[Typewritten Monotony]

2004-04-28T23:47:00.000-04:00

Wednesdays can be interesting - but they can also be insanely dull. Other times they can be simply hellish, and may require a good amount of sleeping in class to minimize the pain. This particular Wednesday turned out to be the third, hellish kind of Wednesday.

It turned out that a big chunk of English class was cut out because of the school lockdown that happened this morning - a lockdown, of course, meaning that all the students sit around in their classes and pretend to be concerned whilst secretly reveling in the fact that...well, a big chunk of English class is being cut out. Apparently some seventh-grade girls were caught with largish sacks of kitchen cutlery in their lockers. I truly don't know why, but suddenly I started to think about whether or not they were just planning to engage in some friendly salad-making after school as opposed to planning to stab someone. The world may never know.

Not only does this happen a good amount of times per month in my school, but the fire alarm is pulled at least six times per day. I am so damn glad I'm going to be out of that hellhole next year.

2004-04-27T15:35:00.000-04:00

Hmm. Tuesday.

Today was supposed to be the one day in the week that I didn't have to spend sitting around doing nothing in my grandmother's nasty office during the hour-and-forty-five-minute period between me being released from my school and Mom getting home from hers. But band practice was canceled - again - so here I am.

Some background:

Mom teaches computers - a mind-bogglingly simple class dealing mainly with how to word-process and create slideshows. Being a teacher, Mom has to sit around for a while after school has actually been let out in order to do whatever the hell it is all the teachers do then. Add in a half an hour drive from Virginia Beach to here, and you've got great big gap between my release time and my get home time.

Since Mom for some reason just dosen't trust me to sit at home for more than five minutes unattended ("Nicholas, I know you're a very intelligent and responsible young man, but what if you were suddenly posessed by the wandering spirit of a dead pyromaniac and burned down the house? I just can't take any chances!"), I've got to spend the time here at H+P Hardware, a little rat-infested hardware dealership that my grandparents own. Despite having the largest collection of rat shit known to mankind, and quite possibly being the most impressive concentration of boring I've ever experienced, I've got to give it credit for at least having a computer with an internet connection. Even if it is a Windows 95 with a disgustingly slow non-cable modem.

Please, don't even ask me what H+P stands for. Because I just don't know.

If the band director had actually felt like coming into work today, after school practice would have taken place as usual and I would be able to go straight home afterwards - no rat shit collections involved. But I guess I don't really blame her for not coming a lot of the time. If the school is hellish for me, then I can't even begin to imagine how hellish it would be for a teacher.

2004-04-25T22:59:00.000-04:00

So Dad can't seem to scrape up enough interest to talk to me about something other than school whenever he calls on the phone - and that's rarely more than a five minute call. I wish I could send him a reply to one of his crap emails saying something along the lines of "what the HELL are you thinking?", but whenever he actually does feel like talking he always sounds like he's about to burst into tears. Again: what the HELL is he thinking?

A little background on my dad:

Married my mother. You know, marriage, that old-fashioned thing that used to be commonplace when two people had a baby before the 90's. Eight years and three kids later, reveals his involvement with several different whores over the past...well, eight years. One year after that, decides to marry one of these whores, mainly because, quote: "Mmmnn...well...err...Yeah."

Treats whore like the Queen of England, allowing her to stay at their leisurely manor all day while he goes to work and earns $95,000 a year. Leaves previous family with no form of child support - or any other support, for that matter - whatsoever.

What the HELL is he thinking?

Tomorrow's Monday. Joy. I'm sure there's some kind of homework assignment I'm neglecting to remember right now, and that I'll conveniently remember it just as the class it's due in is about to start. I don't care too much, though - quickly doing homework at the last minute during school is one helluva lot better than wasting do-things-that-actually-interest-me time at home.

2004-04-24T19:43:00.000-04:00

I guess it's some kind of mental dysfunction or something: I can sit here and write and think of all the things I hate about people and what I should say to them to get them to piss off, but once I actually get the chance to do so I just sit in a corner and act passive. I swear it's as if someone cut the line between my mind and my mouth in half. I do, however, have a line between my mind and hands that's still intact, which prevents typing from being all that difficult.

I go to a public middle school for two thirds of the year. I've spent the sixth through eighth grades (well, basically - there's a few weeks left of 8th) incarcerated with several hundred mentally void individuals, most of whom are above the age of fifteen. What's more - the teachers are all addicts three or four different illegal substances, the floors are consistently covered in a nice, thick coat of various and assorted bodily fluids, and the air in the restrooms is thick with marijuana fumes. Sounds like fun, eh?

Normally I wouldn't much care about all of it - but considering the fact that I'm going to have to return to the place on Monday, it strikes me as a bit of a concern.

To lessen the torture a little, I'll usually set up some kind of event that will compensate for the fact that I'll have to spend most of the day sitting in a cockroach-infested classroom listening to a teacher drone on about something that's been discussed several thousand times before (and that not one person seems to be able to grasp). Sometimes it's a new book that I'll keep myself from reading until school hours. Other times it's an ingenious plot of anonymous revenge on one of the many that torment me every day. Either way, I'll usually have something.

This Monday, though, I really don't have much of anything. Which makes it a TOP priority to suck as much non-school time out of tonight and tomorrow as is humanly possible.

2004-04-24T00:17:00.001-04:00

There's nothing quite like a Friday evening, when you know that staying up this late won't bring infuriating consequences in the morning. It happens to me every single day I have to wake up early (read: before noon) for something: I hear someone scuttling around in my room, realize I'm going to have to get out of bed soon, and quickly try to come up with my best Illness act before the scuttling party begins to scream at me to get the hell out of bed.

Unfortunately this usually completely fails to work. Usually. There are times when I can pull it off well enough that someone actually believes me, and there are other times when I'm genuinely sick. Of course, though, when I am genuinely sick, they tend to think it's an act and fling me into the classroom anyway. You don't honestly think I'd learn something from this, would you?

Let me paint you a quick picture of what my bedroom looks like: Primary colors. It was totally done over when I was in the first grade (I was six) to look like the absolute picture of perfection for a six-year-old's room. Unfortunately it hasn't been changed at all since, despite my desperate attempts to make it look a little less embarassing by hiding everything underneath the rapidly growing unorganized pile that is my book collection. I do give Mom credit for at least acknowledging the fact that having friends in this room is a death sentence for what little social life I have, and for saying that she will eventually allow me to change it as I see fit. The question, of course, is whether or not this will happen before my eightieth birthday comes around.

As I sit here in my primarily-colored bedroom, typing irrelevant information into the little white text box, I have the ceiling fan running. It may be April, but it's damnedably hot. Winter persisted until around the end of March, and then the weather decided to skip spring completely and go straight into summer. God. Damn. Hot. It may now be cool enough in here for me to sleep - but I'm sure that the huge amounts of dust being flung off the fan's blades will still keep me up until my average doze time of 3AM. Whee.

2004-04-23T18:38:00.000-04:00

You don't really care that I'm thirteen, do you?

I wouldn't care about it much, really, except for the fact that the label of "thirteen-year-old-male" is one of the worst labels any given Internet user can possibly have. It's like the window stickers that bored families buy at obscure roadside attractions (usually reading something along the lines of I Saw the Amazing Alaskan Banana Bush): it's the tell-tale marking of a complete idiot.

Let me take the time to promise you that the thirteen-year-old-male-internet-user label almost, but not quite, completely fails to suit me. Or at least I hope so. The reason I bring it up is that appearing to be the common stereotype usually drives away exactly the kind of people I would actually want to converse with. And that's not good. It's a very common scenario for me: Give real age, get treated like moron. Riveting, eh?

So be kind - come visit every so often. Or else I'll have to send the flying monkeys. And neither of us wants that.