Good Night, Sweet GPA

Today I tried to put all my notes from the book 1984 (all right, or maybe the first 20 pages of part 1 of the book 1984) into my Reader's Journal, i.e. hand-write them into a notebook.

Screw you, you smiley, horrible "I'm done with my essay!" person.

So far I have 3/4 of a page of my notebook filled, and I am on page 9 of 337 (counting foreword and afterword). It's okay for me to be writing this post instead of doing work, however, because I have 33 minutes until I have to go drive for two hours! Yaaay, a reason not to do work!

Along with writing up my 1984 notes, I have to translate Latin into English. It's like doing the Necronomicon to raise zombies on the pages of a dictionary. And I have to do math. Fuck math. It's not like it was in 7th grade when it was easy to do. Now it's ABSOLUTE VALUES.

("Absolut Value" is the price of a bottle of Absolut vodka, according to the kid who sits next to me. You can use that on your next test, feel free.)

"Yeah, so like, you subtract the price of the beer bong from the price of the rum you spiked the punch with..."

But the real bad thing is the fact that while working, I have to listen to my freshman brother whine about writing a page-long essay that's a week late. I want to scream at him, "NO, YOUR HOMEWORK ISN'T HARD. LEAVE ME AND MY AP CLASSES ALONE, YOU NON-HONORS-TAKING WHINEY FUZZBALL." But I can't, because that's not polite.

"I HAVE TO USE MLA FORMAT? WHAT IS MLA? HOW DO I TYPE? HOW DID THIS GET HERE I AM NOT GOOD WITH COMPUTER"

Just listening to this makes me revert to being a six-year-old. Not in a good way, even if my six-year-old times mostly consisted of me writing songs about "horses everywhere" and "Bears are good nature!" (Not good-natured. Good. Nature. As in, "This is a good example of one part of an ecosystem and I would like to point out to you their significance in both the deciduous and coniferous forest biospheres.")

I used to have fun on the weekends.

But now, instead of writing happy songs about bears, the last song I had any part in writing (okay, so maybe I had no part in writing it, but I was in the group!) was a rap that was in the meter and rhyme scheme of the Aeneid, but about the Battle Of Actium. (My group got 100% on that project.)

At least we still get to use colored pencils.

Not the same as crayons, but almost as awesome.

The Chill Teacher

Teachers can be too strict. They can be absolutely batshit insane (I once had one who claimed that he liked to take out his rebreather (?) underwater and take naps, along with claiming that he had both lost 20 pounds and ate 30 chickens over Thanksgiving). But the teachers who're chill and cool with everything can't be too bad, right? No. No, the teachers that are too chill and relaxed are just as bad as the very strict teachers.

I think that to identify a Chill Teacher, you should look at their facial hair. They should have a beard, mustache, or a five o'clock shadow that betrays their attempt to grow a beard. They will also wear clothes from the sixties or earlier, or from the 90s and later. They will never touch the 70s or 80s, because anyone who does does not count as a Chill Teacher, but as a batshit crazy person.

Now, some of them must also be women, but I've never had one. Therefore my expertise on this area isn't exactly there, at all, whatsoever. So the Chill Teacher is, in my mind, Walt Whitman in that photo below. (I learned about him from a Chill Teacher.)

You can tell he is, because he has a cool beard.

The Chill Teacher that I've had was great for the first month. Everyone loved him. He was the best teacher- mostly because he never taught. Somehow it was considered an honors class, which I guess is how they can assume that we could teach ourselves from the book. Then, slowly, once he began to assign essays every other day.. We began to rebel and hate him.
He never graded those essays, the ones we worked so hard on. He lost them, he forgot to do them, and he gave us good grades only if he liked us. It slowly broke us down, and we dissolved from happy-go-lucky, adorable little sophomores into sobbing, stressed out, fury-filled almost-juniors.

The average American Studies student.

With the work ethic my schooling has given me, I'm going to stop writing now because I feel like this is enough to maaybe get me a low C if it was graded.

Good enough.

Yeah, whatever.

I Used To Be A Girl Scout

When I was little, I was a Girl Scout. You might think Girl Scouts are all about tying bows and ponytails and making crafts and gossiping.. And you'd be mostly right. In my experiences in Girl Scouting, there was also lots of screaming, arguing, competing over who sold the most Girl Scout Cookies (the Catholic girl who was the youngest of 8 always won), and getting injured. Our favorite pastime was shrieking that we actually sold fifteen more boxes than Mary Jane and that she was a lying meanieface who should have her Good Friend badge revoked. All in all, it was basically like high school drama, but with more crayons and less stoners.



Not like real life.



I particularly remember one lovely summer day that we were going up to a camp-out in the woods. I was ecstatic at the opportunity to rough it and live off the land- I could go fishing, I could hike around the woods and be a dashing, daring explorer... I was pretty excited. Everyone else seemed to be less so, and I didn't know why all the girls had brought bug spray and swatters shaped like butterflies. Sitting in the car, I was next to a nice little girl whose name I can't remember at all. She was more tolerant than anyone should be of the bouncing little girl with the bowl-cut who was shrieking that she wanted to meet a bear.

I did not get to meet my bear.

In fact, I did not even get to go on a hike, nor did I get to go one step outside except between the condo and the car.

My innocent little heart was shattered as soon as I got out of the only hockey mom in the troop's car and saw the white stucco-ed building with huge windows and an old sign reading “Girl Scouts” and then unintelligible words. We were staying there? We weren't going camping at all. I was angrier than a bull in a china shop- actually, no, that bull wouldn't be mad at all. I was angrier than Michele Bachmann at a Socialist Convention. I stomped my feet and declared that I wouldn't go one step further until I got to get into a tent and go camping for real.



You don't think this can be messed up? Not even by burning? You're wrong.



I got picked up and brought inside and chastised for disrupting the troop, when all I had been doing is preaching the truth to the poor mindless lemmings who were all right with sleeping inside on a nice comfortable set of bunk beds. I wanted to rough it, and I would rough it or I would die trying. I was still trying to set up my sleeping bag on the roughest part of the floor when I heard someone call that s'mores were being made. Being a pretty chubby little kid, that cheered me right up until I ran to the voice and saw the most evil act that may have ever been committed. Hitler would freeze and cringe in shame. Stalin's knees would knock and the Joker would have to avert his eyes.

The s'mores were sitting in the microwave, as right in view of the window was a campfire place absolutely radiating an air of “use me! Light fires, right here!”. The s'mores were in the microwave, and I was sitting inside in an air-conditioned condo, listening to my troop call it a campout and talk about how they were so excited they were really camping.

I think I threw a plastic cup at someone as I sounded my barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world. I was more intimidating than Reptar (or Godzilla, for those of you who had no childhood) to those poor troop leaders as I careened across the kitchen, decimating everything in my way and roaring the third-grade equivalents of obscenities at the top of my lungs. Needless to say, I was put in time out.

But sitting there and mumbling about how my individuality was being repressed, I looked out the window and discovered, to my delight, that sitting on the trash cans next to the door was a humongous racoon. This condo had a wall almost completely made up of windows, and so when I shrieked, “LOOK GUYS!! A RACCOON!” every last Girl Scout looked up and shrieked too. The difference was, I was happy and they were terrified.



How I saw the raccoon.



As I sat making cooing noises at the raccoon through the glass, I heard a huge crash and looked to see a wailing girl lying beside a knocked-over table, clutching her foot. She had apparently fallen backwards because of how scared she was of the very threatening small mammal behind panes of glass that really couldn't care less that she existed. Everyone started to fawn over her, and in an act of pure spite, I sat and talked to the raccoon for a few moments before running over and asking if she was okay.



How everyone else saw the raccoon.



She'd sprained her ankle.

At that point, I decided to quit Girl Scouts.

I still like these, though.