Friday, January 25, 2008

Caffeinated at 11:23 PM. Did you expect it to make sense?

The gates of Hell are red. Well, reddish-orange.
When I enter those doors, that is, if I make it that far through the snow and ice of a Colorado winter, Satan manifests himself (herself, itself?) as an ominous black bubble camera recording my every movement, paranoid memorandums sent from an insecure principal to oppressed and underpaid teachers, and petty jockism.
You have to visualize these halls. Dank and gray. Actually they're white, with gray and red stripes. The point is, the atmosphere is dank and gray. The ceiling tiles help this effect; about half of them are disintegrating, becoming living organisms, probably some strange bio-terror science project of some mad scientist (Dr. Strangelove?) who is really running my school from the basement that none of us students knows exists (ah, the War Room). Another of his schemes is to test brainwave activity under freezing-cold conditions. I wear my huge pink ski jacket out of necessity, roaming the halls as a deformed pink marshmallow. Perhaps my disturbed scientist's real experiment is one in the psyche of high school students; how low will self-esteem levels get when students are subjected to extreme embarrassment, forced to galumph (I love that this is actually a word) through the halls?
Today I had a revelation. My school, is not a school. It might be cleverly, or not so cleverly, disguised as a learning institution, but it's not.
There is this class, a "Relationships" class, which seems to be very popular at Centauri High School this season. Let me explain. I walked into the bathroom one day and there was a girl wrapping something up in a blanket on the floor. Well, I was glad it was a girl because that meant I had entered the right restroom. Then I wondered what she was wrapping up. (okay, well my first reaction was curiosity for what might be in the blanket, I just added the other part in hindsight). Then I realized, she had killed a baby and was wrapping it up on the floor of the bathroom! Strange first conclusion, but it might be explained by the fact that babies aren't (or weren't, until recently) a common sight at my high school. But no, she had not killed the baby. The baby had never been alive. It was a doll. A demonic doll, one that cries and tries very hard to imitate a real baby and fails miserably. In part of the "Relationships" teacher's ploy to teach abstinence without actually, I think, telling girls about sex at all, she has managed to pass out these dolls to almost every girl in the school, except for me, of course. I doubt the babies are a very effective tool in teaching abstinence, because, much to my horror, most of the girls enjoy them very much. They are very good at annoying anyone at school who might actually want to learn anything without the elevator music of a baby's scream in the background.
So, I have concluded, my school is run by a Big Brother who is trying to control his pawns, the teachers, forcing them to become Thought Police. But what my school really is, beyond all this censorship and control, is a day care center.

Sorry for the length of this post. If anyone managed to read to the end of the rantings of this frustrated senior, here is your reward, a calculus pick-up line:
"I wish I was your derivative, so I could lie tangent to your curves."

2 comments:

Laura Kling said...

And that's all I could ever ask for. A calculus pick-up line.

The hallways at my school actually are just gray. No stripes. But there are some windows, so I guess that's nice.

Ana said...

no windows. it's a prison.