A Day in My Adventurous Life (braving sleeping juniors, dangerous hall monitors, and the Locker that Ate My Soul)

I'm sure all of you are very much interested in my life. (This is the part where you nod and say with forced brightness, "But of course!") Thus, I decided to chronicle a day in my life (last Tuesday, as a matter of fact) filled with my humorous commentary that you all know and love (this is another part where you nod and say, "But of course!"). I cut out all the boring parts, so you may get the impression that my life is more exciting than it is. (Trust me. It is not very exciting. At all. It's mostly rather angsty. Such are the woes of adolescence.)

5:10 am. I wake up at this obscenely early time and crawl out of bed. It's still pitch dark outside, but I manage to drag myself through the frigid air onto my desk and study. (It's called being an overachiever. I don't recommend it.)

6:25 am. Time to "get up for real". I do all the boring stuff where I eat breakfast, brush my teeth, shiver violently while pulling on my clothes, battle the dog for my gloves... the usual. Oh, and there was a spider. In my room. I totally reacted super-calmly and squished it before going on my way.

6:59 am. Leave the house. My mom is hyperventilating about how I'm going to be late.

6:59 and thirty seconds am. Arrive at the bus stop. Guess I wasn't late. Luckily, my dad works at home, so he lets me stay in the nice, warm car while I wait. A few unfortunate kids huddle together, their faces purple and their bodies shuddering too fast for me to make out who exactly got unlucky.

7:01 am. This is the time the bus is supposed to arrive. It hasn't.

7:15 am. The bus arrives. I brace myself and hurtle out the door, screaming as the obscene cold freezes over every drop of blood in my body. The five seconds it takes to throw myself onto the bus stretches for several years, but I finally make it to the sort-of-warmth.

7:25 am. ...And we arrive at school. Repeat the screaming-as-the-obscene-cold-etc. I begin the trek to my locker.

7:26 am. I pass through the freshman hallway. Everyone there is running around and screaming, and I say hi to a few people.

7:27 am. The sophomore hallway. They're still relatively enthused, but around a quarter of them sit in front of their lockers, faces tucked into their laps.

7:28 am. Junior hallway. It's almost completely silent, with everyone curled into the fetal position, using their backpacks and textbooks as pillows. Many have extra sweatshirts pulled over them as blankets.

7:29 am. And finally, the senior hallway. No one's even sleeping - they just lie on the floor, perfectly still with their eyes wide open. I suspect they are in a catatonic state.

7:30 am. At last, I arrive at my locker. It's in the math wing, so basically there are about three other people who have lockers there. I call it Siberia for more than just the below-zero temperatures. I will spare you the details of my excruciatingly non-existent social life, but suffice to know that I spent the next half-hour walking around with friends.

8:00 am. Homeroom. I discover some kid I didn't know existed has been in my homeroom for the past four months. Huh.

8:04 am. I have first hour free (yay), so I debate my choices: hang out at my locker, go to commons and get work done, or go to the upper caf and stare aimlessly out the window. For once, I decide to be productive, and so I go to commons.

I spend the first half hour laboring over a paper, and at last it's ready to print. The question, though, is whether the printer's ready as well. I hit print and sidle over the hulking machine. After a few concerning minutes, it begins to tremble, and soon it gets more and more violent by the second.

Random lights on it flash eye-searing shades of red so bright I collapse to the musty carpet, covering my leaking eyes. The printer's shuddering reaches its peak, and it nearly tumbles off the table. Luckily, the monitor thinks fast and shoves it back on its place with a well-placed elbow shot.

I hesitantly get back to my feet and eye the tray. Instead of neatly printed paper, ink spurts out. I twist out of the way, and only one black dot lands on my sweater. Some random gunk comes out as well, including a gray-ish eraser and a beanie bag that smacks me in the face, but finally my lovely paper zooms out, hits the wall, and crumples into a ball.

Good enough.

9:01 am. With my paper tucked safely in my duct-taped, falling-apart-anyway folder, I head to history and take a seat in front. The guy on my left has a bucket of cookies, but for reasons I can't understand, he refuses to give me any. Even after I explain that he and I are totally BFF and thus he should give me cookies.

I spend the rest of class staring at the cookies.

When my teacher dismisses us, I cast one last longing look at the bucket and leave with my friends to French II.

9:52 am. We get there soon enough and slide into seats at our customary table. A fourth friend soon joins us, and we all complain about a chemistry quiz.

"What an awful quiz," Friend #1 says.

Friend #2 nods in agreement. "Simply awful."

"I found it not only awful, but dreadful!" Friend #3 proclaims.

"Dreadful! What a perfect word!" I nod vigorously to go along with my statement, in case Friend #3 didn't pick up on my enthusiasm.

We discuss what a perfect word "dreadful" is until class starts. Which is approximately 10:25. Hm.

10:25 am. The teacher talks in French for a while. I wonder briefly what he's saying, and then return to my daydreams.

10:46 am. Class ends. Friend #1, #2, #3, and I leave together, but then Friend #3 slips away to a class. Friend #1 and #3 join me in my adventure through the people-traffic and we grab seats at the tiny square-inch of cafeteria table left.

Yes. I realize it is not even 11 am and I am having lunch. At first I found this obscene (you may have noticed I call many things that; this is because the world itself is inherently obscene), but after a few weeks, I've begun to find myself ravenous at 10:30. This is alarming, especially on the weekends.

A few more people join our table. I will again spare you the details of my profound conversations on such topics as "who's hotter? celebrity x or celebrity y?", "I failed my physics quiz! I got an 85!", "I'm going to fail my math quiz! IZZY HELP ME STUDY!", "I'm going to fail my chemistry quiz! FRIEND #3 HELP ME STUDY!", "why do we have so much homework", "why are we such neurotic little overachievers", and finally, "have you guys noticed that the lunch monitor guy has been standing behind our table and staring at us for the past forty-five minutes with a scary grin on his face?"

Oh. Sorry. Guess I didn't spare you.

11:40 am. I leave my friends and go to Freshmen Leadership, which is basically a fancy name for "public speaking". I think I would prefer a leadership class.

Today I get to give my speech. Oh joy. We're lucky because we get to pick our own speech topics, except I thought I would be all clever and choose unicorn mythology. It turns out this was not a good idea. It is not enjoyable to be up at 2 in the morning researching for your speech, because if it is that obscenely late/early, I better get websites with good graphics. But nooo, instead I get eye-searingly pink backgrounds and mind-explodingly sparkly buttons and a gigantic white rhinoceros bellowing out of my speakers.

One guy goes, and then I'm given the dubious honor of going second. I grimace and root around my backpack for my notecards.

I get a handful of random papers and lint.

"Before the end of class would be nice," my teacher informs me.

I scrape around the bottom of my backpack and examine every pocket, before I get hit with a minor flashback. I remember holding my notecards in my room, spying a spider, screaming, and flinging those precious notecards away.

And then leaving the house.

I swallow and go to the front of the room, racking my brain for anything I can remember about unicorns.

I come up with nothing.

"Uh, feel free to start whenever you're ready," my teacher grumbles, already scribbling a novella's worth of text on my rubric.

"Unicorns are an important part of modern society," I improvise. "You see them everyday on the way to school - or, you know, your bus stop. However you roll. You see them when you play robot unicorn attack, because really, who wouldn't spend their free time having a robot unicorn shoot rainbows at metallic stars?" I kept going like this for several minutes. I finished with, "So the next time you see a unicorn, maybe you'll think of the evolving mythology behind it, from Ctesias's imaginative descriptions to the elegant tapestries of the medieval times."

I think I failed.

12:34 pm. Math time. I think about how yummy curry is.

1:31 pm. American lit. Friend #4 and I open up our laptops and go to Gmail. Although we sit RIGHT NEXT TO EACH OTHER, we communicate by gchatting. We are just so cool.

2:22 pm. Financial mathematics. Just - you don't want to know. I do warn you, this class is not for the faint of heart.

2:23 pm. I think I fall asleep with my eyes open. Either that, or I enter a coma.

3:18 pm. Last class of the day, astronomy! I took it as an elective because I thought it would be such a nice, relaxing class to end the day with.

Ha.

4:10 pm. School is over!

4:20 pm. I make it out to the buses just in time to run with my bus, screaming and waving my arms until the bus driver sees me and opens the doors. Or, you know, not.

4:45 pm. Arrive at the bus stop again. It's nearly completely dark. If it wasn't for the fact that I live in the tiniest suburban town ever, I would be scared. I begin the freezing, "long" trudge home. Ipod in hand, of course.

5:00 pm. Home sweet home. I begin my homework.

Or, actually, first I check my email. Then I respond to my emails. Then I see who's online, and of course I have a few BRIEF conversations. Then I obsessively check and recheck my blog stats. And my blog. And my blog comments. Then back to my email.

Then, at last, I'm ready to start my homework -

Oh. Dinner.

7:15 pm. Begin eating dinner.

7:30 pm. Finish eating, panic about failing high school, and actually start my homework and work non-stop.

10:45 pm. Finish my homework. At orientation, they told us we would have an average of two hours of homework a day.

That is such a lie.

10:45 and thirty seconds pm. Fall asleep with my face on the keyboard.