You’d think having breakfast with the principal (and four other people) would be really awful, right? But it’s actually… kinda not the worst thing to ever happen to me at this school.  The whole thing consisted only of eating a donut and talking about myself, which I know, sounds like pure torture, but if someone as socially-stunted as I can survive, I believe you can too.

So pretty much you walk in, get pointed in the direction of the conference room, wait for all of the other nerds to show up, and then proceed to get the 3rd degree about your college plans. Which is fine for everyone else, because most people seem to have pieced together what they want out of life at the young age of eighteen. Amazing. The most awkward part is being asked, out of the blue, to come up with a story. It’s always harder to come up with something when put on the spot, you know? Remember kids, when you run out of things to talk about, just talk about dead wrestlers.

I ended up talking about the moral quandary that were the murals and teaching him a little about knife fighting. I’m no expert, but when the apocalypse comes harking you won’t see me tussling for mere scraps at the bottom of the food chain. No sirree, not me.

I feel like some people who have heard of this whole breakfast thing, or anything else the faculty tries to do for us for that matter,  whether it  has to do with improving the school in a kind of touchy-feely way or something else, kids are really judgy and just let this river of virulent trash come out of their mouths. And then they turn around and complain how bad it is and how much they hate school. Y’know, kinda like me. I mean, I get it, it’s hard to voice a different opinion from everyone else, not only as a teenager, but as an adult too it seems. Unless you have someone to back you up, I guess the assumption is people will jump you in the alleyways for being different. Which is probably true.

Speaking of touchy-feely, remember that green day or whatever it was that the school tried to do last year? Really stuck in my mind, you can tell. And how it only kinda worked? Part of how it went was due to poor planning, but the majority of what went wrong I think is the lack of enthusiasm and zest for life on the student body’s part. Hand to god, it’s like no one cares about anything and it is an amazing thing to see. Seas of tiny children milling around the halls with little more than apathy in their eyes and a dull moan on their lips. Amazing.

It’s just… do they not see everything around them? How amazing the world is? I mean the tiny town of Bolton, Stow, and Lancaster may not seem like much, but its only a small wheel in the cog of life people. What happened to that time when we were kids, and we’d look at the falling snow in utter bewilderment and then go outside and freeze our tiny little sausage fingers? Or the joys of a nice hot beverage and a board game with your family? A pretty face, warm mittens, whiskers on kittens, anything? Whatever happened to any that? Has the world become so commonplace in the eyes of the masses that the gift of life has become meaningless? Even I, a person who knows everything, manages to learn something new everyday.

Check this, the microscopic pattern of a person’s tears changes depending on the emotion the person was feeling at the time. Isn’t that nifty? Do you feel anything? Enlightened? Joyous? Slightly smarter at least?

It’s either just that no one cares about anything anymore (did they ever?) or that we’re too concerned with everyone’s else’s business. Who cares if someone’s “real” or “fake”? If you have that much of a problem with them just stay away from them.

Or maybe it’s that no one has time anymore. High school breaks people. I look around and see all of these stressed, depressed children and it’s the saddest thing. Your teen years should be fun, but what you get here isn’t what you bargained for in reality. You grow up thinking it’ll be a nice place and you’ll learn a bunch of neat things you can use later and life, but then you’re sitting in Geometry thinking “Why… how did this happen?” and realize you’re being taught something that’s useless to you, a person not going into a field that has anything to do with math, instead of something you’re going to have no idea how to do when you’re on your own. Like how to fill out a check. How to sew a button. Basic living.

I didn’t mean to go into an existential quandary over breakfast with our dear principal, and I’m no prime example of “living life to the fullest”, but damn I hate watching people go idly by like this.

So anyway, having breakfast with the principal is okay, I’d recommend it. Free food.