Enough Stress for Life

My eyes fly open. I lie in my bed and look around. It's still dark. When I see my alarm clock, I internally groan. It's 6:54, six minutes before my alarm. Sometimes now, my life seems like a huge train wreck, and keeps getting bigger. Even my sleep cycles are messed up. I feel drowsy, like something woke me up, which is the job of my alarm clock. I look over again, 6:55. Five minutes is better than nothing, I guess.

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP. Turns out I was wrong, five minutes is worse than none. Maybe I'll just hit the snooze button and get ten more minutes.

"<Get up! You're going to be late!>" my mom shouts in chinese. I look over at my alarm clock again. 7:20. I can't tell which is worse; that I always hit the snooze or that the snooze doesn't wake me up. Shoot, I'm school starts at 7:45, and there's always a line a mile long. I jump up, grab the first two articles of clothing and rush downstairs to the kitchen. I eat a banana and rush back upstairs to brush my teeth, then I rush downstairs once again to grab my fifteen pound backpack and sprint, or awkward running, to the car. I turn on the radio to calm my nerves. What kind of school allows every core class to assign a projects all due on the same day. In physical science, a scale model of a house with electricity in every room, extra credit if you add a basement and furniture. In Honors Geometry, we were supposed to tessellate shapes and they all had to be the same size, extra credit if you did it with irregular shapes. In Reading and ELA, you had to write about your entire life's experiences, extra credit if you included quotes from your siblings, parents, and grandparents. In social studies, you and three other students had to emulate what kind of debates that happened during the constitutional convention of the U.S, extra credit, if you did debates other than the ⅗ Compromise, the Great Compromise, and how the chief executive was to be appointed. In science, I lacked many of the materials. In math, irregular shapes are hard to copy, even harder to tesselate. In reading and ELA, my grandparents live in China. And in social studies, all of my group members were slackers, and I wrote the script, filmed, played multiple roles, and edited the video. The past few nights, I had gotten next to no sleep.

As I trudged to class after stopping by my locker, I look at the clock, 7:46. I look at my teacher, Mr. Rehagodt, which I've noticed is an anagram for hater god. Mr. Rehagodt looks up back at me. "Ah, I see you're late, Mr. Guo," As always, he pronounces my name incorrectly. He always says Gueoh, even though I've told him it sounds more like Gouh, and you mash the "o" and the "u" together. I think he says that just to make me angry. He either despises me because he doesn't like me, or that I force him to get up early. When I skipped a grade in math, he was the only one able to teach high school geometry. All of his other classes are after 4th hour. He always assigns me absurd amounts of homework that shouldn't be allowed. I mean seriously, what kind of person assigns you two pages of homework, each with fifty questions, every night. Not to mention that the online textbook crashes every other five minutes and he won't let me borrow a regular textbook. I silently accept his scorching disapproval, while on the inside I'm seething. One minute should not make that much of a difference. I could tell that he had also just arrived by the fact that his coffee has still steaming, and his desk was a mess. His computer wasn't even on yet. Today, as a punishment for being late, Mr. Rehagodt assigned me twice as much homework as he usually does. He spent the entire hour explaining something I already knew over and over and over again so I wouldn't have class time to do my homework.

The next three hours were more or less uneventful. They were my "Gifted and Talented" class or GaT class, my spanish exploratory class, and my Orchestra class. My spanish teacher doesn't give a lot of homework and worksheets, most of the points come from speaking in spanish. While I'm not really fluent, I try more than others. The GaT class doesn't assign any homework, all we do is sit around and do brain teasers. In Orchestra, I'm first chair. I'm not really good, but my mom makes me practice a lot. Next, I have my physical science class. My project sits next to all of the other ones. I overhear a few kids snicker behind me, "Oh look, Josh here to make all of our projects look so bad," I ignore them, as I usually do. It so happens that they were my social studies partners for my project. Today, there is a sub for science. Ugh, today will be boring. He calls the class to order and calls attendance. I shout my name when he gets to me. Then he moves on to drone lifelessly about energy and electricity from the speech that Mr. Abport, prepared for him. The few students that pay attention and ask questions are confused, because the sub, who's name is Mr. Midaoit, doesn't know the answer and dodges the question. I look up at the clock. It's only 11:09 AM, Not even 5 minutes have passed since class started. Sometimes, my life seems so bleak. At times like these I think about my own predicament. I wonder what it'd be like to live with a different family, what it's like to be dead, and if there's a point to life. That last one a a biggie. Sometimes my answer to that is yes, other times the answer is a no. The school counselors say that thoughts like that aren't good, and we should go to them to talk about it. However, sometimes it feels like that my mind to going to shatter like glass under the extreme pressure to do well in life in general. My parents and all of my teachers all have such high expectations for me. One day, it it doesn't relent, I'll pop. Going to the counselors will probably just add to the stress of life. I look up back to the clock, 11:49 AM. Two more minutes before lunch. The sub is still speaking. I finally tune back into the sub, hoping the class would go faster, but the sub is so boring that it makes it seem longer. The sub finally got around to giving out the homework. Since my science teacher knows that we probably learned nothing from the sub, he assigned extra reading and a 5 page worksheet. The online textbook for science is okay, but it is incredibly disorganized. It takes much longer than it should to do everything. Finally the bell rang.