I do homework, and it doesn't matter. I don't do homework, and it does matter. I'm tired of playing this ridiculous game. Why do I have to try to achieve some ridiculous score? Grade school is like a bad arcade game that stopped being fun ten years ago but you're not allowed to stop playing until you graduate. Actually, you're allowed to stop playing before that, but then they point at you and shake their heads and tell you that you have no future, and they throw numbers in your face about how hard it is to get a job as a high school dropout. What they don't tell you is that if you hated high school enough to leave, you'd probably hate the jobs they use to get those numbers, too.

I'm not thinking about dropping out. Like I said, I'm just at a teenage emotional low right now. I understand the value of a good education. I love learning. I never want to stop learning. I just want to be done with high school.

Tales From the People Aquarium

I work at a movie theater. More than that, because of my prowess and good-looks, I am usually (and by "usually," I mean "almost always") placed in the box office. For all of you non-theater-savvy folks, that's the place where you buy your tickets. It's separated from the rest of the theater, and I often work alone. In fact, the most accurate description I've heard is "people aquarium," indicative of the wide, tall windows that comprise the front half of the room. It's true. But the manager that termed it that had it backward. I'm not the one in the aquarium. Everyone outside is. I'm surrounded by windows, but people rarely see me until they need movie tickets. Sometimes, they don't even see me then.

I sound like a sad, lonely kid. I'm not. The reality is that while I am sometimes lonely and a lot of the employees that work the box office often suffer from several varieties of cabin fever, most of the time the entertainment that I get paid to enjoy is better than the movies I sell tickets for. Working has taught me many important life lessons. Among them are: people are morons, people are funny, and people are morons.

The only thing that links my tiny world with the outside one is a speaker/microphone and the little window at the bottom. The microphone is extremely sensitive. It's odd because it's not assaultingly loud when people are near it, but I can clearly hear conversations taking place halfway across the parking lot. I feel like a spy. Do you know how many arguments, evening plans, and breakups I've eavesdropped on? At this point, I know so much someone should be after me.

On an alarming number of occasions, I thank heaven for the plexiglass barrier between the customers and me. You'd be surprised how intrusive it feels when their hands come too far through the window. Stay on your side people. My side, your side. My side... Your side. See? It's easy.

I wear a nametag. For some reason, the public seems to think this entitles them to call me by my name. I am not your friend, I do not want to be your friend, and I'm pretty sure I don't like you. Don't use my name.

I can't believe I have to explain this one, but the box office is NOT where you order popcorn and drinks. Yes, someone actually did this. (Insert long, drawn out, heavy sigh here.) Honestly? Where am I going to get a large popcorn from, lady? Do you think it will come buzzing out of the ticket-printer? Or am I supposed to get it from the apparently infinite chasm below the counter?

There's one more thing you should know before attempting to go to the movies. We do not sell marine mammals at the movie theater. The word is matinee, not manitee. And it's pronounced mat-in-ay.

I often leave work seriously worried about the world. I don't know how it doesn't collapse in on itself, really. It seems like we ought to stupid-proof the earth the same way we child-proof our homes. But I realize we have. That's why we have movie theaters. Let's all sit in a big room for a while and quietly watch a movie. That's at least an hour and a half that they can't be out there breaking things. Here, have some candy. And I musn't forget the expected greeting (to which the majority of the aforementioned geniuses perfunctorily reply "you too"): Enjoy your movie! :)