school life

My headphones and I

Posted on by clem2000

A couple hours ago my headphones broke and I immediately became broken hearted for my headphones are literally my best friend. If I was to be handed one of those silly little ‘lets get to know each other’ surveys by a teacher and it asked who was my best friend was I would very proudly write ‘my headphones’. After I got home from my doctor’s appointment that afternoon I immediately started searching the Internet for yet another perfect pair. Some would suggest that I just get another pair of the same kind as the ones before, but I would never be able to do that. Somehow it would feel like betrayal to all me and my headphones have done together. It would just feel like cloning my true love after they died, but without the memories. We live a very tightrope sort of life, my headphones and me. There is a very good reason that I like over the head headphones rather than earbuds. With headphones if I put them on it gives everyone a much firmer message. With ear buds they always look like they are just waiting to be plucked from their owner’s ears but when wearing headphones you seem to say “don’t bug me now. I am deeply in love with my music and I am just about to confess. Seriously don’t. Bug. Me” which is especially good for me. Plus, if I get the right brand and type I can annoy my school just enough to get a dirty look but not enough to send me to detention. You don’t have to attend my school to know that it is one if those schools that have a thing for the dress code and I am very passionate about calmly sidling around said dress code. Sure, I show up wearing the same damn dress as all the other girls but the lesser rules are the ones that I calmly sit on so nobody can see. My headphones are a big part of this. I where one stud diamond earring that I have been told makes me look like a pirate. This is against the dress code. I slip my boots of during class. This is against the rules. I wear headphones. You won’t find this in a rule book but they have never been happy about it. I wear bracelets on my left wrist. I should wear them on my right wrist, god know why. I wear a jacket that isn’t school uniform but it looks exactly like the ones the seniors wear.
It is easy to see how I slip under the radar while still getting enough dirty looks to satisfy my need to play against the rules.
My headphones are part of the set but I can wear them if they are broken. That’s just faking it… I also need to listen to music or my mind just actually wanders out the door while my body is still stuck in class. Needless to say the situation is dire.

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No.

Posted on by clem2000

Teachers often mistake my vibrant reluctance to play the game with disrespect for them personally, which is really not true. Unfortunately for both parties I can only go so far in respecting them that I start disrespecting me. I won’t respect them because they’re older than me, or because I have to call them by their last name. I won’t respect them because they are honestly trying to give me an education or because they have the ability to give me detention. I will respect them because they are fellow human beings and being a human being is hard enough without having people being dicky to you.
To many people my gracious and not quite conventional attitude to the world would be regarded as a ‘problem with authority’. I’m not really sure I understand this. I have no problem with authority, I just don’t take it seriously. It’s all very well to tell me what to do, but the least you can do is give me a good reason why.
The school motivational system basically entails the following:
Student: “I don’t want to”
School: “Do this and we will give you a brightly coloured piece of paper with your name on it”
Student: “I can do that all on my own, thank you”
School: “…okay. But if you put in five of these we will give you $2 to spend on sugar”
Student: “I already have $2 and I still don’t want to do it”
Teacher: *sighs* “fine, if you don’t do it we will have to put you in a room for fifteen minutes with air conditioning during a heatwave”
Student: “That’s cool with me. See you at lunch”
You can see how hopeless the whole system is.
The best example I can give on how morally corrupt the school system is my well loathed cross country, which it essentially running in a big goddamn circle that unless you win is going to make you feel kinda crappy about yourself. I can understand how some people find joy in running in big goddamn circles and I am perfectly willing to let them continue running in big goddamn circles but for everyone else, it’s just running in a big goddamn circle.
The unfortunate truth is that no matter how many times your PE teachers says its not about winning the person who comes last is still going to feel really, really terrible and quite frankly I am beyond not cool with participating in something that is inevitably going to make quite a few people feel crappy and embarrassed. The question is how much do you have to want to win that you go so far as to make other people feel bad. I realise that of course this is not the aim of the competition but it is a side effect and people have to start taking responsibility for that.
There are always going to be things that people are going to force us to do but I don’t believe that being forced into doing things that both bring you no pleasure and will serve no good effects on you and the people around you is something that should be done as a practice. It’s like being bullied by your boss. Sure, it’s good to do what your boss says but that doesn’t mean that you have to put up with anything that makes you feel crappy and doesn’t serve any real purpose.
I also find many PE lessons quite disrespecting towards me as a person. Consider this: many times in my life people have asked me why I won’t do sports and often it’s the normal reasons. I’m too hot or I’m just feeling lazy, but in general my first and foremost answer is ‘I have better things to do’. Every second of my life that they take away from me while I’m being pointlessly forced into running in big goddamn circles is a second I could be using to do more interesting, productive and more happiness enforcing things.
When it comes to the various institutions in my life I have many a few choice words but unfortunately the people that are at the mercy to these institutions aren’t being paid to listen to me while they honestly can’t do anything about it, so all I can to is state my own hopefully subtle protests.

Rain

Posted on by clem2000

My school sucks at rain. When it rains its like the whole school goes into a state of both disarray and daze. We become solitary penguins. Swarming together in corridors and shelters. We wander mindlessly around looking for somewhere out of the endless drizzle that always seems to know where you are. A thousand lungs breathing the same warm damp air. Strangers following one another even though you have no idea who they are.
On rainy days so many friendships are reformed. Nobody has the energy to be awkward. Nobody has the care. You find yourself residing in the company of someone you haven’t talked to in ages. Or somebody you don’t even know. You don’t talk. You don’t socialise. You don’t text. You don’t play games. You listen to music and watch the drops of rain slide down the windows.
When it rains it is as if the whole school has decided that the only thing worth doing
is to breathe. Things like productivity and persistence and determination, they don’t matter. Late homework? Don’t care.
The best you can hope for is doing text book work. But the thing is though you don’t hope for the best because just like everyone else mental consciousness is suddenly such a trivial thing. When it rains you don’t pay the asking price. You just continue on your journey without a thought going to waste. Thoughts on days like these become such valuable things. If you think about something then that thing is important. When our minds and our bodies become rusty with dampness and you are thinking it is the basic equivalent of a miracle.
Rehearsals, shows, matinees, due assignments, homework all stop. It doesn’t matter whether it is achingly important. If rain is dripping even the idea of productivity is calmly looked at and then dismissed.
Throughout the day all you do is seek warmth and shelter and spare no thought to anything else unless it is of the utmost importance.
This is rain.

Dodgeball, An autobiography

Posted on by clem2000

Small fact: dodgeball is stupid. The only reason that I said that I would choose it for my sport was on the condition that I wouldn’t actually have to do the dodge the ball bit. This turned out to be very true. Though I wasn’t expecting that other people would not have the same view about the stupidness of dodgeball as me. I know that there are people who actually enjoy sports but I never thought that there would be such a thing as a dodgeball enthusiast. Well, there isn’t really. There are just highly competitive people who use dodgeball to satisfy that need to win. To me dodgeball doesn’t bring up any complicated philosophical questions. It’s just so pointless that you have to wonder what the hell people are doing being enthusiastic about it.
Me, I sat in the corner of the gym playing puzzle games on my phone and flinching not an inch when balls were hurriedly hurled my way. One of the greatest advantages to not giving a crap about winning is that you get to watch other people give a crap about winning, which is a vastly curious sport.
As I sat in the corner for a very special reason. It was a tactical reason rather than a lazy reason. The fact is that even if people decide that I’m worth the ball if they are off angle for more than an inch it’s just going to hit one wall, bounce onto the other and miss me entirely. Another good thing was that people tend to crowd around corners for no good reason when they’re afraid of getting hit, so I viewed the game from a cage of long, pale legs.
The thing about dodgeball is that the people that actually give a shit are usually either really, surprisingly tall, or really rather small. I found this remarkably amusing.
An unfortunate fact for not really giving a crap is that when your team loses and all the good people are out you can either just stand there and get a ball int he face or you can stand up and play. I did the latter. Though not with my normal lack of enthusiasm towards actual physical exercise. I figured that if I was going to have to jump around dodging brightly coloured balls with 96 pairs of judgemental eyes staring at me I may as well have a little fun with it. I don’t need to tell you where that went.
Happily this only happened once because our team had a larger amount of people who gave a shit on it than the other team.
The one time my not exactly playing, but not exactly out strategy didn’t work and I well and truly did get out was the one game that my team lost. Though unlike most of my other teammates there was a much smaller amount of yelling and violence. This year nine guy came up to me holding one of the balls. I didn’t recognise him, but that wasn’t surprising considering we were playing with people from year eight to year ten. He asked me if I was out and I grudgingly told him that I wasn’t. He smiled at me in a nervous sort of way and threw the ball like a bowling ball. It hit my boot with a satisfactory thump. We saluted each other as I wander vacantly towards the out area filled with the rest of my team. Later I was asked if I knew him to which I had to answer no, nonetheless in those few minutes of confrontation I had become a fan.
In the end I wandered out of the gym feeling bewildered and vaguely hungry. I deemed the period of sport a decent waste of my times and somehow ended up on a train deciding I needed to document what I had observed.

We all have to do it whether we want to or not

Posted on by clem2000

Picture this: you are in a class room, it is hot and everyone, including you are wearing heavy dresses that feel like big woollen sacks that itch in all the wrong places. It’s the end of the day and everyone wants to go home but don’t want to suffer through the hassle of public transport to get there. Everyone wants everyone else to shut up so that they can rest their heads down on the desk and go to sleep. The teacher is trying to enhance the enthusiasm in the class by being overly enthusiastic.
This was the situation I found myself in this afternoon. It’s day two of term four, the Australian spring is just setting in and everyone is still hissing at the sudden appearance of sunlight. This is an occasion that almost a good load of everyone has found themselves in. Hot, bothered and almost always completely exhausted. This is what us first world humans deal with a lot.
It’s tiring and boring and anger stimulating but worth it. It is always worth the fight. Today I kept walking in the heat back from the train station because I wanted to be at home and the only way that I was ever going to get there was to keep on walking. Even if I was half dead with exhaustion I was going to have to get my ass to bed by walking.
We all have to deal with this and it does get easier. When we get pushed back we get back up and kick ass, because we inevitably aren’t where we need to be and are willing to fight back to get there.

Welcome to the planet awkward, we come to make you uncomfortable

Posted on by clem2000

High school if anything is awkward. Really, really, annoyingly awkward. Everything is awkward. In real life, the life outside the gossip and the awkwardness nothing that is awkward in my life would be that awkward at all. It might be because that boy’s of a certain age are just so fill with sexual joke, scrounged off the Internet that there ready to explode with laughter at the slightest movement between two people no matter the gender and girls who are so desperate for gossip that they will dig it up before anything would be aloud to bloom.
As someone with more guy pals than girl pals I end up with more awkward moments than most poor souls that end up somewhere in the educational system and I have found ways that eliminate awkwardness.
The Go along with it tactic: this is where you go along with the laughing and games and pretend that the slight movement was actually that you were thinking that the normally male subject should be your boyfriend. Just know that you kind of need to do this jokily or your going to end up with some poor friend looking at you as though their going to have to break your heart.
The “Like I care” tactic: this is where you roll your eyes. A clear signal that you don’t find it funny but you don’t really mind if they do. This often gives the normally male subject time to do the same. Eye rolling can really come in handy at the best of times.
And finally the “fun police” tactic: this is where you stand up looking pissed off and flounce off. This works really well if you throw a “you guys are so immature” over your shoulder. Of course we are dealing with twelve year old boys and girls here so this tactic may not be the best approach. Plus it makes them feel guilty and honestly it’s not really a nice feeling to make some one feel guilty.

deadly thinking, school life, Uncategorized

A very curious ball game and a ‘what to do’ question

Aside | Posted on by clem2000

I do not like sport. I do not watch sport and frankly at some points in time I would rather impale myself on a rusty pike than play it. But today was different.
The rebellious-ness of children sometimes amazes me but it is one of the greatest things to be a part of. I had PE today. We were put into teams of five and were asked to split in two more teams of three and two. The rules were that we were meant to pass a football five times to score a point. This game gradually evolved after time to make a game a little like touch football. By this point we were all tired and cold and the wind was biting though our clothes no matter how much we ran around trying to get the ball. As the wind howled a friend of mine started to just throw the ball up into the air at absolutely nobody.
This was the start of the rebellion.
The rest of the two teams including me also started to rebel against the pointless game that seem to go on for forever and a couple more days after that. Me and a taller girl started to sing ‘Girls just wanna have fun’ at the top of our voices. The wind drowned out our voices but the rest of us could still here the out of tune calamity. Our song slowly but increasingly evolved in to “I through ball up in the air sometimes, saying ayo got to let go” even with this singing and dancing and general up-to-no-gooding it got boring. We looked around the field in sort of something else to tease. We saw that some kids from another school were playing something that from a distance looked like duck, duck goose. As rebellious twelve year olds we immediately sat down and made someone in. We played this for three seconds before the teacher noticed.
Again the game evolved. We were suddenly a whole team again and were pitched against the team next to us. The other team had a large amount of uptight people who seemed to really want to win. It soon became apparent that we were lazy idiots who would rather make the game a giant joke than win. At one point our team sat down, crossed our legs and started to meditate. Saying with our eyes closed that we would propel the ball towards us with mind power. A boy immediately kicked the ball towards us.
It was fun.
We got in trouble but it was really fun.
This has nothing to do with PE or sport but it is also a kind of interesting topic on how to be a kid. I have a pretty large crush on a boy in a few of my classes and I have absolutely no idea what to do about that. This worries me. I am a huge and utter fan of knowing exactly what to do at all times. Should I be writing a letter to him, confessing my ever ass-kissing love and spraying it with perfume that I have never worn. As a teenager I watch or are forced into watching a large amount of bad tv dramas and it seems that a girl with a crush should do different things to a boy with a crush. A boy should send flowers and a girl should write love letters. Some would say that I’m being brave by saying that I have a crush on some one on social media but really I am not going to go naming names.
I know for a fact that if some one wrote me a love letter sprayed with cheap perfume I would be seriously and epically freaked out. For every girl out there with a crush do not use this method. As for the guys you’re going good. As far as I can tell the large majority of girls like flowers. Also chocolates.
A lot of kids deal with the he/she doesn’t know I exist problem. You would be surprised to know that not only do great minds think alike so do a large majority of other minds too. That’s why when you don’t like someone they don’t really like you either.
I have a high doubt that there is anyway at all to say that you like some one without making a huge and utter fool out of your self. I have made to decision to lay low for the point being. Let’s just say my pride is worth a lot to me.