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January 8, 2010

Yes Man

I got home from school today utterly exhausted. There should not have been school today. I don't care how goddamned not-icy the roads were, the online snow day calculator gave me a 99% chance of snow day. I think the problem is the administration. Harsh doesn't begin to cover it. Our frog of a superintendent would simply prefer to pretend that snow doesn't exist. I think Becky's plan is the best- get into a car crash, and put your blood on his hands. Now, I probably will not actually do this, and likely neither will she, but I have a feeling that nothing short of a catastrophe could change the administrative opinion in question.

I just watched Yes Man, which basically consisted of a rubber-faced, not particularly attractive protagonist who never does anything because he's so insecure he thinks that as soon as people truly know him they'll just start hating. Then, he goes through some mystical self-help transformation and says yes to everything and finds his own manic pixie dream girl. The basic idea behind the Yes Man premise is that we shouldn't be letting opportunities pass us by, and if we'd just embrace it, our lives would be fuller and better and a whole host of other positive adjectives.

I can understand that, to a certain extent. I do think that one needs to be careful- there are people who say yes too often, who don't get their own homework done because they're too busy helping everyone else in the entire class, who give so much that they don't have anything left to hold as they fall asleep at night. I'm not sure I really have either of those problems. I mean, I do do some things. There are times when I say no, I'm too busy, no, I don't want to, no, I have a...thing, but most of the time, I do try to be somewhat open. After all, I know how depressing it is to not do anything.

When I was younger, I used to always have absolutely nothing planned for the first week of summer. I would veg, completely and totally, for that time period. Then, the year after fifth grade, all of my friends (granted, I only had three friends at the time, but this is beside the point) went to camp, and I was left alone. I did nothing for a week, and my clearest memory is of lying sprawled across the couch in the kitchen, moaning to my mother, "I'm soooo bored."

So, moral of the story, do stuff, because boredom is boring. On that note, I'm going to find something to do.

2 comments:

Ginny said...

We discussed in stat class how it's unfair that none of the BOE people have high schoolers in their immediate family, and so we're an under-represented group.

I guess the superintendent doesn't feel our pain (or the teachers who come from an hour's drive away).

Gretchen said...

i'm bored