From the Vault

 This is entitled My Wakeup Call is Overdue and was written by my 17 year-old counterpart for a stupid cause and effect assignment in english

     Beep...Beep...BEEP! That is the not so coveted, dreadful sound of morning hitting my ears. Sure, why not another day full of opportunities, but can't it start at ten? My next decision is one of utmost importance, although quite simple in procedure. I can pop out of bed with a spring in my step and prance off to school -just in time to see the sunrise- OR  I can release all my furry and frustration of being so rudely interrupted by slamming my hand down onto my snooze button. The latter is my preferred method and most often practiced. This single event, in which the cosmos lines up and fate seems to inevitably go against my favor, effects my whole day and my very existence as life falls deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole.

     Snooze buttons are magical. When pushed they give the non-morning persons spectacular, ever-so-enjoyable, extra minutes of sleep. But magic is not without consequences. I seem to barter and sacrifice everything for those few minutes. The effects are monumental.

     First comes the good morning shock as I roll over, look at the time and realize I overslept. AGAIN! Then fear sets in. Frantically I run around scrambling to get ready for my day. To compensate for my lack of promptness, breakfast is skipped, on occasion lunch isn't made, my physical appearance does not reach my satisfaction, and homework goes unfinished.

     I'm late! I'm late, for a very important date! I get into the car and speed off to school, literally. Driving while in a bad mood, tired, and late is not a good combination, as it jeopardizes my safety as well as others. Arriving at school I realize that all the snooze-button-resistant-students have taken the good parking spaces. Thus I am forced to the outskirts of the parking lot. This vast distance of asphalt wasteland requires additional tedious time to trek to class, furthermore extending my unpunctual arrival.  Disrupting class is not a relishable experience. It's easy to get behind in class work and feel left in the dark by missing important announcements. Might I add that getting on the wrong side of an educator is not a wise choice if you wish to pursue a successful academic career.

     Being tardy ultimately affects my citizenship grade. My snooze button has put me into a very unpleasant circumstance due to my inability to resist its alluring features. As a member of National Honor Society I am required to retain high CPA in order to graduate from the society. If I get one more zero in citizenship all my hard hours and effort will have been in vain.

     As much as I adore my snooze button, I have realized it does not love me in return. Otherwise it would not have transformed my morning routine into chaos, disorder and panic, made me go hungry, put added stress on my shoulders, blackened my mood, placed me into a continual hurried, anxious state, jeopardized my academic success, and so on. However weary, exhausted, drained, tired, or sleepy I am in the morning it is pressingly necessary that have a strong resolve to conquer this foe and wake Alice up from this crazy, awful wonderland.

You Got Dissed

Romantic comedy. You Got Mail. Guy says to girl, “wouldn’t it be wonderful if I could pass all my zingers to you? And then I would never behave badly and you could behave badly all the time, and we’d both be happy. But then, on the other hand, I must warn you that when you finally have the pleasure of saying the thing you mean to say at the moment you mean to say it, remorse inevitably follows.”

Well Kathleen Kelly, I too wish that I could say what I want to say when it I want to say it to whom it may concern’s face. But I’m not that brave. My tongue may be able to dish out one or two quick retorts, but I don’t not trust it to hold its own after about ten seconds of exchange, and where am I then? Six feet deeper than I started. Even if my remark is a success, I can't stand the idea of making someone dislike me. You can inherently hate me all you want, profile me, judge me, think I’m weird, that’s between you and yourself inside your head, but openly plant malice in a relationship with another human being? That’s harder to swallow. Although… a spoon full of sugar DOES help the medicine go down. Sarcasm. Sarcasm is the little loop-hole in this predicament that lets you express exactly what you want to say without the guilty emotions that come with saying it. Even better, the receiver of sarcasm often can't comment on your remark without sounding totally irritable or on the rag (“don’t YOU take that tone with me”). What tone? :D

But most of the time my sarcastic comments are muttered under my breath or clearly vocalized when alone. The younger Kaitlin used to argue with her parents about emptying the dishwasher or the trash but as time went on realized how tiring, draining and unproductive it was. So later on when I was told to do something I didn’t want to do, I said yes, got them off my back, then usually forgot the chore and suffered the wrath of parental disappointment instead. I blame dirty dishes with my current struggles of defending my points of view. That is when I have them. Most of the times issues seem too trivial to argue about. The French philosopher Voltaire said, “ I may not agree with what you say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.” My philosophy seems to be, “ I’ll talk if I agree with what you say, but if its different I’ll definitely be dead before I get to say it.”

Sometimes a zinger, dis, insult, slam, retort, whatever you want to call it, simply fells good to say. One specific memory comes to mind where I got a second chance to say exactly what I wanted. I was walking from my car into the grocery store. Near the entrance to the left of where I was heading was a group of 12 teenage boys. The fact that they were hanging out at a grocery and radiating the “we’re too cool to know what to do with ourselves” vibe I assume they were ninth graders. As I approached the store I prepared myself to expect some sort of remark, because stupidity always flows from the previously stated vibe. I was right, as I walked past then one or two of them cat called and whistled at me. Its sad that that’s what I should except being a 19 year old girl, alone, walking past pubescent idiots. 

As I got the first item on my list a perfect retort came to mind. And oh how I was mad I hadn’t thought of it sooner. Give them a piece of their medicine. It wasn’t that it took a while to think of, in fact it came to me quickly after I asked myself what I would have liked to have done, but it was the fact that I was only able to think of it until after the pressure and reality of saying it was gone. Twenty minutes later I walk out of the store with groceries in hand and hear the same degrading whistle being blown in my direction. I turned and faced the group of boys maybe 30 feet away, looked at the whistler and said, “You whistling at me? I'm surprised cuz by the looks of you, I thought you were gay.” Bamm! I attacked his manhood in front of his friends. The hilarity of my comeback triggered laughter that then turned into taunting “ooooh” s at the boy. I kept walking and heard him yell “blah blah blah blah…stupid girl…bitch.” After the initial stock of having a stranger cuss me out and dismay of no more planned responses my lips curled up in a smile. Swearing: the single last resort for the desperate soul when attempting to offend. I just kept walking to my car got in and drove home. I won. And didn’t even feel bad about it, take that Joe Fox and Kathleen Kelly.

A Little Poem

Can we still bring joy to each other’s lives?

I don’t know.

I don’t know if I want to know.

Can we put all those warm summer nights under lock and key? Hidden deep underground, unspoiled,

Unable to tarnish with time.

Let’s meet tomorrow,

As strangers.

No shared past to hinder friendship.

That I could live with.

Not this.

Not the memories of how happy I was


heres a link for those more inclined to listen to poetry about the same said subject:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AN6n-lJyv-A

Engish iz knot phun

            Now if I was the English major protégée that I’m not, this would be my opening thesis in which I would state in one sentence something intellectual that I am about to discuss for the next few paragraphs, but the thing is, words are not my forte.  They're more like the joker to my inner Batman. I’m a very visual person (oh I also really like parentheses, sometimes I have parentheses paragraphs, not something an English teacher would be fond of mind you) so, where was I right, visual person.... I love doodling, painting, tie-dye, the Sunday funnies, color-coding my classes, numbers/ math, but letters and words I just don’t get. English rules are set rules only because they "just are that way." 

          I still don’t get the i-before-e-except-after-c-rule, (does it mean i is before e but after c or that it’s before e only when not after c, the except part throws me off…) and it’s not like spell check has helped me improve my spelling knowledge. Often times there’s more red than white on my word document it looks like I've murdered someone and tried to clean it up with my research paper... But numbers…ahhhhh…numbers stay the same. Any number plus two will ALWAYS be two more than what you started with, it doesn’t matter if its 42 or 87 or 593,015! Add two and YOU’LL HAVE TWO MORE. I mean come on it’s how the game is played. There’s no two-before-three-except-after-four rule. Granted ∞+2=∞ but at least I care enough to actually KNOW that and I understand why it is, but for the sake of this discussion, “ that (the ∞ thing) is beyond the scope of this class.”

To demonstrate my "love" of English (wow I'm really on a using-quotations frenzy tonight aren’t I…) I shall recall an epiphany I had in fifth grade during "reading" class. We were learning about adjectives and adverbs and stupid names and parts of clauses, and who knows what, and it just came to me, like inspiration from the heavens. All these rules and names are unnecessary complications; all words are nouns, end of story.  There you have it. Take the word jump for instance. At first glace it may seem like a verb, but would be mistaken, because a-hum (gotta clear the throat for this breakthrough) it is a noun. Oh poor undeveloped brain I shall explain, jump is a word a word is a thing and a thing is a noun. By definition a noun IS a person place or THING, so there. Problem solved. Time for recess. Be back in 15.