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.