Wednesday 7 May 2014

Home Sweet Home and Back to the Dungeon

I’m back!

Don’t lie – you missed me. Even if it was just a little.

Yesterday, I returned home from my two-week excursion to faraway lands (i.e. Europe), utterly exhausted, grumpy and slightly (very) irritable after about eleven hours on a stuffy airplane. It’s taking me a while, but I think I’m starting to recover from two solid weeks of social interaction and exercise (in the form of walking for hours on end) and education (mainly in the art of learning how to ask where the bathroom is in four different languages). Three of my favourite things…

I have many – MANY – stories to tell, several involving my near-death experiences due to my apparently severely dangerous clumsiness. However, due to my currently very confused and dysfunctional state of mind, I decided that it would be best for me to slowly sort through the several hundred photographs I took, and decode the scrawling mess of what appears to be handwriting in my travel journal, before I write a series of blogs on my “adventures.” I’ll do four posts, each one focusing on a single country that I visited (France, Czech Republic, Austria and Italy).

These blogs will hopefully not be delayed further due to the fact that I am expected to take part in what society has taught me is mandatory for my success in the future events of my lifetime. Ah, yes, that dreaded time of the year when children from the ages of five to eighteen are required to haul themselves out of bed at six a.m. and drag their underdeveloped minds to concrete buildings, where they will learn useful, lifelong lessons such as how to avoid getting caught on your phone during classes, and how to sleep with an “I am totally concentrating on this bunch of meaningless slop” expression on their faces. Also known as “School.”

Maybe this term the school board will consider my several e-mails and petitions for a class teaching us how to survive a zombie apocalypse, rather than how to recite what society trains us to think is “useful information.”

I’m also still waiting for the moment when somebody can explain to me why it is “useful” in the real world to be able to recite Newton’s First, Second and Third Laws word for word from my Physics Textbook.

Person 1: “Quick! The Zombies are attacking! What shall we do, oh most powerful leader?”

B. Obama: “The only way we can ever survive this is by reciting Newton’s Third Law of Motion! But who could remember this secret, highly sensitive code able to blow up the brain of underdeveloped beings set on devouring our brains?”

Person 2: “I remember it! I remember it!”

B. Obama: “Then save us, oh most mighty citizen who took Physics to twelfth grade and spent hours studying the laws of Physics in her room even though she planned on becoming a rock star!

Person 2: “Wait… I got it! If Object A exerts a force on Object B, then Object B will simultaneously exert a force on Object A. The forces are equal and opposite in direction.”

*zombies stop attacking the world*

*Person 2 is awarded 1298737 Nobel Peace Prizes*

*unicorns reappear on Earth*

Ahem…

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I am back at school tomorrow (*sobs uncontrollably into pillow*) so I will most likely only put my series of adventures into words over the next few weekends. If I don’t suffer from brain damage before then, that is.

Oh, and Happy Election Day to my fellow South Africans! Let’s pretend for one whole day that your opinions, hopes and dreams actually count for one whole day as you cast your vote. (I’m actually very interested to see how elections turn out this year…)


To my fellow students going back to school tomorrow: be strong. We can get through this. Only two more days until the weekend.

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