School Daze
Embarassing Personal Stuff
A friend and I come across a flyer for a Gender Studies class in the hall way outside the computer lab. It shows the Tao, the famous Yin and Yang, overlaid with their gender's traditional Greek symbols.
My friend steals the flyer, sneaking it off in her backpack. She embodies both the best and the worst of the American young adult in the year 2000. She's intelligent, but not experienced. She may not known how the world works, but she knows how her world works. And she hates it. Hates it with a passion that, at the same time, fuels her to change her life and makes her blind to ways of doing so.
I try to tell her this. I try to tell her that her dream (working her way through college as a stripper) is not the soundest of plans. I try to tell her not to react harshly to the adversities she meets. Instead of attacking a problem from every angle until you beat it into submission, I tell her to find tactful ways around and out of situations, with as little bloodshed as possible.
Always about halfway through my telling of this, I always take a step back, and realize I should practice what I preach.
We're back in the computer room. The seminar is almost over. Soon, I'll be home again, defending the Earth from the scum of the Universe. As a final master stroke to the day's events, our instructors take out a one thousand dollar digital camera, stand us in a line, and take our pictures. One by one, we are handed little floppy's with our pictures on them, and instructed to post them onto our "Student's Site".
The "site" is set up like a message board. You enter data into fields, and the server translates that into something tangible. God forbid we every try to get creative with our pages.
Then, suddenly, the sermon ends. Like heathens staggering from church, we rush out of the building, throwing our papers to the sky. Some of the more level headed of us remember that this is just the first day, not the last.
Me, I'm just glad I survived. Screw level-headedness.
Screw Summer, too. Every year, the Blessed Season that betrays us by shedding another ream of scales and growing shorter. Though, in December, when it's cold and damp and I'm once again without a warm body to curl up with by the fire, I'll pray for summer again. I know it. But I can't help feeling cheated.
My friend and I catch the bus back to where we both parked. She has to go pick up some of those dreadful siblings from the elementary school. And me . . . I have something to write about. Something to keep me sane. Something solid to focus on in the school daze ahead.
So, I kiss summer goodbye for now. I'll see it on the other side.
--8:29:0:0