Smile On His Lips and Cuts On His Hips (Jalex)

Thirty Five - Worth It

I’d gone through endless years of school and done a seemingly infinite number of homework assignments, struggling through plenty of crap that I didn’t understand with my sanity relatively uninjured, but, recently, I’d get confused about a difficult math problem and get frustrated with why I was doing it rather than my inability to do it properly.

In sixth grade, I had a great history teacher, probably learned tons, and had a decent enough time being pushed through the curriculum. Problematically, though, five years later, I did not remember any of what those lessons had included. Not only was I unable to recall every detail of the history I had learned that year, but I didn’t even remember what we had studied. Something to do with Buddhism, probably India. Exactly what we’d gone over at the beginning of Junior year, too, and that, that pissed me off. How many hours had I passed in those stupid fucking plastic chairs in sixth grade history, or social studies, as we referred to it then, hearing information that was ejected from my head immediately after I was tested on it? Why listen to lectures to hear the exact same words repeated ages later, the erased information once again registering as new in my mind?

By that point in the year, both the students and instructors of Dulaney were stumbling exhaustedly to the next break, the monotonous days losing their definite edges and blending into a perpetual school day. Connecting notable events to the day they occurred became a struggle since everything got so indistinguishable, the months when Spring Break was over and it was too soon to get excited about summer always depleting everyone of the remaining energy that they could offer to classes. I was running out of fucks to give, so whenever I turned a textbook page to discover that the math problems I still had to do were multi-stepped and complicated, I snapped.

I’d end up frowning at my notebook, pencil slipping through my fingers and over my knuckles, eyebrows pushed together with concentration as my thoughts departed from the assignment and instead focused on its futility. When, exactly, would my extensive knowledge of the parts of the cell improve my life? If I ever reflected on my existence and realized that I had some scientific job – in a cardboard cubicle, surely, since I wasn’t smart enough to be an important scientist – I’d either quit immediately and search for a career that wouldn’t disappoint my teenage self, or have a mental breakdown because of how much of a failure I was. So what was the purpose behind learning about the properties of water?

The answer to that question was both obvious and irritating. I strained for good grades in the subjects that I despised so that my transcript would be impressive and I’d be accepted to decent colleges. The only thing that prevented me from ripping up my math notebooks was the fact that failing a class would give me a deplorable GPA, and I’d go to community college or make minimum wage at Burger King. Both of those options were alarming, so, despite internally convulsing when looking at the numbers that I’d squiggled across so much graph paper, I did my homework and passed my tests and tried to ignore how sad it was that the only unusual events in my foreseeable-future were exams.

It maddened me, though, that I slogged through all this shit for such an idiotic reason. Everything leads up to something else, and high school A’s would only contribute to the next section of my education. College degrees, of course, were viewed as important exclusively by possible employers and pretentious dickheads, so they were also quite essential. Memorizing impractical information that would ultimately be forgotten had been annoying me to such an extreme extent that everything I did suddenly seemed pointless, and I’d be overcome by this idea that nothing had any purpose and I may as well snuggle up in some blankets with my music and never move again, because all the effort I put into school, which controlled most of my life, was insignificant.

But in those instants when everything appeared inane, I searched for an actually meaningful justification for doing all this crap, and recalled the times when I experienced the exact opposite emotions. I sometimes questioned if the good in life should completely outweigh the bad, or if it was worth stressing through the repetitive days to get to the ecstasy-inducing events. When my brain was throbbing with the stupidity of most of what I was forced to do, remembering shouting lyrics and pressing forward with crowds under flashing lights with drums beating in my chest kept me sane.