Saturday, April 30, 2011

We all belong

Day 4: The Breakfast Club

Today is Saturday. I am sitting in Saturday detention. All the work I have requires a scientific calculater, and since I couldn't find my purse, and since the business classes apparently don't use the wildly important logarithm and ln functions I'm sitting on my hands with a dinky OfficeMax calsumader trying to rewrite each expression as a single natural logarithm without the LOG or ln buttons. Shiny. The real problem here is not the math, which I'm sure if I could concentrate I would probably find that for part of the assignment I don't really need a calculator, the problem here is the events leading up to my current bodily occupation.
I slept through dinner last night, in fact I slept until about 6:15 this morning. So when I woke up I basically decided NOT to go to this detention. My VP has told me multiple times to call myself in if I'm ever "sick" just so he wouldn't have to punish me with extra Saturdays. I was laying in bed thinking about this and trying to decide when the best time to call would be when I heard Chewbacca bellow his familiar wookie calls. My mother had texted me wondering if I had a detention, and, inexplicably, I said yes. I roll out of bed, get ready, and text her back asking if we can stop and get something to eat. Sometime later, I pull into McDonald's, the bane of my mother's existence, and get in the far line, a poor decision.
-Side Note- Where do I begin to explain my mother? For the moment I'll just say that out in public she gets this strange idea that everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, is out to get her, literally driving because they know that she too is out at that exact moment, and relish the possibility of ruining her day.
Back at the ranch, my mother sees a woman pull into the other line and she freaks because now she will be served before us. My mother is panicking because if I'm late to my Saturday, they won't let me in when I know for a fact that they wait for at least 15 minutes before moving back to the rooms. She will hear none of this. This woman, this McDonald's, I have stolen a precious hour, more like 30 minutes, from her day. Oh God, the work she could have accomplished if she only had 30 more minutes.
-Another Side Note- I think subconsciously my mother hates that McDonald's, and Chillicothe in general, because the site where the restaurant was built used to be a church. A church where we held my sister's funeral.You look outside the northern windows and you can see the place where three generations of my family are buried. Every time she takes me to school, there they are, her father, her brother, and her 3rd daughter. For me it's a constant reminder of the effect unresolved grief has on a family, for her I don't know what it means. Maybe nothing. Sometimes I think about Leah. I think about how my family would be different had she survived. Would my parents have divorced? Where would we be? Would my brothers have been born? I think about her fragile, little bones, her weak heart and lungs crushed by the earth bearing down on the cheap coffin, the only thing they could afford. I have to move on now because crying in front of the Breakfast Club would be unforgettably embarrassing.
Back at the ranch, once I get my food I attempt to zoom out of the place while my mother continues to bitch about the set up of the drive thru. I make a California stop hoping I could make a break for it in the gap in front of me and she starts screaming about the stop sign. Cue an awkwardly positioned stop, dirty looks from other drives and a headache and embarrassment for me. Distraught with the whole morning I leave the car and forget my phone. One helluva morning if I do say so myself. At this point the whole day is labeled Fuck It.
I now have 40 minutes left of this detention. I've got two girls I know and like; three I don't know, but probably don't like; two freshmen, a ginger jock who compared me to Velma (hurr hurr) and an apparent scene kid; the brother of my sister's friend; and the two chaperones, the business and consumer ed teacher and the sub everyone hates. I call him Grumpy. He's quite socially awkward, but the man's got a heart of gold. Since I spend so much time in Saturday detention and in-school suspension, I spend a lot of time with him. Because I'm kind, he talks to me, and if I'm talking I'm not alone in my own head, which is always a good thing.
Damn, this post on hard copy is already almost 3 pages, and I haven't even written about dreams yet.

This dream is only the last section of a larger, longer, stranger dream:

-Spoilers for Mass Effect 2-

I was Commander Shepard and I was returning home to Earth to visit my family before embarking on the suicide mission to the Collector base in the galactic core. My mom's a horticulturist, she loves plants, so I brought her an alien plant. I had it potted in a common adobe pot, but instead of soil the plant lived in sand. Just one little stalk poked out. I remember putting the plant on the window sill above my Grandma's kitchen sink while talking to my mother. We were arguing about something, I think about my career choice, and I decided not to tell her that I probably wouldn't see her again.


In conclusion, all of these posts make it seem like I've got a really strained relationship with my mom. Lulz. Sorry Person-I-hung-up-on-because-I-was-mad-and-depressed-and-feeling-sick.

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