aumsworld

School Spirit Blues

On which occasions are you graced with the sight of a hundred or so teenagers dressed in yellow hula skirts, red flower leis, cowboy's hats, suspenders, hot pants, and flaring miniskirts, bouncing up and down like Mexican jumping beans while yelling slogans that could have been written by a five-year-old kid? Why, on school spirits day, of course. Trust me, I know - we've had one today.

Someone ought to do something radical about the people who invented these things - I dunno, lock them in a medieval dungeon, make them tear out their own eyeballs and eat them, or, horror of horrors! lock them in a room full of the previously mentioned hysterical teenagers and have them get trampled and deafened by the frantic screams. Spirit days are one of the most kitschy, stupid, discriminating traditions of teenage pop culture. I have nothing against cheerleaders and sports teams and the likes - I mean, if they're having fun showing off their buff bodies by jumping up and down and screaming "Jason! Jason! He's the man! If he can't do it no one can!" or by running around a sports field wearing fake shoulders and throwing around an inflated piece of rubber no one could care less about, fine. Hey, it’s their life, not mine. But to have school spirit days - in which EVERYONE is supposed to join the collective hysteria, and in which outsiders are mercilessly excluded, persecuted, and made to sit in empty classrooms copying dictionary definitions during one endless hour, well, then, THAT’s not fair.

The worst part of it is that it’s actually so hypocrite. Teenage girls claim that they’re liberated, the guys’ equals, that they’re smart and proud and modest and so on, and then they go on to dress in skirts that wouldn’t even hide a ten-year-old’s ass while cheering for their oh-so-virile male classmates, giggling when the latter’s eyes lick over their exposed legs and breasts. Yeah. Rock on, feminism.

Besides, like exaggerated patriotism, it’s only prejudice disguised by a mask of fashionable hipness. These teens and teachers (yeah, the teachers participate too - where is this world leading us?) pretend they’re open-minded, and yet they hold the deep conviction that just because they go to such-and-such school, it makes them the coolest, smartest, hippest - in short, best - people in the entire world. Hm. Since when does the building in which you spend half of your invaluable days yawning, dozing, and staring out the window make you into what you are? Thank goodness Jean-Paul Sartre and his existentialists aren’t alive today - they’d tear their hair apart along with clumps of scalp at the sight of such ignominious nonsense. Not to mention Descartes: "I go to C... Secondary School, therefore I am." No wonder the days of philosophy are dead.

School spirit days are the plague of the modern world - the apocalypse of an endlessly boring existence - the scum of the world’s fifty-millions-or-so teenager’s minds. They’re society’s cancer, pop culture’s monster, every school’s closet skeleton. They’re…

Oh. Did I mention that Scary Movie’s the worst event ever to occur since the seventeenth century, ranking above World War 1, McDonald’s, and the Industrial Revolution? No? (Well, I guess I’ll have to keep that for next time… I've rambled long enough for today.)

‘Til then, so long.
Peace out, Aum

Beauty is in the eye of the beholden.