Viewing entries tagged
high school

THE LAST DAY OF SCHOOL

THE LAST DAY OF SCHOOL

Things to do today:

1. Run final exams through scantron machine.

2. Learn how to use scantron machine.

3. Contemplate contacting the NYS Department of Education to inform them that I never once gave a multiple-choice test before they decided to (again) change the academic standards and I’m relatively certain that bullshit exams measure absolutely nothing besides the ability to memorize trivia.

4. Check in with a student (or six, just to be sure) to confirm that this year’s senior prank will not involve mice.

5. If the prank will involve mice, write a letter of resignation immediately because I can deal with rising heat and the conflagration of senioritis and colleagues who never ever shut up – but I will not deal with rodents or vermin of any kind because I've got limits.

Things to do today:

1. Get Patrick and Beth to sign my yearbook during lunch.

2. Go to the tailor after school with my mom to make sure my dress was taken in enough that my nipples will not be mistaken for accessories on prom night.

3. Buy more Aussie sprunch spray. 

4. Tell Mr. Gavriluk how much he’s meant to me and that I appreciate how he read all my poetry and then offered me insightful comments and didn't once tell me that any of the pain I wrote about in a non-rhyming kind of verse was at all pathetic – even though we both know it kind of is.

5. Kill the guy who broke my heart – or just avoid having to see him because plotting a death takes energy and I have exactly none on this strange day in June.

 

REUNION JITTERS

REUNION JITTERS

There is a little twinge of an emotion that exists somewhere way in the back of the chest called “Reunion Jitters,” and though I barely passed any Science class I ever took, I know that this emotion is real.  I personally felt those Reunion Jitters take hold when I attended my high school reunion a couple of years ago and I vividly remember that that a clear side effect of RJ (That’s right:  I’m gonna abbreviate my made-up emotion, patent the phrase itself, and then contact Merck to see if they can develop a pill that quells the ailment, one whose only side effect is drastic weight loss and shinier hair) was that my hand shook when I applied my mascara.  I’m not sure what it was that I was so nervous about, but it was probably an unbalanced combination of having not seen most of those people in years and wondering if certain guys were going to show up and whether or not it would be weird that I wasn’t married. (Who cares? said a friend of mine who couldn’t go to the reunion because he lives across the country.  You’re the only one who has published a book.)  Still, there was something really fucking weird about pulling up to the house of a girl who is now a woman and walking up to a front door that her mom wouldn’t be answering.