I don’t like school. That, in fact, is an understatement. It is the simplest way of putting what I want to say, but it’s lacking the emotional intensity of what I want to express. How I feel about school (my high school in particular) is more comparable with, say, how the Romans felt about Jesus, how misfits felt about popular kids, how West coast felt about the East coast, and vice versa. I hate my high school. I hate high school so much, it’s almost immoral. So, reasonably, on can assume I don’t walk around the halls of the MFC with the biggest smile plastered unmoving on my face and spreading good cheer and school spirit like free candy from a parade float.
No, one can assume I do almost the polar opposite of that.
I have a reputation around my school, among the teachers. I sort of play the sarcastic, cynical roll. I walk around, stomping my all-black logo-less chucks* with resentment. Everything I say is coated in a thick layer of sarcasm, everything I do is bourn from the pool of apathy I’m constantly drowning in.
All of my teacher’s know this. I believe, by now, they’ve come to terms with the fact that they can’t change me, that my state of misery is pretty much unalterable and their efforts towards making me in a proud Morton students are all entirely in vain. They’ve accepted it now and have moved on to giving me crap for it.
The nicknames are there, the snooty comments, they eye-rolling, the mocking snickers at my comments, are all there. But today, I got the mother of comments. I got a comment that might’ve been delivered to be insulting, but that I took as a compliment.
Let me explain the story:
It was English class, and because finals are close and it’s the last hour of the day, our teacher didn’t really have anything plan. There was fierce debate over whether we should go visit the book fair going on in the Great Room (yes, my school has a Great room. I don’t know why they call it that; nothing great ever happens there) or we should stay in class, review something for a few minutes, and then do nothing. I petitioned to go to the book fair because I wanted to get out of the class for a new environment to trudge through, and when our teacher turned to ask a student (I suppose she made some negative comments toward the idea that caught his attention) what her opinion was on the topic, she gave a cynical, apathetic answer. Now, this student and I have had a few congregations over snarky remarks in gym class, so I made a comment about how I was starting to rub off on her to which my English teacher said this:
“Oh no, Sarah, no one can touch your level of cynicism. You’re way up there. You’re the Queen of Vinegar. You’re like nothing I’ve ever seen.”
My English teacher is much like an older, more refined, happier version of myself in which he is sarcastic and cynical periodically. Knowing that, we can assume he meant this as an insult. I, however, am going to take it as a compliment, as the best compliment I’ve gotten all year.
Much Love and Cynicism,
Sarah.
*All-black because that’s the uniform policy, logo-less because the uniform policy also prohibits stars on logos to be visible on the shoe. I walk into the school one day wearing the same shoes I’ve been wearing all year to be stopped by a security guard who asked me to lift up my cuffs and show her my shoe. In seeing the logo, she sent me to the Dean’s office where a secretary with an Australian accent told me I either get LAC (don’t know what it stands for, but it’s an equivalent to in school suspension) or I get the logos off my shoes. So, I sat in the Dean’s office, fuming, ripping off the logos from my shoes, sending the whole system death wishes. I’m still pissed about it.
