School Days

School Days

You wake up, your vision is foggy, your entire body feels like a huge slab of meat, freshly unthawed. You decide to get up; you feel the tension in your legs, then arms, and all the time, your back. The whole experience is very much like taking a step out of a hot shower, and then being thrown into artic water. You are finally up, and now your vision is clearing, and whatever mechanical beast you have next to you, screams its fatal cries, mournful and dying… annoying. After a brief ritualistic slaughter of the alarm clock, you walk to the kitchen, your sight is clear now, and your stomach, who was sleeping in late, finally wakes up. You consult your wristwatch, then you look at the stove, and sadly you sigh as you pick up something instant, or some other packaged cardboard, soaked in all natural chemicals, and then covered in realistic food textures. You then grab whatever books are in your bags, and haul them over your shoulder, as you trudge on to take part in consensual torture.

People who tell you that school was harder in their days are horribly mistaken. I guarantee you that while my great grandfather was rearing poultry, and going to school in his spare time, he never had to equate, with reference to Newton’s laws, the speed of a falling object, and henceforth its total impulse as it collides with the ground. Now maybe they refer to the way discipline used to be carried out in schools, with their big paddles, some of them sinisterly riddled so that it could be swung faster, and their sadist meter sticks which enjoyed seeing so many trifles go well punished. The meter sticks still exist, though we aren’t hit by them, it would be useless in comparison to how teachers now know to punish you: they never let you know. Yes, never knowing sounds great, but in practice, it is not. You don’t hand in a paper, you don’t get told off, the meter stick is saddened, and then one day a report card waltzes in and throws himself into one of your caring parent’s hands. Needless to say, your parents put on an amazing show of disgust and anger, if only popcorn was allowed, I would surly misbehave more often if it was.

School is for social interactions. You say good morning twenty times, and good bye twenty times, that’s 9600 ritualistic social interactions a year. You get to the point where you just grunt at the person and its understood that you are abbreviating “Hello! How are you my brilliant friend? I’m doing ever so well. Well, I had a lovely time chatting with you, but I simply must press on with all of my scholarly works. Farewell!” to “UGH.” Everyone has nothing better to do than to sit around, or wander aimlessly during the breaks, because, if you were to enjoy them a lot, you would die of boredom in the next class. Personally I choose to wander aimlessly, biding my time, in a complete trance, nothing in my mind, no thoughts, I have to prepare my brain for a massive influx of knowledge, and hope it survives the waves of knowledge pummeling it over and over. If knowledge was the ocean, then our brains are definitely sand castles, some are better fit for it than others, and they come in all different shapes: big ones with thick walls hoping walls keep it safe, then you have the very fragile ones, they will be the ones that have peaks and slopes, in such gradients and shapes that make you wonder why such a thing could be allowed to suffer any harm, and as the waves approach, they see the true beauty of a naïve mind, and they sigh back down the beach in resignation. Finally there are the Alcatraz style sand castles, which have moats, layers of walls, each thicker and more upright than the other, all aspects are uniform, even barbed wire fashioned from seaweed can be spotted on the tops of every wall, this is the logical mind, allowing in only what it wants, and pushing away everything else.

The tension rises as the last minute counts down. The atmosphere is so thick with this feeling of emergency, adrenaline courses through our bodies, as the time decays away. Like obedient soldiers in an army, we all have our equipment expertly stored away in order to act fast. The bell rings, and suddenly there is a sense of urgency, you have to leave as quick as you can. There is no good reason, but you will knock down people in your path to get out. It is very much like the soldiers on Normandy, escape from the “Classrooms/Transports” as fast as possible so that the machine gunners (which you can’t see, but you know exist) don’t gun you down before you have a chance to fight for your country. I think it is an instinctual response, ever since the stone ages man has been weary of the hidden machine gunners which could be anywhere. This is why men like guns, we want to be able to kill the machine gunner, who we know is out there, when we find him.

So you leave school, practice your sprinting, and your rugby at the same time, little kids flying off to the sides, school stuff strewn in your wake, you dive into the bus, and then you sit for a while and nothing really happens for another twenty minutes or so. Finally you get home, and you open your homework book to see what you have to do, and it refers you to the homework novel, which you spend half an hour reading all the assignments due for the next day, then you burn it, go on the internet, and find the brief summary of the book. Now that you have identified the work you must do, you have to get in the mood. Getting in the mood is real easy; first you dim down the lights a bit, then play something romantic on the stereo, bring out two glasses of wine, and then get the homework good and drunk so that it’ll be more open to suggestion. Actually what I like to do is use a montage; you play some music that’s fast and sounds sporty, then you cascade images of you doing work across the screen, and in every new image show a little improvement, at the end, you must be sure to fade out because it makes it seem like more time is going by when you do.

Finally it’s time to sleep. You did none of your homework, but you did get the papers doused in wine, which at that moment, which is most probably 2 in the morning, seems like a good thing for the papers to have gone through, and if you’re lucky the wine just might magically manifest itself into the correct answers on the page while you sleep. So you lie down and close your eyes, then you open them roughly 5 hours later. Re-read this about 365 times and you will have gone through the average life of a high school student.