Vote for your favourite member!

...not elected officials, as I missed doing as my birthday was on Election Day.

Rather, I'm talking about class superlatives. As seniors, we're involved in the creation of a student yearbook, printed and bound as well as video. on Thursday, we were handed out leaflets polling us on whom would fit for superlative categories. A few weeks earlier, though, I had approached the head of the yearbook development department and made a decision that shattered everyone: I asked her to omit and substitute my name if it were listed as a superlative. Only two weeks ago I had fought with my parents to not have my pictures taken, which I found to be extremely stupid in retrospect (I ended up getting them taken in the end). While the latter turned out to be calamitous for me, the former decision both surprised and infuriated the seniors. As people ticked off the leaflets, I found that my motive could have been justified by two details:

• Two members short-listed me as 'rudest'.
• I had, as I told Brandon on PC, done a right job of deceiving and berating people in a daze of thought of my own academic prowess. In reality, though, my grades were standard and I had been found to be unfairly advantaged by my middle school in the conclusion of a peer mediation session. I even found myself to be an entity apart from the rest of the class at times. Finding it hard to admit this, I simply wrote a short Word document and printed it to hand to my homeroom teacher in what was probably cowardice.

Not a decisive detail, though, was the declining respect I had for such a system. Back in middle school, when I was voted to be the most intelligent and artistic male, I saved face simply by not voting for myself or even skipping categories. These days, though, the desire to have a photo in the section became more and more compelling. One of the guys went around as we typed up paragraphs in the library and asked people to vote for him as the most attractive male; in reality, he was good-looking, but a pregnancy by him as well as his ostentation, which annoyed me chronically but not severely, beset him. One of the girls even shouted in response, 'If you go around asking people they won't vote for you!'

Point well made. Then, however, I realised that this was exactly what happened on forums, or could happen. As many readers know, the Pokémon Community manages to get away with Member of the Month threads without a mass of hype that would come as it did with the yearbook, even considering that there are less than 60 people in the graduating class. Some months, though, this is due to lack of interest or a narrowed field of acquaintance. Elsewhere, and I'm sure PKMN.NET has experienced this, such threads start generating 'VOTE FOR ME!' spam. Although such resorts indicate that the person behind it isn't nearly as qualified as those that would naturally be voted for (and it's a proven fact — do you see Forest Grovyle trying to champion her work?), they still do it, and the threads are eventually canned.

Although I don't like the system, I still go to the Member of the Month threads and vote. Over there, the honours are temporary and are unlikely to reflect the real person as known by real-life friends. In the yearbook, though, it'll be accessible to those in the family who want to inquire about the past, especially the kids. If it's seen in the yearbook that you were recognised as the rudest, it will reflect off anyone voting it. If it's seen that you were the most intelligent or artistic, they'll probably challenge it — and all they'll get is a subway or alley map. For that matter, they'll challenge you on your intelligence — Stephen Hawking, regardless of whether he had the honour in his yearbook, is probably challenged so many times. For me, the fact that I had made such a big point of my intelligence makes me cringe even today — I'm bombarded by questions even at the register, there are girls who appear to like me on the grounds of my supposed intelligence, and there are the guys at the corner who try to make me recall an image with my eyes shut or prophesy something. And I've done it for so long, sometimes arrogantly. And it needs to stop. But the cost of leaving it behind will probably mean the loss of many admirers, but maybe it is worth it if they're there to challenge me....

More army

The newspaper that printed the article about Matt's objection to saying 'Yes, sergeant' decided that it warranted a column by the editors yesterday:

“Yes, sergeant!”

You say that a lot in the military.

But should students at the Atlantic County Institute of Technology have been told they had to say it — and do 20 push-ups, if they didn't say it loudly enough — when Army recruiters gave commands during a phys-ed class last week?

Matthew Rodin, an 18-year-old senior, didn't think so. He refused to say “Yes, sergeant.” As a result, he was removed from gym class and sent to the library to sit out the period. Rodin says he also was threatened with a grade of zero for the day. The school principal says Rodin's grade will not be affected if he completes an assignment he was given in the library.

Partisans of both stripes — supporters of the war in Iraq and opponents of the war — no doubt quickly came to their own conclusions about this incident. We're just guessing, but we suspect one group immediately thought: This is outrageous — Army recruiters have no business being in a school. The other side: This is outrageous — the military deserves our support, and Rodin is an unpatriotic, ungrateful jerk.

Allow us to make what we hope are three more reasoned points:

One: Military recruiters have a tough job to do. This nation is at war. The all-volunteer Army needs recruits. And there's nothing wrong with recruiters having access to students and students having access to recruiters. But allowing recruiters to lead a gym class — a captive audience, so to speak — seems a bit unfair to students who may not be interested in the recruiters' message.

Two: While we certainly respect our military and support our troops, no Army sergeant in this country has the right to come into a school and order students — or any civilian — to say “Yes, sergeant” or anything else.

Granted, this incident may well be much ado about not much; other students say Rodin took it more seriously than anyone else and that the only one who had to do any push-ups was one of the recruiters, because students out-shouted him in the “Yes, sergeant” department.

Nevertheless, point three: Rodin is clearly a young man with strong convictions; he had every right to express those convictions; and he should not be punished for having done so.

And if you disagree with any of that: Get down and give us 20.

Of course, Chris McMahon of Absecon had another idea today.

Regarding the Oct. 20 story about the student who was terribly offended when some Army recruiters were invited to the Atlantic County Institute of Technology for a demonstration about physical fitness, even though it was not a recruitment visit:

I cannot for the life of me understand why this man deserves the amount of press space he was given. People like him despise the very military that has guaranteed him all the rights to speak as he does. Without our military to defend us, none of our rights would be worth the paper they're written on. Those who have served and died for our country are the reason the coward and wimps of this country can whine and moan about how terrible things are without fear of reprisal.

There will always be people like this student. He will live here and benefit from all that our military does to defend his rights. But like the majority of liberals, he will despise them and probably never have the courage to serve himself. It is a disgrace that he is given a headline on the Region section as if he is some defender of values, when it's quite obvious what he really is.

I think the other matter is that Rodin distorted the story — he was threatened with a zero, but his alternate assignment made up for it; the Press misinterpreted the interviews to mean that Rodin was being penalised for not participating. I'll have more later.

Bzzzzzzt!

I remember watching a programme about dog whistles; whenever someone blew into one, a dog would rush forth but humans would not be able to hear it. I then learned that it was because our eardrums aren't quite as good as those of dogs.

And then again, such quality can be limited to youngsters. Shortly before school started, a company produced a ringtone, 'Mosquito', that was configured so that only students could hear it. When school started for me, it turned out that the ringtone had become so popular that many techers knew what it was, What may seem as a disappointment may be that two of our teachers were able to hear it loud and clear; in fact, one, our marine biology teacher (I stopped her course to pursue Spanish last week), demonstrated it to other teachers. It turned out that she had been a musician and had kept her ears healthy that way. On the other side of the spectrum, though, our gym teacher — the same one that assigned the mechanical babies — was led into the room as Dan, one of the ringtone owners, played a sample for her. She couldn't hear it, so she made us turn around and raise our hands if we heard it. When most of us did, she accused us of lying and stalked out. The ringtone has proved so successful that I also heard shopkeepers intend to use the sound to drive hoodlums away.

Even so, I haven't seen the need to text in class or otherwise use a mobile phone during those hours. My stepbrother was ecstatic to receive one the Christmas before last, and ever since then he's wanted the best and the most expensive out of it; he's used that thing for more uses than it's been designed for, from what I can tell. I'm the exact opposite; since mine was not a flip phone and it kept turning on when I brushed against a wall, and I never had any cell phone numbers to keep anyway (only that of Tom, whom I haven't communicated with much since I started working), I stopped using it after four months of being forced to have it on me and gave it to one of my father's labour contractors. This Christmas, though, I may be getting one of Cingular's 'go' phones and, when I receive my licence, AAA services. The main concern in my family was being stranded on a dirt road, which I saw as the only use for a cell phone if ever there was one.

And there's also the possible meet-ups. Lily did mention calling Frostweaver via mobile once....

Tales from the Arcade III: More Smoking...and Teen Pregnancy?! (That's Three, Articuno!)

Chances are that you'll remember the posts I made about the arcade and the smoking business I saw there. Today, there was yet more smoke about, and since my throat was not cooperating I was rather indignant about going to hang around them, especially when they barraged me with a good round of trivia. I'd been known around the town for knowing who was the president in which order, and I'm surprised I've been able to hang on to that in the summer.

However, trivia was not what I'd come home to blog about; neither was it wholly the smoking and the ability of street officers to miss one of the thirteen-year-old girls carrying into the arcade a pack of Marlboro menthols. This was about a sixteen-year-old that I was unfamiliar with, bantering with the rest of the lot. It eventually got down to where one of the girls made a joke of being 'two days pregnant' and everyone began rubbing her abdomen. A few minutes later, one of the boys went over to this unfamiliar sixteen-year-old and began blowing on her abdomen. When I edged in closer, I could see the abdomen portruding quite a bit and everyone was soon rubbing it — she was pregnant.

Now, I had known two other pregnant teens in my entire life. The first was in my school and was taken out (shortly before the baby project!) in April; her baby shower coincided with my turn to do the baby project. The second was outside the school by the poles when the buses arrived and was seldom seen by me within. I'd talked to a friend online about it, when I was under the impression that it was just an anomaly, but she asserted me that it was nearly everywhere she went (mind you, she lives in southern Devon). When I first took a course on birth control, I was merely told that there was an alarming teen pregnancy rate and I thus decided not to get in the mix by having sex so fast — but it didn't really hit me until I saw it happening twice at a secure school. The third time, now, was the charm. It was real, all right. What worried me, though, was that this sixteen-year-old was around cigarette smoke and a mere four months along. (Good for the older girl having a hormonal patch in sight when she was taking her drag!)

With this in mind next to the party held at a neighbour's house prior to a concert in which nearly everyone, aged 15 to 20, was either drinking beer or smoking a cigarette — which leads me to believe that Brigantine is going to the dogs at the same rate as the rest of the nation — I think I'll have a whole litany to read off when I go up to Rhode Island in...three days already!

Tales from the Arcade II: More Stalking and Smoking (and a few more rounds of OutRun in between)

Further to the post I made about the arcade and the activity there yesterday, I was today told that Christian had been apprehended by a prominent cop and hauled off the island, prohibited from re-entering.

Again, though, that was a lesser worry and more of a relief, but now it was left to me to see that the two that came out of the truck were not the only smokers. Anthony (with whom I shared a room at the Elks conference!) came out of the arcade once and accepted a drag from one of my OutRun opponents, aged 15 or so, who also smoked. In all, that meant there were about six boys (if Byron, a friend of mine, and the girls I was eavesdropping on didn't light any up themselves) under the age puffing in the courtyard in plain view of motorists.

I remember saying before that an older arcade had been on the northern end of the island before the owner was convicted on association and drug charges and the facility condemned. Notwithstanding that the owners of this new arcade seem like solid citizens, are we headed for a repeat of the situation, but with the patrons on the wet end of it?

Tales from the Arcade I: Stalking and Smoking

Far be it of me to disclose anything that goes on in a menial day, I think it's time I lived up to the promise of more regular updates for once.

I apologise if I haven't said before that the reason why I've been working the morning shifts is due to the abscence of juvenile activity at that time. Sometimes it can be at the beach, although this is beleaguered by the requirement of beach badges between 10.00am and 5.00pm, so what I do is troll the middle section of the island instead, where there's always an arcade and a line of pizza, Italian ice, ice cream, and fizz shops. The former had been opened shortly before Memorial Day and didn't have a large selection then — perhaps only ten games against the current 30 or so — and I tended to stay awa from it out of the doubt that anyone I knew from the old school would have the audacity to appear there.

The arcade, it transpired, was the complete opposite. The first day there, I realised that my friend Mike worked there, so he was always up for a game iof air hockey or OutRun 2 at his expense. The second day, Dave, his close friend, appeared there amid the crowd I knew from the old days, but it was then that Mike managed to tell a blonde about my maps and, when I neared her, who I was. I was shocked to see that she was so happy to see me although we had never met before!

But as time went on, Dave's crowd only proved to be part of the sporadic clientele. A few days in, I noticed a group of girls that aged about 14 or 15 that hanged around the sister of the girl who always takes a shot at me in the store. The girls instantly recognised me when we first saw each other — I wasn't surprised since the people at the doctor's office also recognised me for that. It was only today, though, that the lot would actually show signals that they wanted me to be part of the group, even as they knew I was sometimes hovering over their closed discussions and competitions at the Dance Dance Revolution machine (this, like my school's version, required you to move your feet to register arrows). This acceptance, though, proved to be at the expense of a boy named Christian, who would pretend to be established with one of the girls; after the acceptance phase of the day, he summoned me and pointed out the girl he was following:

Christian: Are you following her?
Me: As in stalking or overseeing their discussions?
Christian: Overseeing.
Me: Yes. But they actually have accepted me, if you must know.
Christian: I don't care for that. Stay away from her.
Me: Why? What is your point? What is your objective? It's not as if you're the pimp of the group yourself.
Christian: Forget that. Just stay away from them. They're my bitches.

Which, of course, the girls refuted. As I continued to surround them, he kept going to the girl he pointed out and pointing at me, evidently reprimanding her for talking to me. Even so, when I inquired, they assured me that he'd do that in any case; after all, he wasn't the only other boy involved in the lot.

However, that was a lesser worry. Soon after I confronted Christian, a truck pulled up, another girl and the sister of the girl that terrorised me in tow. They had left amid the possible penalty of being punished by parents so as to drop someone off at a marina, but when they came back I smelled something awful: When I next glanced at the two, they had stowed in the mouths a half-worn Newport cigarette. Having attended two Youth to Youth conferences and an Elks conference, I began to back away slowly, only looking sceptically on as the two finished the last of the drags amid arguments from the rest of the lot. The younger girl was 18, a year below the age to purchase tobacco in New Jersey, but even if my prior assumption that she was 15 was not correct, I was still disgusted. Afraid that I would get dragged into the mess surrounding it, as the girls that weren't smoking were nonchalant about the presence of Lorillard tobacco, I excused myself ten minutes after the girls popped up amid hugs from the nonsmokers.

Now I'm thinking the same thing James did, although his ideas weren't forged by youth summits and he even looked in retrospect on possible enhancement of comedy by such. Why would they do this to themselves? Why would their families (the older girl's mother would invariably order three or four Newport packs at my register) do so? It did run in the family, and cigarettes were evidently having a gradual effect on their countenances. The girl Christian pointed out had optic orifices that flapped on the top and bottom, a warning sign that she would probably trip over into smoking, the older girl emerging from the car had a lot of fat between the breasts and pelvis and had a flat face, and the 18-year-old had a splotchy red face. Even worse, though, will be the bill when they have to have the throat or lungs repaired. Of course, they could also do what my father's father did: Ignore the fact that his aorta was blocked from smoking three packs a day, downing two beers a day, and driving one block to the beach to hunt for clams — and, a month after notification of the blockage, lapse into a coma and die.

I've got a story to tell on 18 July.

Well into summer

Right, I've pretty much sensed that I have to update this to keep up with James' impressive record of blogging and the usual LiveJournal records set by others as well as find a crafty way to get the ads to pay (James had his Google AdSense account banned since he used methods to steer others to the ads — 'Please keep clicking every six hours', folks?) I've vowed to make posts more regular. Hopefully I'll be able to post enough to close the nagging five-day gap that usually separates the old post and the next exciting one.

What I regret not reporting on is my experience thus far with Windows Live Messenger with Messenger Plus! Live. I must admit that after four months of having to live without it I eventually got used to having long Messenger queues and restrictions on the length of messages. Thankfully, all that has been brought back, and I've finally been able to figure out how to create coloured names using the software. Even before then, though, those that had the time to notice would have seen Dark Mightyena and me staging a status bar and signature war — probably enough to admit that in the midst of having a pair on the Community as a publicity stunt (after I knocked it before) there was a mistress.

The online side of things aside, it's time to examine what's going on in the real world. Although summer has officially arrived, the new pattern that my workplace has been sticking me to has decided to scrap the tradition of hiring me at night, instead giving me morning shifts — this ensures that I don't have to painfully switch from the regime of getting up early and submitting to SuperCheats before going to school to sleeping late with little hours and back again two months later. Over the past three days, I've been given a challenge that everyone else has passed up: train two cashiers at once. A set of twins had been shunted from the deli department and were instead assigned to the front for reasons unknown, and from that point I had had to keep them from going insane enough to fistfight each other by strictly regulating who gets to work the register and who gets to pack (their mother would much rather prefer that they bag, as I had met her today). Today, though, a series of confusions and discrepancies in the computer had led to me running back and forth, exchaging items as I went along, and having to reteach how to handle WIC checks and most produce codes.

Seeing as work pretty much follows the pattern of school now, I'm left with almost nothing until I get home, which is going to an arcade that opened recently (the previous one at the end of the island was foreclosed due to the owner's involvement with a shooting and drugs gang). Yesterday I had been able to meet the old crowd from the northern end of the island as well as a girl that Mike had pushed in to request a map of the place (I'm known for drawing road maps). Today, though, I was tortured there by a girl that appears at the store occasionally with a family that usually buys $300 or thereabout of groceries.

...Well, that was an attempt to liven up the day. Seeing as I'm in a routine that'll be monotonous from now until 18 July, when I head up to Rhode Island for the next youth summit, I guess we all will have to live with the five-day gaps. Or will we?

Memorial

On a walk to the observatory at the northern end of town, I scrambled upstairs to practice for a dissolution of a pact between two friends of mine, but as soon as I came up the flight of stairs I quickly noticed that there were black marks on the floor. I at first dismissed them as dry rot, but when I bent down closer I saw that it was fresh felt-tip ink. The entire schematic turned out to be a memorial to 'Toni Nikki Yoder', supposedly a friend of mine that had been murder.* Scrawled around the box within which her name was written were a verse from some song (evidently a rap) as well as a banzai cry: 'Senseless murder is wrong! 14 years old and gone!'

Combined with the news that one of my classmates had to leave school for excuse of maternity, this made for a nasty shock. I was not new to death; my grandmother passed away in 1999 from cancer of the pancreas. I also was not new to widespread funerals, either; on the Pokémon Community they are honouring a member, Mandi Lili Cormier, who died in a car crash over a year ago, and even after that period of time you will see those words in many signatures on that forum. It seems that ever since I registered on PKMN.NET, tragedy has started to come forward. Not only was I banned for seven months, but now a pregnancy in my school, the death of a nearby student from leukaemia and now the resonance of the murder of someone I knew, have established my stay here as truly calamitous, across the board.

* One of the comments has resulted in a correction here; I had originally thought it to be domestic violence after a sketchy thought of newspaper articles on the subject, but it's really a murder case.

The kid

Yesterday I went to Friendship Park in a hamlet north of Paoli, Pennsylvania, to walk off the air until sundown. Whilst the rest of the family went off for a few rounds of tennis, I resigned to the benches and started playing with my Game Boy Advance. A few minutes in, however, I heard very awkward cries coming down from the swingset and decided to take a look. As I expected, it was a teenager of rather high stature walking along the rim of the mulch and wailing without impetus. With his head down and kicking scraps of mulch back into the hub within, he walked about as other students (presumably) flanked him. Some of the other students would pace back and forth in the area until they gathered to leave.

At first I thought that the kid had been bullying schoolchildren, since the park was small and composed mainly of the tennis court, swingset and a concrete roundabout on a hill. When I finally came closer and was able to study the movement, however, my heart sank. I had been known to pace back and forth in places like this — and I was pulled over by police officers a few times for this — but had forcibly torn the image of my mental illness out of my head. But upon looking at that teenager, I was faced with a harsh reality. That was me. That was the face and meander of the autistic spectrum.

I have a half-brother living with my mother (I live with my father), and his autism has meant financial hardship across the board. Between lawsuits that failed to sway the public school system to arrange for special services for him as well as the cost of hiring babysitters that charged more than median and often left after two weeks, the rest of the family provides very little for the cause at all. They may provide money, but none of them have ever shown enough compassion or have demonstrated sufficient experience with their own children to look after him. And it will be a heartbreaker to see him evolve into something resembling the kid that I saw at the park, just because the family is in its current disarray.

Thankfully, my condition is not as severe as that of him. By the time he reaches seventeen he most likely will not have the capacity to write on a blog or assimilate with teenagers that comprise today's society. And looking at customers that I have seen carry around grown autistic men, some around the age of fifty, he may not be able to produce anything in life. I feel sorry for the kid, seeing as he's in a constricted family environment and I've been afforded enough time with people that are enough well off.

Whoever it was that was walking in the park like that, thank you. I hope someday you'll bring yourself to see me say so.

Crystal Walrein as Tillmonkey

Some days don't afford me time to sit up in my room thinking of what attacks to plan, what snides to make on James, or what snubs to make on forum ills. Rather, these days — six hours of them at the very least — are spent in the world of what James calls the 'tillmonkey'. Each day I have six hours to sell off chunks amid chunks of shovels, pails, crackers, Luckies, mixed peppers, and lottery tickets.

Hectic as it may intially seem, the job I hold is surprisingly menial and complicated all at once. The Coinstar machine tells you to vouch your slips (which deduct nine cents on the cashed dollar) at the cashier, but we're told to rediret them to the front desk. Up until a few weeks ago we weren't capable of returning cash on debit cards. And even today we have to go up to the desk when our till accumulates more than $750 to extricate $500 and plunk it down for entry into the vault. And a lot of these mishaps had — and still have — caused disruptions of orders, poisoned infected food, falling chickens, and cries of 'VOID!' when a cancellation was needed.

Often I, being a particularly enthusiastic worker that has been reduced to roaming the aisles an hour before actually starting work, am called in on off-days to handle shifts emptied from people calling off for holidays or unusually high consumer volume. At least I don't have to complain about my wage of $7.00 an hour, which'll go up by a dollar in May and then become invalidated as a figure by the state income law in October.

Perhaps I shouldn't complain about the glitches involved with working for this food store chain, either. After all, not only do I get to talk to people that have flown in from all over the world to gamble in Atlantic City or enjoy the ocean views (or both, if their wallet is fat enough), but I also get to connect once more with friends that I had become estranged from upon graduation from junior high school. And as I said before, there happen to be a few girls that gawk at me as I work. It may be annoying and cause me to mutter darkly, but there are people at my age other than my co-workers and bosses who actually respect what I do.

Next to the store is a dollar store, from which some people will buy items that'll occasionally ring up on our registers. It also has a few small toys, gizmos, and colouring books that do for a long trip up the Garden State Parkway. Of course, others will prefer to cash their checks at the bank or brew coffee at Wawa. There also exist people that regularly visit other stores and actually try to use their cards for those stores (Shop-Rite and Stop 'n Shop) to get markdowns — when our policy is that they apply to everyone!

But a lot of the joys of working for such a prominent food chain are compromised, of course, by the inability to post for you or actually see people to add to my game data files. Of course, since I'm not a child anymore, I have no right to gripe on that subject. Sometimes, though, I'll bring a console and play it in the back room an hour before the shift begins.

All things that can be used to fix up the home and a banquet to boot pass through my hands, over the beams (with the exception of some Rosa packets whose barcodes are blurred), and into a plastic, paper, or hybrid bag depending on what the customer demands. Of course, there will be occasions when I have to rip out different-coloured peppers because the rates aren't the same. There will also be occasions when I have to go with a customer to investigate a mismarked item and then either have them return it and call 'VOID!' to take the item off the roster, or call 'VOID!' and have the code fixed.

Getting to the store requires that I navigate my bike or plan a walk around the lighthouse roundabout (luckily, the main street has a divide when it approaches the roundabout so that I can clear one lane at a time) and then squeeze between undermaintained sidewalks and moving sport utility vehicles that fly down the streets as if they're motorways. Often, I'll have a transport arranged for the purpose of cutting such hazards out. even with the work in the building and the intricacy of getting there, I enjoy my job very much. It's one that I intend to hold until I flee to the UK or go to college. And it least puts me at a position above James for being able to work whereas he quit to go to college and was apparently very happy that he did....

Typical school people

Okay, I go to a high school that has some taunting, some jokers, and some classes with homework that requires that you pour out your heart and soul. End of article on the elements of school.

Okay, I'd better elaborate, which will be hard to do considering that I'm writing this out of sheer boredom due to the inability to fall asleep and the end of Bush's State of the Union. I should start off by saying that I don't belong a secondary school that fits the description of 'school daze', although that rhetoric will be present throughout the day. I go to a school run by the county that had a hard tme of selecting laureates in my graduating year. This school is so much a mesh of people that have the same general interest that physical bullying almost never exists in the school. However, the school itself does have its classes of personalities, and so do other schools in the region. Tonight we'll discuss the types of people that you'll find in the American secondary school.

First are the computer geeks with clean report cards. To dispel the myth, many geeks are not dressed in dress clothes bearing pens in their breast pockets. Many of these 'geeks' actually do not exist, but are rather a deformed stereotype in America. Geeks will be confined to the computer, yes, but they do not have glasses most of the time and they usually do not have high-pitched voices or crooked teeth as the Urkel stereotype suggests. More importantly, they're far from outcasts; they even have their own cliques or will assimilate into other groups.

Second are the girly girls. 'Picture stalkers' drool over pictures of Dream Street and actually take advice from and adhere to magazines such as YM or J14 — both of which advertise for both genders when spoken but in the visual department show their true colours as magazines oriented toward girls and pushing the 'chic', 'glam', and 'sexy' girl image, but due to the fact that they, unlike the tabloids Star, National Enquirer, or Globe (not that they're entirely trustworthy), do not give any information as to obtain those images, these images drive many girls to anorexia. Some older ones will flout the dress code, wearing revealing clothing on the campus. Some will gawk at boys like me (there are currently three in a pack that gawk at me when I'm working) and then giggle amongst themselves. Some will horse about in the cafeteria, pushing and chivvying boys and often feigning physical offence. And some are on the path to contracting chlamydia, AIDS, or herpes. Contrary to the advertisements, there are NO girls who will buy the Bartz dolls. Not one girl I know has one of them.

Third are 'hagglers' that resort to looking at other profiles and chatting on MySpace using 'txtspk'. These come from all genders but are unified in the fact that what they communicate about boils down to a monotonous 'glum, glum, glum'. They carry over from picture stalkers and will also use the service to arrange dates with people they go to school with or have just met over the service itself (resulting in the abductions I talked about).

Fourth are isolated people. (Thanks to José's muttering in history class for this!) Some of these people don't fit into any category or are exiled or rejected by the other groups. Others are rather successful in their lives and don't feel the need to assimilate into any of these groups. They, alongside the geeks, tend to do the best in academics compared to picture stalkers or hagglers. However, some don't do as well due to low self-esteem. The isolated people keep schools from being true melting pots — which, for one, I think they should be.

It's amazing how distinct these groups are in every American school. Whether they're reinforced by the media (I'm glaring at James' comment on the MySpace article), by emotional, physical, or social contrasts, or by forced separation by the staff, they exist and have had a formidable effect on the politics of school. And they'd better enjoy this position, too; the only other place than college after you leave secondary school where these classes will form again is in prison.

Sorry, guys, but that's how I feel about you.

Snow!

Yes, late in the autumn, we have received snow. Today Brigantine's schools have been closed, yet the radio has yet to tell me whether the ones I attend in Mays Landing are closed. I initially expected the year to go without snow, seeing as the hot climate has spawned twenty-six hurricanes (they ran the list of names and went into the Greek alphabet), and I still believe this latest fall will warm up soon.

New Jersey hasn't been popular with snow these past years. I remember the blizzards that prevented us from driving, and I remember the large continental blizzard — where have they gone?

XVII

This is a rip-off of James' XVIII announcement, but it'll have to do with the magnitude of turning seventeen yesterday. As a seventeen-year-old, I now have access to R- and NC17-rated movies, can get my motor licence (if ever I start practising) and if I'm dismissed from my job as cashier I can apply for most other jobs on the island.

The day passed over outside my world rather quietly; only the Super Cheats populace, a Pokémon Community member, and a few friends at my school recognised the day. Even so, I did get some applause and miffins, but I couldn't eat the real cake owing to stuffing myself at work. But I was still itching to get back on the computer after unwrapping my new hard drive and camera, the latter of which will provide rudimentary pictures until my aunt gets the ones she took developed.

Problem is, though, at seventeen my gift choices are limited. I'm sure some of you remember asking for GI Joes, Transformers, and flamethrowers (if you're Calvin from the Calvin and Hobbes comics), but if you've stepped over into puberty you've realised that your choices, due to the fiscal reality of your family kicking in, have diminished greatly. Gone are the GI Joes and the Tonka trucks, and in come the hip clothes, the computer stuff, and some jewellery (or cosmetics in the case of girls). It's amazing how drastically your preferences change as you get older. Me, I'm just embracing the idea because it'll be financial hell on my family all the same, since I want fewer things yet the expenses stay level. Ohohohohoho!