See the Chortling Schoolgirl!
Oh, Loves.
The world has been shaken and has fallen over on its head and in some strange
and stunning progression of disjointed voices and hazy faces I have realized
that life has never been quite what I thought it to be at all. School Life. School Jessi.
This is to offer a hearty and high salut to School Now In Session--this is all
the fierce yawl my tired heart can muster, because absolutelynothingisthesame.
I believe it is different for me than for many of you, because I once loved so fiercely
this insular Humanities community of deardear teachers and core Humanities classes
and brilliant electives and never-tiring bleeding-eye'd "overachievement," and now understand that most of the glory was just some neccesary structural imposition of my mind and everything is so very cold and real now.
It is all gone. All gone up in rust and a little pile of water sitting inauspiciously by a drainpipe.
Sometimes I fear the apathy and crawling laziness skirking 'round inside of me,
because I am afraid that if such demons were e'er allowed to blossom everything
that I had once loved and held precious and white and pure and dear would
go up in bubbles: Eutrophication of the soul!
But it hasn't happened quite like that.
I stayed up quite late last night, attempting to pound out sentence-by-sentence analyses of pragmatism (AP Government!) and attempting to flay myself whole and bare on the written page for some teacher who surely has his own life and own secrets and own quiet hatred for being forced to do anything. And I went to sleep without writing an essay, and the teacher was not there today, and due to strangestrange scheduling conflicts, I shall only have the class twice a week anyway. I should feel bad. I should feel horrible. I should not be living with the lightness of soul that I now carry within me.
I am waiting to feel creeping guilt when I go through the age-old motions
of comparing my stack of scrawled Biology outlines with my tablemate's,
but alas, it has become clear that for the first time I hold two pages for each
paperclipped pile of her eight-to-sixteen. And it does not bother me.
No emotional response whatsoever.
I have done what I have done, and although it might not have been all that I could do,
it was all that I found sense in doing.
Is this dreadful?
This weariness towards that whole world (and you see! I can't even put myself in the midst of it anymore! I, who once professed having no life and no soul outside of school!) is so new to me.
Shall I die and wave some pale ghost reply to the glittering halls of True Academe
before ever having left these dreadful shores?
I feel as if I have been holding out for The Colleges for so long.
I don't want my sparks of excitement to go away.
Everything is impossibly bizarre, my TASPers.
My schedule is as follows:
Senior Seminar (This means make a Big Project and impress Community Members.)
AP U.S. Government & Politics
Calculus--Regular! (Featuring 35+ Glaze-eye'd individuals! O, how I miss my former Pre-AP brood! If only I could do the Leibniz like I love the history of Newton!)
AP Biology (This class is full of drunkards and a boy who once believed me when I told him the name for the golgi body was "anus.")
AP Chemistry (O, Ye Recordbreaker! Enter Mr. Bracken, surely the world's most brilliant chemistry teacher, stolen from his own home school especially to start a world-renowed Chemistry program here, in the midst of new urbanist glory. And he burns things, and people love him. The end result of all of this shameless periodic propaganda? Over 65% of our Senior Class is enrolled in AP Chemistry. This equates to 4 full class sections with 28 individuals in each. Somehow, despite our academic striving, I feel quite sick...!)
5th period
6th period
7th period
And then there comes the void.
O, horror vacui!
And I've no more classes. Not even a lunch.
Just an empty wandering sensation at 11h00 or so, for I am left to either find
ways to fill 5th-&-6th-&-7th periods with less desirable but oh-so-highschool classes
like AP-PHYSICS-LEARN-NOTHING! or GERMAN ONE! or NEWSPAPER!
These things, in the post-first-day-glow of retrospective lucidity, do not seem so terrible,
but something in me, something which I cannot or will not explain to my questioning and sympathetic peers, wants to go home, and wants to have quiet afternoons without the screech of faux acquaintances and the throb of my brain trying to digest some "independent" reading in some halogen den of moral laxity sulking under the moniker "Study Hall." And I am sick of jeering and pounding fists at the poor guidance counselors whose kindly telephone calls reverberate off the walls of my house all summer long to announce conflict after conflict after conflict after cancellation. I'm just so weary of it.
Everything seems peeling and fake,
and I'm still worried that it is real and the problem is with my vision.
Is this so terrible?
I am just dreadfully, dreadfully afraid of how disconnected I feel.
And I grow more worrisome to think that I like it,
and that this much more viable community still sustains me.
But am I mad with all this half-school-day dreaming?
Indeed, I am slated to attend my Orientation at the Illustrious Ohio State University
on Wednesday, which (hopefully!) shall furnish my still-foggy mind with a retinue
of classes (two or three college courses) that my school cannot provide. Hurrah for Post-Secondary, and for being a half-teenage-half-denizen-of-a-notorious-state-university. All hail the unabashed pragmatism of myintended selections! Courses in logic! Introductory Sanskrit! Philosophy, and so much of it!
Obscure branches of art history, entire courses dedicated to the literature of Byzantium!
O, and what an escape it seems!
I once wrote of Iago, and of some metaphoric rope in Othello serving both a noose and an escape.
Am I taking such a risk, in simply walking away and attempting something different?
I fear that my initiation into some amorphous and unnamed realm between
the worlds of High School and College will be different, but perhaps not be terrible.
If any of you, in all of your
wisdom, perceive that I am about to drown, pleaseplease do not let me go under!
This is as far out, and as far indulgent, as I have ever let my formerly
cloistered & frustrated self to wade, and I am not quite sure how much I should
trust my own test of the water.
Comecome, riptide.
I dearly hope that this has made finite amount of sense, and I apologize for being
to stunned and silly to transliterate correctly. I miss my dear teachers who have fled
for other schools, I am suddenly repulsed by the idea of knowing so many of the faces
come bobbling down the halls, all that I once worked for has proven itself to be a pragmatic
sham, and I have made a decision to invest my interests in my interests, which
makes it awfully difficult to continue doing pretty tricks for
a half-attentive administration.
Oh, frustration. I am sorry for all of this sinking gloom.
I have never before known a silent 2h22 so close to September,
and believe me, this newfound freedom is bizarre.
Any and all moral and spiritual and existential advice,
as well as any tales of scholastic glory in places far less
column'd and far more academic than dread Ohio,
would be appreciated x very large numbers.
And I hope and shall continue hoping, forever & always, that the lives of all the
rest of you are churning along beautifully and ohcollege! and ohwe'regrowingold!
I cull strength from the knowledge that perhaps we are all a bit dangerous relaxed
and vexingly apprehensive about all of this alltogether. We will endure! And also conquer.
(Just like Pruitt Igoe?)
Your Frantic and Sleepless Friend,
Jessi Holler.
Post-Script: I miss all of us together quite dreadfully, but the coming of this school beast has made it all the more apparent. Was it just another illusion that we wrought? It seemed so tangible, rich, and substantial, everything there at Danforth! And in light of this, I do suppose that I have an evaluation to be writing...! Adieu, adieu!
Post-Post-Script: OH, MICHAEL AND EMILY. I'd wrap you in my aching sympathies if school was/is as disorienting for you as it was for me. Such a Monday. At least we are all groaning together, yes?
The world has been shaken and has fallen over on its head and in some strange
and stunning progression of disjointed voices and hazy faces I have realized
that life has never been quite what I thought it to be at all. School Life. School Jessi.
This is to offer a hearty and high salut to School Now In Session--this is all
the fierce yawl my tired heart can muster, because absolutelynothingisthesame.
I believe it is different for me than for many of you, because I once loved so fiercely
this insular Humanities community of deardear teachers and core Humanities classes
and brilliant electives and never-tiring bleeding-eye'd "overachievement," and now understand that most of the glory was just some neccesary structural imposition of my mind and everything is so very cold and real now.
It is all gone. All gone up in rust and a little pile of water sitting inauspiciously by a drainpipe.
Sometimes I fear the apathy and crawling laziness skirking 'round inside of me,
because I am afraid that if such demons were e'er allowed to blossom everything
that I had once loved and held precious and white and pure and dear would
go up in bubbles: Eutrophication of the soul!
But it hasn't happened quite like that.
I stayed up quite late last night, attempting to pound out sentence-by-sentence analyses of pragmatism (AP Government!) and attempting to flay myself whole and bare on the written page for some teacher who surely has his own life and own secrets and own quiet hatred for being forced to do anything. And I went to sleep without writing an essay, and the teacher was not there today, and due to strangestrange scheduling conflicts, I shall only have the class twice a week anyway. I should feel bad. I should feel horrible. I should not be living with the lightness of soul that I now carry within me.
I am waiting to feel creeping guilt when I go through the age-old motions
of comparing my stack of scrawled Biology outlines with my tablemate's,
but alas, it has become clear that for the first time I hold two pages for each
paperclipped pile of her eight-to-sixteen. And it does not bother me.
No emotional response whatsoever.
I have done what I have done, and although it might not have been all that I could do,
it was all that I found sense in doing.
Is this dreadful?
This weariness towards that whole world (and you see! I can't even put myself in the midst of it anymore! I, who once professed having no life and no soul outside of school!) is so new to me.
Shall I die and wave some pale ghost reply to the glittering halls of True Academe
before ever having left these dreadful shores?
I feel as if I have been holding out for The Colleges for so long.
I don't want my sparks of excitement to go away.
Everything is impossibly bizarre, my TASPers.
My schedule is as follows:
Senior Seminar (This means make a Big Project and impress Community Members.)
AP U.S. Government & Politics
Calculus--Regular! (Featuring 35+ Glaze-eye'd individuals! O, how I miss my former Pre-AP brood! If only I could do the Leibniz like I love the history of Newton!)
AP Biology (This class is full of drunkards and a boy who once believed me when I told him the name for the golgi body was "anus.")
AP Chemistry (O, Ye Recordbreaker! Enter Mr. Bracken, surely the world's most brilliant chemistry teacher, stolen from his own home school especially to start a world-renowed Chemistry program here, in the midst of new urbanist glory. And he burns things, and people love him. The end result of all of this shameless periodic propaganda? Over 65% of our Senior Class is enrolled in AP Chemistry. This equates to 4 full class sections with 28 individuals in each. Somehow, despite our academic striving, I feel quite sick...!)
5th period
6th period
7th period
And then there comes the void.
O, horror vacui!
And I've no more classes. Not even a lunch.
Just an empty wandering sensation at 11h00 or so, for I am left to either find
ways to fill 5th-&-6th-&-7th periods with less desirable but oh-so-highschool classes
like AP-PHYSICS-LEARN-NOTHING! or GERMAN ONE! or NEWSPAPER!
These things, in the post-first-day-glow of retrospective lucidity, do not seem so terrible,
but something in me, something which I cannot or will not explain to my questioning and sympathetic peers, wants to go home, and wants to have quiet afternoons without the screech of faux acquaintances and the throb of my brain trying to digest some "independent" reading in some halogen den of moral laxity sulking under the moniker "Study Hall." And I am sick of jeering and pounding fists at the poor guidance counselors whose kindly telephone calls reverberate off the walls of my house all summer long to announce conflict after conflict after conflict after cancellation. I'm just so weary of it.
Everything seems peeling and fake,
and I'm still worried that it is real and the problem is with my vision.
Is this so terrible?
I am just dreadfully, dreadfully afraid of how disconnected I feel.
And I grow more worrisome to think that I like it,
and that this much more viable community still sustains me.
But am I mad with all this half-school-day dreaming?
Indeed, I am slated to attend my Orientation at the Illustrious Ohio State University
on Wednesday, which (hopefully!) shall furnish my still-foggy mind with a retinue
of classes (two or three college courses) that my school cannot provide. Hurrah for Post-Secondary, and for being a half-teenage-half-denizen-of-a-notorious-state-university. All hail the unabashed pragmatism of myintended selections! Courses in logic! Introductory Sanskrit! Philosophy, and so much of it!
Obscure branches of art history, entire courses dedicated to the literature of Byzantium!
O, and what an escape it seems!
I once wrote of Iago, and of some metaphoric rope in Othello serving both a noose and an escape.
Am I taking such a risk, in simply walking away and attempting something different?
I fear that my initiation into some amorphous and unnamed realm between
the worlds of High School and College will be different, but perhaps not be terrible.
If any of you, in all of your
wisdom, perceive that I am about to drown, pleaseplease do not let me go under!
This is as far out, and as far indulgent, as I have ever let my formerly
cloistered & frustrated self to wade, and I am not quite sure how much I should
trust my own test of the water.
Comecome, riptide.
I dearly hope that this has made finite amount of sense, and I apologize for being
to stunned and silly to transliterate correctly. I miss my dear teachers who have fled
for other schools, I am suddenly repulsed by the idea of knowing so many of the faces
come bobbling down the halls, all that I once worked for has proven itself to be a pragmatic
sham, and I have made a decision to invest my interests in my interests, which
makes it awfully difficult to continue doing pretty tricks for
a half-attentive administration.
Oh, frustration. I am sorry for all of this sinking gloom.
I have never before known a silent 2h22 so close to September,
and believe me, this newfound freedom is bizarre.
Any and all moral and spiritual and existential advice,
as well as any tales of scholastic glory in places far less
column'd and far more academic than dread Ohio,
would be appreciated x very large numbers.
And I hope and shall continue hoping, forever & always, that the lives of all the
rest of you are churning along beautifully and ohcollege! and ohwe'regrowingold!
I cull strength from the knowledge that perhaps we are all a bit dangerous relaxed
and vexingly apprehensive about all of this alltogether. We will endure! And also conquer.
(Just like Pruitt Igoe?)
Your Frantic and Sleepless Friend,
Jessi Holler.
Post-Script: I miss all of us together quite dreadfully, but the coming of this school beast has made it all the more apparent. Was it just another illusion that we wrought? It seemed so tangible, rich, and substantial, everything there at Danforth! And in light of this, I do suppose that I have an evaluation to be writing...! Adieu, adieu!
Post-Post-Script: OH, MICHAEL AND EMILY. I'd wrap you in my aching sympathies if school was/is as disorienting for you as it was for me. Such a Monday. At least we are all groaning together, yes?
posted by goodbye, goodbye at 11:01 AM
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