About a month ago, my Psychology class started studying unit 2. At the onset of this unit, our teacher smiled apologetically and said, “Now, I feel it’s only fair to warn you before we start. When you’re studying psychological diseases and their symptoms, you’ll start diagnosing yourself with every chemical imbalance and disease you read about. You don’t have them, OK? Everyone feels depressed sometimes, and everyone has trouble concentrating at times, and everyone gets the shakes occasionally… it doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you, OK? So don’t stress about it.”
At the time, this sounded like a really weird warning. Was she sure the entire class would start diagnosing themselves with everything we studied? But… why would we do that? It didn’t sound like a very rational — or likely — thing for us all to start doing. As a result, I completely disregarded this warning… and let my guard down.
I haven’t been feeling well today. It’s probably one of those all-too-common winter bugs, but a really weird one: no coughing, no sneezing, no sore throats, no aching joints. Instead, I feel like I’m just… not functioning. It’s hard to say that, because I clearly am getting by. It’s just that there’ve been so many little lapses in… functioning… and since we were studying neural diseases all morning they seemed a lot more significant than usual. Read on…
I am becoming increasingly sure that my History teacher’s goal in life is to establish his own Democratic People’s Republic. How do I come to a crazy conclusion like this, you ask? One thing: “re-education classes”. After school, every afternoon, for those year 11 History students who aren’t “good citizens”.
It all began on Tuesday, when we were given a wonderful assignment. In pairs (”like on Sesame Street”), we were to research and formulate a ten-minute presentation on a topic which would be assigned to us. It could take any form so long as we got the information across “in a coherent format understandable to the populace at large”, was “pretty”, and used primary sources and more than one viewpoint. It was then that one of my classmates, Terence, noticed the unusual heading at the bottom of the page — “Why are we doing this?” Read on…
Cats don’t have consciences. Of course, I knew this before today, so it’s not exactly a revelation. It’s just that today I got a lot of proof.
Extremely early this morning (when I’d only been sleeping for an hour), my cats had a fight in my room. They always fight, because they hate each others’ guts, and usually the situation can be easily defused. I yell at Tigger (because Tigger’s always the aggressor), he scarpers, Caper sidles up for a cuddle to comfort herself, and all is well with the world. Tigger has obviously never felt any guilt about it, but what happened in today’s fight was — to me — so horrifying that, just today, it rankles. Read on…
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