Four of Them

(this picture isn't related, but I've been trying to clear out my documents. Plus, Anna Calvi looks fucking angry)

Okay, I know I don't usually assault you all with the woes of my youth, and I assure you, it won't happen again. But for now, let's all just grit our teeth and bear through it.

-Knowing that, no matter how smart/dumb, cool/uncool, annoying, fun, not fun, funny, serious, whatever you are, as a Lady Person, in the eyes of them Menfolk, you'll forever be reduced to ugly, hot, prude, slut. Which is why we wander in packs. They've shot our self esteem to the point where we have no confidence in anything we say unless we have a dozen of our closest friends providing backup chorus.

-Guys are bigger bitches than girls. They make no secret of talking about you, because as the opposing gender, it's considered light-hearted teasing. Which is stupid.

-The halls reek of farts and crappy Claire's perfume.

-The girls' locker room is largely unattended, because, again, us Gentleladies must have impeccable hygiene. Except not at all, in fact, it's worse, because you have the added bonus of the aforementioned perfumes and those bitches who dump their tampons in the toilet and make a run for it.

-They don't want us to learn, they want us to take tests, and pass tests, so they can all get their Christmas bonuses. Like, this year, there's an experimental Biology exam that, if everyone fails it, won't be continued next year, but, oh shit, it'll still count for the majority of our grade. Because The Higher Ups suck like that.

-Terribly boring/shrill teachers who don't particularly know anything outside the textbook, assign you three pages of homework a night, not actually know the answers themselves the next day, just have you write it on the board.

-Being forced to watch boring/depressing/crappy movies about various revolutions in History.

-There's an entire elective dedicated to genocide studies.

-They still only teach the Big Four Euro/latin languages--Spanish, French, Italian, and German--plus Latin as an elective. Well, in my school anyway. What my question is, since they also obsessively stress business savvy and office dronery, wouldn't it make more sense to be learning Mandarin Chinese, Arabic, languages that are an actual presence in today's economic/political spectrum? Spanish I understand (in fact, it's default language for K-8, until they changed it right when I was leaving the middle school, now I think the elementary school cut the program, and the middle school is divided into the four per marking period, but anyway), Italian is useless to me, as I don't particularly like Italian movies (or, at least, the ones that I've seen, it's not a general rule, but I've got to stop interrupting myself, don't I?), French, I'm taking, but since I'll probably never go to France unless it's as a teacher (there's a program that if you volunteer as a high school English, you can take as many University courses as you want for free, and as for places like Haiti, I doubt I'll be of much use there even if I was fluent, thanks, Cracked), and if I learned German, some of my more bitter extended relatives would cut off contact (my aunt on Germans: "I wouldn't let one of those people into my house". She might've changed her views since then, but still, I'm not rebellious enough to find out). Wow, that's a lot of talk on languages.

-They encourage you to read, but not now, dear. Because I have all this free time after school, y'know, in between piles of homework and tests, to sit down and concentrate on a book. It's either during school, or at three in the morning.

-Cafeteria food.

-Ridiculous cafeteria food prices.

-They sell soda (real stuff, not the shit store brands) are sold, but in a locked frig reserved for teachers.

-Terrible coffee.

-Kids who keep stomping on water bottles until they explode. On the plus side, my one friends keeps pretending she's been shot.

-Those people who bitch and moan about how much they hate school, then bum around there until eight.

-Bitches who, god help me, this is the only way I can describe them, are preppy, stuck-up, privileged and, uh, I said bitchy, so that's it. Right. Who whine all day about what injustice is wrought on them.

-Guys who think they're the great World's Fair shit.

-The Peers.

-The Faculty.

-Group projects.

-Research papers.

-Handwritten notes that have to be scrawled down in Real Time, making them void later when you go to study and find you can't read the Cavechicken Hieroglyphics that are wastng valuable notebook space.

-The fact that, despite you self-promises you'll at least try to be sociable or whatever, you can't help but come off as an asshole out of performance anxiety. Or stage fright. Whatever you wanna call it.

-That I've been doing this for, like, twenty minutes, and still haven't started my homework.

-The fact that I don't get what's going to be on my test tomorrow, but find my teacher so annoying I don't want to ask for extra help.

-Knowing that, if I'm not in any classes with my set of four friends and/or five-or-something friendly acquantinces, I'll be doomed to glowering in the corner, because it took every ounce of patience and nerves I have (not a lot) to make the ones I have now. And even then, most of them were my sister's friends first. See? I need a motherfucking segue.

-Waking up at 6:30 because, in order to avoid traffic, my bus has to show up ten minutes earlier. Also, that We of the Teenaged have to go to school at seven in the morning, while our n00b K-8 counterparts get to go at a lofty 9:30. Because, never mind we're the ones with the big, stressful, life-determining tests and extra curricular activities and stuff to do, the little ones, those shrieking balls of adrenaline and Pixie Sticks who are notorious for not going to sleep, are apparently delicate little snowflakes that can't handle dawn-time travel. Leave that to the older ones.

-The constant, nagging fear that some asshole will show up with a machine gun and kill me before I ever get to see the light of day.

-That everyone else speaks another language. There's a shitload of Polish kids, Indian kids, Taiwanese kids, couple of Russian kids, Spanish kids, and here I am, barely conversational in French. Even my douchebag cousin from fucking Florida speaks Hebrew.

-That, instead of something useful in gym, like self-defense of Nunchucks 101, we learn volleyball and yoga and stupid shit like that.

-Even if I were the best damn driver this side of the Mason-Dixon line, I could still get killed by some dick in my class who can't read a Smirnoff label.

-Jersey Shore after-talks, because hey, let's embrace MTV-created stereotypes, guys, that'll solve everything. Half those shits are from New York, anyway.

-Crap music.

See? That wasn't so painful! Well, it was. I probably lost most of you twenty bullets up.