Claudius the God will Never be as Famous as I, Claudius.
By Aoki Lee Simmons
I turned the page, praying I was near the end of the chapter. The writing was leaden and uninspired. Simply facts connected by overused conjunctions, and, or, and also. Black Tuesday, October 29th was the day the stock market crashed and it triggered the great depression. Also Herbert Hoover's popularity fell as he failed to address the exponentially mounting crisis.
Uncapping my highlighter, and illuminated the Black Tuesday fact; I replaced the cap, thought better of it, removed the cap again and illuminated the whole damn paragraph. Highlighting is such a tricky business, don't highlight for an entire page? Well, you feel like you haven't done enough so then highlight too much, and it defeats the whole thing. That conundrum of highlighting left me more hopeless than before I'd thought of it. I'll often do that, think of something then wish I hadn't thought of it, and be further distressed by the fact that there is no unthinking of one's previous thoughts. I could hear the rain outside, and it punctuated my mood in a perfect example of pathetic fallacy. I stored it up in my head for AP Language, the next time the teacher asked for an example of pathetic fallacy that wasn't from Act I of King Lear.
I'm really not a Shakespeare fan, though that might be taboo to say in AP Language. Reading Shakespeare takes effort, a dictionary handy, and a list of literary terms tattooed into one's brain. And it's still not enjoyable after all that, except for Romeo and Juliet, which, as it were, was the most scandalous thing in my middle school library. Shakespeare will never write anything else I thought mildly, and that was perfectly ok with me. I don't think his death was so great a loss and countless highschool students forced to trudge through Macbeth would likely agree.
I closed my eyes, because I was not only tired but tired of looking at the same sentence about poor old unpopular Herbert Hoover, and I listened for a change in the pattern of the rain, but it remained constant. No harder or softer than the moment before, hitting the ground in consistent rhythm. I leaned back and heard my old wooden chair creak; one day I knew I would break this chair. Break it just by sitting in it. It was bought for me when I was too young to use it, and now I had begun to grow out of it, my height too great and my athletic limbs too heavy for it's nimble seat and slender legs. It had been built for the slim fragile girl my mother perhaps imagined I might become. I always sat in it recklessly; throwing myself into it, stretching, draping my entire body this way and that; draping my arms over the back. I almost needed a cigarette just to show how very nonchalant I was, not only about my chair but also about my health, as though I knew both body and chair would break soon and didn't care to preserve either.
I titled my head back and allowed myself to examine my exact level of my personal pity. It was a Saturday night, and I was sitting here, studying the Great Depression. How apt. My classmates were out living; breathless and relieved after their mom nearly caught them making out behind their shed with a boy two grades older or crying and laughing over the toe they just stubbed against the doorjamb of a senior student's un-parentally supervised split level suburban house at the absolute best party ever. It was not that I wanted to be there, doing that. Those were not head spaces I longed to occupy. Nor shoes I yearned to fill. But I envied the vitality their constant excitement brewed. The evasive drug of adrenaline, in addition to whatever other drugs they might be taking. After all, the most terrible thing my poor mother might catch me doing is reading -oh dear- Voltaire's Candide, or worse a bit of that terrible gossip monger Suetonius! Suffice to say the fear of being caught quietly reading enlightenment era satire or half truthful Roman historians in the living room doesn't exactly get the blood pumping. But then, what would?
