All The World’s a Stage and I’m the Goddamn Center of It

Senior Show 2004. A motley group of 80 high school seniors with little singing/acting ability join together on stage for a magnificient showing of very little clothing and very naughty dancing.

And the birth of a star! Center stage, right in front of the audience to see! Fabulous! Inspiring! Powerful!

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I am referring to my eyebrows.

Because apparently, my eyebrows are not good enough for the Wilton High School theater community. No! They are too light! Horrors! Whip out the eye pencil, we need to change a swan into an orangutan on the double!

So look closely folks, center stage, halfway through the opening, marring a perfectly good forehead, special appearance by…
Sarah’s Eyebrows.

WMD? Where? I didn’t see any WMDs!

Dear Mr. President,

Two years ago you sent our troops into Iraq under the pretense that they harbored weapons of mass destruction. Big, scary bombs that would destroy our purple mountains majesty and spacious skies. Wait, what’s that? You quit? You give up? Oh, so you didn’t find any WMDs? Wow, I could have told you that two fucking years ago. If there actually were WMDs, did you actually think you’d find them?

So, admit it. Face the American people and tell them you were wrong.
Tell them why their sons and daughters are dead.
Tell them where 150 billion tax dollars have gone.

Better yet, get on your knees and beg for forgiveness.
You told us you were going to get those big bad WMDs, those terrorists that were going to kill us all. You were wrong.

Keep Me In Your Heart For a While

Death is an inevitability. Death is a terror. Death is a blessing. Death is something I want to understand, need to understand, yet the more I learn, the more it slips through my fingers. Death is not a hooded spectre with a scythe. Death is the ending of life. That final breath, hearbeat, word. The child inside of me asks why. Why can death not be the end of a long life? Why must we die in wars, tsunamis, and barely into our adulthood from disease?

There are so many things I wish I could say, but there is a conflict. It lies between the child in me, and the teenager that knows better. Disease and natural disasters are part of life. Population limiters. The boom and bust population chart I memorized in ninth grade biology.

But that was just a graph on the page of a textbook. Watching the endless stories of the tsunami on the news, emotionally crushed at the sight and the devastation. How easy it would be to cry and sob and scream “WHY?” to whoever would listen, but I know why. An earthquake in the ocean caused the tsunami. That is why.

But there are those that leave us far too quickly, without the chance to grow into old age, learning the whole way. The death of an old aquaintance, a year above me, who rode my bus for as long as I can remember, and again I want to beat my fists on the floor and ask “Why??” over and over again, but I know why. Genetics and outside circumstances cause disease. Often it is not preventable. That is why.

Then there is war. The weakness of humanity, the lust for power, the need to kill eachother to prove our values. War would be preventable, if humanity could overcome its bloodlust. But war will never stop, and I know why. Because we are human. That is why.

And I wish so deeply that I didn’t know what I do know, that I could cry and cry until there’s nothing left, and that I could live in the relative ignorance of childhood emotion, unaware of the natural causes that are completely unavoidable. I wish the big bad world would just go away, but I know it will not. But above all, I wish I were not human. That I could escape the humanity that binds me to this confusion and fear and hatred. I wish I didn’t have to argue with myself, wanting to cry, but completely incapable. I wish it was as simple as yelling and screaming until my throat was raw, and everything would be better.

But it’s not.

Death is funny like that.

Sibling Love

A brief comment after watching an interaction between my brother and his friends playing a computer game:

I thought the use of grunting as a complex form of conversation died with the cavemen.
Boy, was I wrong.

Early Dismissal Euphoria

It is 10:15 in the morning. I am at home. Fear not, fair reader, I am not ill. I am home due to those two words that cause instant jubilance “Early Dismissal”! Those two words every high schooler awaits with baited, frozen breath after hearing a forecast for snow. Those two words that sent us into a distraction frenzy when they cracked fuzzily over the loudspeaker. Those two words that promise an afternoon of fun and frolicking, completely devoid of school!

But oh, if only the glossy picture of fun and frolicking actually did exist! While overjoyed by the fact we are not in school, many of us find ourselves at our respective houses, watching bad soap operas, and wishing desperately for something to do. Cruel fate has delt us a bad hand, while we no longer suffer the traumas of equasions and vocabulary, we must suffer the most excruciating boredom that stems from a 30 minute television segment that asks, Who Really Did Kill Amber after the Had Stephan’s Child While She Was Married to George, Who Was Really Her Long Lost Cousin?

What then, do we do? It is a bother, do we admit school would have been more entertaining than the mindless psychobabble of Dr. Phil?

Or crack a smile at the fact that a majority of the population finds it intelligent and entertaining?

A Tsunami-Sized Idiot

I’ll admit I’m a bit behind on the times, writing about the tsunami now, but it’s not the disaster itself that I’m quite so angry about. While President Bush has currently pledged 350 million in aid, it wasn’t originally that much. Originally it was 15 million dollars. Until someone cleverly pointed out to him that the cost of his inaugrational celebration was 4o million dollars. Which leaves a 25 million dollar discrepancy. And if that isn’t bad enough, President Bush gave 1.3 billion in aid to Florida after the hurricanes.

And that’s all I’m really going to say, because I can’t think of an insult brutal enough.