My words will someday rule the world. Today, I'll have to settle for just Roslyn High School.

Out of complete avoidance of other duties, I have decided to post my upcoming column in the Roslyn High School newspaper called the Hilltop Beacon (because, it is so important to know that the name of my high school's newspaper is based on our location on a hill). I guess this is like a pre-release special edition of my column. I might as well also post the column that was too risque (obsessed with post-structuralism) for publication. That'll be soon. Perhaps. And I'm Brian Sherwin. I probably don't have to tell you that...but I feel obligated to do so. What? I have no idea what I am saying anymore. I'll stop and let a previous self speak for this present gnarled and mangled self.

The Skeptic

Boring, boring mundane, and boring mundane….it’s all so boring!!! That thought usually swirls around the coffee in my mind like a dissolving creamer. I need caffeine. I don’t drink coffee. But this type of thought progression probably occurs in your head constantly during school. Wake up! The revolution against boredom begins with you. Students of the world unite! All you have to lose is your chains! WAIT! Before you proceed to run into the streets with hammers and sickles and confetti and balloons and Happy Jewish New Year, read this article. I have a permanent solution to boredom: a keg of absurdity, a bottle of creativity, and a shot of freedom.

During the sixties sexual revolution, a few UC Berkeley students organized a free speech movement. The UC Berkeley administration banned political activities: getting signatures for speeches, recruiting activists, and handing out pamphlets, and students of the free speech movement protested to force the administration to remove the ban. Mario Salvio, of the free speech movement, released these words from the bowels of his soul in a speech to students participating in a sit-in, “Here is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!” Boredom is the machine. If “the machine” has” made us “so sick at heart,” then we must act absurdly to “make it stop.” We live in a gray fortress of sameness and wear gray everyday. I run the ticket booth to the catapult, and you have to light yourself on fire and be dressed in a florescent pink jumpsuit to get launched over.

Back at Berkeley in 2002, artist Jonathon Keats, who copyrighted his mind and sold his thoughts that he had while staring at a nude female, attempted to get Aristotle’s law of logic passed as a law. Aristotle’s law of logic just says that each thing equals itself. The newspaper that you are reading equals itself. If you don’t understand, then just ask me. Keats claims that attempting to get the law passed was an artistic endeavor that questions the processes of the legal system and the reasons we pass certain laws and follow them. No one would have actually been able to break this law. Why do we break laws? If there’s a law that can’t be broken, then what is the purpose of it? If no one ever broke any of the laws, then would it be necessary to have laws? Without humans, would there be laws? Natural laws - are there natural laws without humans? We have legal laws, why do we need societal laws? Why must we wear shoes in public?

Keats and Salvio broke away from the confines of boredom. They acted creatively and absurdly in order to transform reality into an interesting place to live. First, I have a minor and practical suggestion. English teachers should give the option to students to choose their own summer reading books. There should also be more creative writing in class. I applaud the A.P English Literature teachers for setting aside time for journal writing. All grades and levels of English should do so also.

The imagination is the most immediate escape from boredom. Creativity, absurdity, and the imagination can lead you to personal freedom. Scribble insanities on your binders, paint like a kindergartner, CREATE! CREATE! CREATE! All you need is pen and a piece of paper. You don’t even need a pen and a piece of paper. You’ve got your mind; you don’t need a copyright to own it. The theater is closed.

The Answer to Life: Not Bagels, Not 42, but

...muffcakes. Yes, it's the truth. There's been a lot of cluttering going on in my mind lately, what with the college application frenzy and this stupid blob of busyness called school (oh! disconsolate soul! why this uncertainty?), but in spite of all this there's always been one thing I invariably come back to, and that thing is the essence of muffcake. And so the war continues...

I'm missing my pep rally this year, but it'll be okay.

Our Homecoming theme is the best.

"Tigers: The Ultimate Superheroes."

What's yours?
I mean, I think my school's still going to win Most Awesome Spirit Theme Ever, but I'm curious.

This post was sponsored by the letter H

This is about an issue that we are all aware of. It's something we never want to admit, but we all know it's there, like the big-foreheaded elephant in the room. Why Hufflepuff? Why did J.K. even bother with such a useless House as Hufflepuff?

There are obvious reasons for the other three Houses: Gryffindor is for the jocks, the cheerleaders that bang them after the game (and if anyone's thinking that Hermione doesn't count, check out page 625 of the Deathly Hallows, US edition), and the honor students. Slytherin's got all the slutty goth chicks and the obnoxious legacies. And Ravenclaw, obviously, is where the annoying genius-brats go to play. So what's left? Special Ed. A quick breakdown of Hufflepuff ought to clarify the point:

Who's in Hufflepuff? Let's be honest. The only thing Hufflepuff ever had going for it was Cedric Diggory, and he died. The most anticlimactic death 'til the Deathly Hallows, Cedric Diggory, hero of Hufflepuff, went out like a chump. Other than that, you've got a few pathetic no-names that the Gryffindor's go to hang out with to get service credit.

And really? C'mon. The Hufflepuff common room is next to the freakin' kitchen. How much more obvious can it be? The connection to house elves is so painfully obvious. The Hufflepuffs are the ones that the rest of the school is ashamed to show in public. It should have been S.P.H.W. So let's imagine the Hufflepuff common room. I see big, round walls, with no sharp edges. It's furnished with bean bags and big foamy couches, so no one can get hurt. Scissors are strictly banned, and only organic paste is allowed. And being next to the kitchen serves a double purpose. Not only does it keep the retards out of sight, it allows for central heating without dangerous fireplaces for some downie to fall into. And not to be insulting, but their Head of House is a gardener. And their mascot is a badger. Strong and hardworking? Yeah, so were Neanderthals.

Anyway, it's time to get to the point. Helga Hufflepuff ought to be remembered in the same breath as greats like Woodrow Wilson and Margaret Sanger. There are some people that we want to succeed, and others we don't. Some people just aren't cut out to contribute to the gene pool. Helga Hufflepuff recognized this, and she wasn't afraid to say it. We can't let these people keep procreating recklessly, or we'll just get more of them. So we must segregate. Brand them with the bright letter H.

Intellectual Elitism, the Horrors of

Today I...

Spied on the sunset (yolkishly pale, a bit sad and half eaten),

Felt particularly Amazonian and ordered Fear and Trembling, Paradise Lost, and Pale Fire (hands down the best $25 I’ve spent since that outrageously medieval Shakespeare book),

Listened to snippets of “Hey Jude” waltz across feverishly in my brain,

Tried to read Ulysses amidst all this commotion,

Passed by a car station called Butler Tire and—well, guess who came to mind?

Wore my shirt inside out,

Did not toil away meticulously on college applications,

Searched “Foucault”, “Judith Butler”, “Derrida”, et cetera, on YouTube and was pleasantly surprised (Why, they’re all so endearing! Neanderthals, the rest of us),

Dreamt something insane that Freud would not understand (well not really, since I’ve forgotten everything, but all the same I have a feeling it was pretty baffling),

Wrote a silly poem about some extinct bug (a natural symptom of lethargy, I'm told),

Sketched a shoe,

Checked this Blog,

And, as always, am missing everyone. There are unconditionals in this world, I’m telling you!

WCS: Where Children Succeed

So today was my first day back at Wilson Central School, a tiny public high school in the middle-of-nowhere part of Western New York. People bring cowbells to graduation and ring them when their son or daughter walks across the stage; no one is embarrassed by this.

We've been ranked the top school in the county a number of times in a row, based upon our scores on standardized tests. To reiterate: "based upon our scores on standardized tests." It's beautiful, in a sick sort of way. Every year, I am filled with the same mixture of awe and disgust that I get when one of my friends talks about his "system" for choosing horses at the OTB. Our principal has found a way to break the school ranking system, discovered the magic formula to produce the highest test scores without sacrificing the sports budget. The man is a genius, really.

The goal high schools are supposed to work towards, according to No Child Left Behind, the whole sick state/federal funding scheme, and independent rankings is high test scores on NYS Regent's exams. This is the end goal, the logical conclusion of the groundwork laid by state and federal agencies. Most schools still like to pretend that "education," "personal growth," "achievement," and so forth are the desired results of a public high school education. WCS has the balls not to waste everyone's time on such a ridiculous assumption.

Most schools have advanced classes. Pretty standard fare. Honors, AP, maybe even IB... The assumption here is that it's best for everyone if the brightest, most well-motivated students are able to challenge themselves academically and perhaps earn college credit in the process. It's a fairly self-evident, intuitive assumption to make. But in the whole NCLB scheme, the exact opposite is true. If your funding is based upon the scores your students earn on standardized tests, the absolute worst thing you could do, financially speaking, is to segregate out your brightest students from the pool of students who will be taking said tests.

You want gifted students to be trapped in Regents level courses -- which are set up as Regents test prep classes -- because they will inevitably score very well on the Regents exams, padding out the scores of the less talented students. Everyone takes the same classes, everyone takes the exam, and by averaging out the scores of the people who need to be in a Regents level course and those who would otherwise be in advanced classes, you outscore schools who place their gifted students in courses that focus on actually teaching the topic at hand as opposed to preparing for the state examination.

It's like our principal's favorite aphorism: "If you do what you are supposed to do, when you are supposed to do it, the way it is supposed to be done, to the best of your ability, and you do it that way every time, you will succeed." Success is measured in terms of doing what it is that you are supposed to do towards a goal defined by someone else, not what is most fulfilling, desirable, or indeed beneficial. Dance, monkeys, dance.

And yes, in case you were wondering, this IS just a frustrated, probably mostly juevenille rant. Some highlights from my day...

Precalc
The teacher hands out an eight problem worksheet as a review. The eight problems involve the addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division of simple fractions. "7/8 + 4/15"... that sort of thing. She gives us ten minutes to solve the problems. The vast majority of the class does not succeed in completing more than one problem, and discovers that the problem it did complete was incorrect. We will be discussing this topic in depth tomorrow, because apparently we were all absent that day of fifth grade when we were taught this the first time around.

Economics
The teacher has a fake tan and goes on a long rant about lazy people who wind up living in their parents' basements. This is both a direct reference to the students in the class and a thinly-veiled reference to poor people in general, who all would have succeeded at life if only they had worked hard earlier in their lives. The class looks like it will be an introduction to neoclassical bullshit with a good deal of inane paperwork.

English
The teacher is a unabashedly condescending man. He spells out words as he speaks them to us.... "The theme is the moral of the story... that's 'moral' without an 'e' at the end, or else that would be something different... Characters are affected by the plot... that's affected with an 'a,' or else that would be something different..." However, I don't know whether it's fair to characterize him as condescending, as many people around me were, in fact, correcting their spelling.

Physics
According to our syllabus, the entire first quarter of the year will be devoted to a review of measurments and middle-school level equations from eighth grade science.

Independant Reading
This class has literally three people in it. Our teacher asked us what we were going to read. I said I was going to read The Human Stain by Philip Roth, and she had not heard of him. She is reading something by Stephen King.

I sort of feel like an asshole for going on like this. It's quite an elitist rant. But at the same time, it's such a frustrating situation to be in that I don't know quite how else to react. I'm sure I'll get acclimated to high school again, but goddammit, I almost don't want to. I came home today and started reading a microeconomics book I picked up at the Cornell Store just so I could feel as though I've actually learned something today.

Bah, bad times.

Oh Man, You Guys. Oh Man.

So:
I participate in this tangentially scholastic activity called Lincoln-Douglass Debate. It's named after the debates between Lincoln and Douglass for, you know, president. That was how they rolled, back in the mid-19th century.
My coach really wants us to win, a lot. Gee, does he want us to win. In the pursuit of a shiny plastic trophy to grace his cold and empty mantle, my school-chums and I have been slaving away at his child labor-law-violating Potomac Debate Institute, practicing tactics for the year's resolutions.
There's a list of ten possible resolutions, of which five have been or will be selected.
This is one of them--
Resolved: Governments ought to make economic reparations for their countries' historical injustices.
I dare you to tell me this isn't a blatant Bruce Robbins.
Good God, I could have so much fun with this thing. I can dress as Bruce, and instead of actually delivering my speech (which of course will be composed wholly and solely of quotations from Lama Robbins, as I have taken to calling him), I can just skim it in front of everybody, summarize select paragraphs, and then pause to criticize the bald lack of logical reasoning ability displayed throughout. Best of all, during cross-examination (in the course of which your bumbling and incompetent opponent attempts to articulate a question in comprehensible English as you stand awkwardly by, tracing the bottom of the podium with your toe and admiring your own minty-fresh breath-- thank you Doublemint Gum-- spit out into a wastebasket before the round commenced, of course-- or surreptitiously stuck to the underbelly of a cold metal desk-- there's a whole universe of chewing gum underneath desks in college and high school classrooms if you'd only bother to look, pocks and crests like a lunar surface), I can snarkily brush aside all my opponents' questions. "You're very clever. Very clever, but very wrong." The judges will love that. And when my opponent asks me for the credentials of my evidentiary source?

"Some say he was born the son of a nuclear bomb and the complete works of Martin Heidegger--"

What more could you ask for in an academic? Or, for that matter, in a man?

Sorry I've been more or less incommunicado for the past 3 weeks; in addition to debate I've had to set some other affairs in order. Wow, sounds like I'm dying.

I'm not.

I'd like to write about how thrilled I am by the Larry Craig Scandal, but I have summer reading to do, so that's a topic for another day.

The former Senator and I send you our illicit, steamy, airport-bathroom love and affection from the nation's capital.