AnonymousCoworker

When I was in middle school a few things happened that brought me further from innocence, and closer to the depraved soul that sits plucking away at this monument to egotism we call blogging.

One day a girl who was in orchestra with me (that’s right. I was in orchestra. I wanted to play the drums, but in the 4th grade, when you play all the instruments and decide what you want to play for good, I picked the drums. The music teacher said I couldn’t because my older brother picked the drums the year before and my mom wouldn’t be able to stand 2 people practicing drums in the same house. I wonder if she would have said the same to Josef and Michael Haydn. So I picked the first instrument that I saw, the violin. I spent the next 4 years learning how to read music and play the violin, but never played. It was literally my silent protest. I learned how to “air bow” just millimeters above the strings. My finger positions were decent, at least. Had I actually touched the bow to the strings I probably would have played just as well as everyone else. But I didn’t want to play violin. I hated it, and thus, I protested by not playing.) came to school with a beer in her lunch.

She hadn’t brought it on purpose, (orchestra kids were meganerds) but her mom apparently had grabbed for a Barq’s and gotten a Bud instead. Well, this girl, let’s call her D, absolutely lost it. She pulled the beer out of her lunch bag and opened it without looking. When she brought it up to her mouth to drink it, D must’ve smelled something different and looked at the can. As realization slowly creeped up to her eyebrows, she let out a short and quick, “Aak!” She shoved the beer away from herself and started turning the shiniest red I’ve ever seen.

D started sobbing and saying over and over and over again, “I’m getting expelled!” We tried to console her and told her to take the beer to a teacher (ACWGF, I know what you would have done if a student handed you a beer…) but she wanted nothing to do with it. Finally, as D was crawling under the table to hide, which should let you know enough about her daily routine than I could tell you in 2000 words, a teacher came over to see what the commotion was. We explained what we thought had happened, handed over the full, but open, beer, and went back to eating lunch. I imagined then that the teacher poured the beer out down a sink in the kitchen of the cafeteria, but now I know better.

The other thing that sort of relates to this is that every year of middle school our Vice Principal would come around and explain the school disciplinary code to us. Every year she would put our minds at ease by telling us the story of the girl with the knife. One day a girl came to school. She had been getting severely teased every day by many of the kids at the school (great job there VP. Top notch. Just let a kid get teased until it escalates into what I’m about to tell you. Seriously, does anyone get fired anymore?) One day, one of the kids managed to sneak a huge knife into her binder. She opened her binder in her first class, screamed, wet her pants, and started crying because she thought she was going to be expelled. That was the VP’s way of letting us know we shouldn’t get upset over things that weren’t our fault. I always took away the morals that, a) the VP wasn’t doing her job, b) the girl probably got teased until the end of time because the story kept getting retold, and c) bullying was sanctioned by the school de facto because she never told a part of the story where anybody ever did anything about it.

The reason I bring this up is because the genuinely good kids always flipped out over things that had nothing to do with them. Yeah, you brought the beer in, but no, you didn’t try to drink it, bong it, sell it, or inject it into your veins, and you openly lost your mind at the idea that you had done something wrong, so no, I don’t think you’re going to get into trouble.

So whenever something happens, because I am genuinely a good kid, I try to think rationally instead of going out of my nut. But I always keep in reserve the idea that I could potentially wet my pants out of being convicted for some type of crime.

Can you just imagine it?

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, though there are dozens of pieces of evidence pinning my client to the crime in question, and though two score witnesses put him at the scene, please keep in mind that when my client took the stand he went out of his gourd and defecated all over the floor. Is this something a guilty person would do?”

And then comes the acquittal…