Quantum Teenager

I need to go to the bathroom

I need to go to the bathroom.

…Ah, much better. Foiled my parents again – I didn’t eat my fiber-enriched cereal all week so that I could waste this time on the can. Now I only have ten minutes left to stare at this blank page before my preordained half-hour is over. Genius.

And very satisfying. I wouldn’t ever, ever tell anyone, but I’ve always enjoyed answering the call of nature. Until I hit preteen (and became self-conscious) I liked to shout “Yes!” whenever my bathroom exploits ended in victory. (Don’t ask what happened when it ended in defeat). Indeed, I find pooping very pleasurable. It must release endorphins, or something.

It would be very embarrassing if somebody were reading this.

 Luckily, nobody can. I keep it well hidden under my mattress. Among other things.

I have an older sister. She  is incredibly nosy, and she goes through my room all the time. So damn typical. That’s why I dislike her with the passion of a thousand burning ogres – she fits in perfectly with our asinine, affected, alchoholic, aggravating, bigoted, brainwashed, cocky, cliquey, depraved, distracted, drug-addicted, egotistical, flippant, phallic-finding, frappaccino-slurping, overexposed, intellectually oppressed, wasteful, self-gratifying, unreliable, unsanitary,  ungrateful, ingrate, inane, intolerant, irrational, lying, weak-willed, shallow, stubborn, silly, slothful, sex-mongering, apish, profligate, perverted, vapid, rabble-rousing, celebrity-gawking, chunky, triple-chinned, yellow-bellied, elder-berry-smelling, dung-smearing, hamster-abusing, excessively flatulent, chattering chimps that consist our youth culture. Well, about half of those might describe me. But! But they all describe my unbearable  sister.

Oh, well. I love her, anyway. 

And yes, I skimmed the American Heritage Dictionary for insulting vocabulary. I cannot describe in a few words the agonies I suffer whenever I endure public spaces. Instead of screaming, “You’re all idiots!” at those guys I saw mindlessly leaping up and down at last night’s Fourth of July concert, pretending to dance, mimicking each other’s strange arm motions, I internalized everything. Oh, what a relief to take a load off! It’s almost as satisfying as pooping.

Almost.

Anyway, Sis won’t find this journal. I keep this thing under my mattress, beneath my…

…

…

…magazine collection. Sis is a tattle-tale. The day she finds this thing is the day that Mom will commit her first homicide. On me. So I’ll know.

You know, even though my time limit -- I think of it as a limit, even though my parents think of it as a bare minimum – even though it’s over, I think I owe you a favor, Journal. I’m not gonna name you Kitty, like Anne Frank, otherwise I’d also have to barf on you -- and then I can’t give you a bath without killing you. But since you helped me get over my hatred of the world by allowing me to expulse a hefty vocabulary at its expense, I’ll confide in you a bit more.

I’m under house arrest. Not legally of course. It’s my name for being grounded. I think I’m too old for grounding, so I call it house arrest.

It’s not just for the dog incident. Really, I think it’s the fault of the federal government.

That’s right. I blame the president. He appoints the judges, and a judge appointed me to my mother, when my parents split. I don’t get along with my mother and sister, so, naturally, I ended up grounded.

 I mean, under house arrest. And the president’s to blame.

My therapist says that I’m unwilling to face my own problems, and thus shunt the blame off to other people. He’s right. I just won’t tell him.

I also don’t take anything seriously. This journal ought to be about serious things, but all I do is fill it up with useless junk. Whatever. I’ll avoid those rip currents of thought that will lead me to a deeper understanding of myself. That would be treacherous. Then I’d have to be hard-working and politically correct and moral and honest and hygienic and many other things. But I want to read Edgar Allan Poe. And play Minecraft.

Ah, Minecraft. You should try playing it sometime, Journal. It’s a very fun game where you do stuff, like mine.  And craft.

I wish I could craft chainmail. Not in the game, in real life. I’m gonna build a forge someday. I’ve always wanted to learn the art of blacksmithing.

Oh, but what is that you ask? You want to know what my desk looks like? I would love to tell you what my desk looks like!

Well, you’re on it. And also that dictionary I was using. And also a few pens, because I tend to run out of ink after writing a couple sentences. Crappy pens. They’re like shoelaces. They work when you have nothing urgent to do, but if you walk everywhere and you’re late for work, beware…they untie themselves about twice every three minutes.

Yeah, I work at McDonalds. As they say in Star Wars, “You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.”

Just kidding, McDonalds. Please don’t sue me for libel.

Oh, my desk.

It’s crowded with keys, water bottles, a pack of gum (a birthday gift from Grannie), and various scraps of paper scribbled with amateur poetry, work schedules, favorite words (like “tintinnabulation”), and portraits of my overweight cat. It’s also littered with thank-you cards I wrote but never sent, the Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (of course), a pair of Rubik’s Cubes I could never solve, postage stamps, pencils, grape-juice-stained papers, paperclips (unused on all the papers), a paperweight consisting of a real scorpion encased in glass, some chapstick, my sister’s lipstick (I do not know  what it’s doing there) and, at the very bottom of the mess, my trigonometry homework. You can tell where my priorities lie.

That’s it. I’ve “written” for nearly an hour now. Don’t tell anyone, it would ruin my reputation. Wink. Wink. Wink. (That was one or three too many winks. But I can’t erase pen, and I hate crossing out…)

 (I feel like the last parenthetical statement kind of ruined my snappy ending.)

(And the last one.)

(Shucks.)

(Um…)