School's In Session

Whenever the school year starts up, I'm reminded of why it's good to be 24 (...because I have to be reminded). School really is "out forever," and the kid-in-me's dream is realized. However, I wouldn't have been a true dork as a kid if I wasn't also slightly excited about going back. Granted, I wouldn't have complained if summer went on forever, of course, but if I had to leave it anyways, I used to figure I might as well embrace the change. And admit it, sometimes getting back to the grind, showing off your new jeans and pencil sharpener, and flopping down on a plastic seat before a chalkboard to "learn" (rather than a couch before a TV to "veg"), has its own charms too. Learning is vital to..... Oh? What's that? The teachers are gone? ...

The coast is clear! ... School can kiss my Pog-pocketed BUTT! Woo-hoo!

I liked school, because I was a dork and I enjoyed getting teased, but back in the 90s every kids commercial made school out to be "capital-L-amo bro" and "totally not radical brah" where every male teacher was half asleep like Ben Stein, every female teacher was a decrepit relic crow of the 19th century, every bus driver was out to kill you for "the things he did in Nam" and every lunch lady was out to poison you for her own sick pleasure. NOT cool! Those adults? They just don't GET it man! "WORD!" Every kids movie made it out to be Auschwitz ("Be quiet or I'll lock you in the CHOKEY!"). It's a place where all you boys get to be "ex-cel-lennnt!" and "bad!" and "on a mission... without permission!" ...only to end up living in the principal's office (me) ...and all the girls get to be chatty, ditzy, frizzy-haired, elitist, snotty "Mean Girls"... only to end up crying in the bathrooms. Listen to Sonic: "School is LAME-O... bro!" So eat Bubble Tape!

 

WTF? Anwyays... it was inevitable, but it certainly wasn't all it was cracked up to be. Every year you just had to get back into it... back to TI-108 calculators and Weekly Readers, to colored notebooks and Trapper Keepers... back to cafeteria followed by recess, plastic trays and tater tots followed by short rope swings and blazing metal slides... back to girls with their Lisa Frank backpacks and boys with their Sketchers Hot Lights... back to classroom fish and "Great Job!" stickers, to strange clapping games and sitting on the carpet, to Crayola 45-packs, scented markers, and Sharpies you can get high from smelling... back to dorky, colorful cutouts of happy ethnically and capably diverse kids gracing the covers of everything like no other reality is allowed...

Get back to music class "recorders" and maracas, art class scrubs and sponges, gym class bean bags and "stretching stations"... back to having a desk with your name on it and a tiny shelf space underneath where you can store your notebooks, glasses case, retainer, and used gum (for later)... back to "show and tell" where the only act you really care about is your own... back to a place where the bathroom is officially called "the boys'/girls' room" and you have to sign a piece of paper just to go to it, or "bring along a friend"... 

So get back to the pecker-order, to butthead boys and know-it-all girls, to jocks who were untouchable and nerds who probably should've worn a cup that day (...ouch...) ...back to class clowns and the girls who tell on them for drawing penises on worksheets (true story), to popular girls who inevitably wanted you dead and popular boys who inevitably stole your erasers... back to front row teacher's pets and back row Kurt Cobains-in-training, to dorks who picked their nose and ATE IT and preps who sanitized their own desk every day and refused to ever step foot in the bathroom... back to quiet kids you have to keep an eye on, shy girls with no name who sit in the corner, and true aces who raise their hands in class only to burp... LOUDLY.

Yep, that's school, and you had to go back there... back to learning stuff you'd be forgetting in time for next summer.