Yesterday was not the best of days. I had sat down and written a great deal of an essay for my english teacher. I read it to Ben, and he enjoyed it, and I was feeling optimistic about it. Then my parents called me away from the computer to go eat dinner. So I do, and after I eat, I try to get back on to finish my essay. However, the complete waste of tissue that is my father was on it, playing Spider Solitare, which is a game designed for people who not only don't have any friends, but their stench and mannerisms forbid that occurance from every actually happening. Obviously, this was my dad's favorite game. I calmly explain that I need ot use the computer for something actually useful, and to please let me use it in a few minutes. He is on for half an hour. At that time, I remind him of our little talk, he baits me, trying to irritate me, trying to push my buttons. Then he asks me for a hug. Bullfuckingshit. You just sat there and mocked me for upwards of 10 minutes, you think I want to touch you? So I tell him no repeatedly and that I am going to go in my room and close the door until the time in which he has gone upstairs and I don't have to deal with him. So I wait maybe 5 minutes, just to make sure, and when I walked back towards the computer room, I noticed the door was closed. I was on the phone to Mike at the time, so just before I opened the door, I declared in a loud voice, "I swear, if there is a person on the computer, I will scream." My mom was on. She knew I needed the computer, it was her who helped me get Dad off the computer. I screamed. I said I would, so I did. So, finally, I get back on the computer. Enormous sighs of relief. Until I look on to the desktop and realize my essay isn't there. My fucking father deleted it. I had one of my crying jags and laid my head down on the table and cried for 20 minutes. It was as if they were basically saying, "Yeah, we know how hard you've worked and we don't really care."

Quote for the Entry: (Ok, fine I'm cheating, but this is my essay, and I'm really proud of it. I know most of you won't take the time to read it, but I feel better just about posting it.)

"Microcosm and Heartbreaks

I wouldn�t have gotten caught, but he didn�t come back to class. He was too embarrassed. The teacher, a huge neurotic mass known as Mrs. Woblehorst, sent one of the more blatant brown-nosers to go look for him and find out why he didn�t come back to class. My palms became sweaty as I waited for the inevitable call slip summoning me to the office. It came, and under the accusing stares from my guiltless classmates, I packed up my things and left. He was in the principal�s office, and as soon as I entered, he raised a quivering finger and declared in a nasal, piercing, high pitched voice, �She�s the one who did it, Mrs. Powell, she�s the one that beat me up.� Thus began my long and arduous journey through the public school system. While the law disguises it as a means to fill us with �useful information� that we �can use later in life,� I can see its true purpose. The social interactions forced in the public school system, a microcosm of the real world, allows us to slowly become aware of the world around us and how to work with it, without the jagged knives, hypodermic needles, and murderers, while the �information� such as the quadratic formula and how to diagram a sentence, will never truly serve us, unless we can figure out how to make some type of weapon out of the muffins we made in Home Ec. The time spent in the learning process is actually quite wasted. The most valuable things are better taught on late night phone conversations with your crush, or a screaming fight with a friend. The thing that prepared me the most for adulthood was learned on the playground, not on the blackboard.

Public school seems to be a ripening place for the village idiot. While this often times made me feel like taking a bit of natural selection into my own hands, it in the end taught me patience and tolerance to the lower end of the mental chain. I had quite a problem in relating to people because most of the time, as I felt like I couldn�t have a decent conversation with them. Being forced to listen to a vapid attempt at poetry by a socialite (that included the sentence, �My shoes are pretty like a sunset,� ) made me want to pour some chlorine into the gene pool, yes, but it was necessary. Later in life, when I have a moronic co-worker in my face, questioning my spelling on �psychosomatic�, I will remember how I dealt with the socialite, and promptly tune the co-worker out. Idiots don�t get wiser, they just get jobs supervising you.

Boys have always been an endless source of fascination. With their odd peeing rituals, absorption with large groups of men beating each other, and their ability to find new ways to hurt themselves everyday, they probably could have fit under the previous paragraph, but their involvement with me deserves its own. Despite my lowly social status, the current number of boyfriends stands at 18. They just don�t learn, do they? I, however, do. I learned that I can stand on my own, and that boys are for amusement only. For example, in the third grade there was a boy named Greg who was totally infatuated with me. In typical boy manner, he told me this by stealing my backpack and pulling my hair until I cried. This was a very useful experience for later, when I had to start picking up on slightly subtler techniques. The next year, a boy named Josh fell for me. He took a slightly different tactic and just followed me around everywhere. I found this irritating to no end, especially when he kept turning up in the library which was my sanctuary, as the people that I wanted to avoid didn�t even know what a library was. I finally just got fed up, and with my finely-tuned social skills, turned around and yelled, �Leave me alone, you freak!� While this was definitely not the best way to deal with the situation, it led me to greater understanding of the male psyche. As in, you can�t completely decimate their egos. This made the ensuing relationships much better.

Another thing the public schools system gave me, other than some cuts and bruises, was the knowledge that I had to be humble and not gullible. My mother is a highly idealistic person who looks at the world through rose-colored glasses. She taught me to be polite, return my library books on time, to be proud of my differences and knowledge, and that good always triumphs. This was a great disservice to me, as no one really returns their library books on time, much less are proud of the differences. The cleverer ones learn to hide them, and the reason is bullies. Bullies are stupid, and they realize that you are smart. They also realize that if they let you get out from underneath their thumb, you can build long distance weapons and hurt them from far away, where they can�t sucker punch you. So they sucker punch you while you still don�t know how to make nuclear weapons. For instance, Sara, a girl who was in my 2nd and 3rd grade class, had most of her abilities in places other than in her skull. She somehow thought it was my fault that I was smarter, so it was her mission to physically extract karma from my flesh simply because I didn�t need to have the 4�s multiplication tables explained to me 14 times. There are Saras everywhere, the type of people who ruin your science project just because they picked theirs out of a trash-can on the way to school, or rather, sabotage your promotion because you orchestrated that jack-pot of a deal. I�m glad I�m smart, but I don�t have to be ostentatious about it. My mother also taught me that values always shine through, and yet, again and again this was disproved on the playground. For example, there was a girl named Jamie who was exceptionally pretty and popular. Obviously, I wanted to be her friend. Everyone did. Well, she told me that if I gave her the dessert out of my lunch everyday for a month, then she would invite me to her birthday party. Of course I accepted, and for the entire month prior to her birthday, I gave her my dessert, thinking that the birthday cake would be far sweeter than home-made brownies from my mom. Well, Jamie never did invite me. I figured she just forgot, or that she ended up not having enough room, but that wasn�t it. She just used me. I have since then had people try to blatantly take advantage of me, but because of Jamie and a few others, I am now jaded and demand money upfront.

Throughout me life, I will continue learning things. Not to say that I will be studying the Pythagorean theory once I graduate, but that is not the only type of knowledge, as I have revealed in this essay. As life brings me into new and different situations everyday, I am always growing, and always will be.

School lets us learn how to fight with our fists instead of grenades. It teaches us politics: the tyrant that is the teacher on a power trip. Public relations when we have to spin doctor a break-up, and it even give us the illusion of control that is the student congress. It teaches us how to deal with moronic bank tellers who can�t count, and the panhandlers with the, �Amazing deals!� While we can put paste into the seat of the bully during art class in 3rd grade, we realize we have to learn how to get him fired from his job once we get into the real world. Public school may seem frustratingly ridiculous, but it prepares us for the worst outside the playground fence."

- Me

So whaddja think?