not where i started but ended where i started...

So, I’ve decided something. It’s big. Not many people would take to a blog to make a realization like the one I am about to share. Well except maybe kids who might just think it’s cool to brag about something like this. You know the ones... on Myspace or Facebook who rant and rave about all their illegal activities from the previous weekend right next to a picture of them taking a massive hit from a 4-foot gravity bong. Right there for the whole world to see. Like an idiot. I mean sure, probably just about everyone you know did something illegal when they were younger but as I have gotten older this is the theory I buy into…

Dude, don’t talk about the illegal shit you do and certainly don’t give the District Attorney photographic evidence to prosecute you at some point in the future.

Wait… wait… wait. It wasn’t growing up and maturing that taught me that – It was going to Catholic school my whole damn life. People say public schools are bad and overrun with all these issues of overpopulation, drugs, violence, gangs, poor education, sub-par teachers, etc. I wouldn’t really know firsthand about public schools as my parents wouldn’t allow their children to deign to darken the door of anything considered a public school until college and really at that point, does it even really matter?

So what I learned in Catholic school was this… there were far less kids in Catholic school – a lesser teacher-to-student ratio – which generally meant if you were doing anything out of the ordinary, you stood out. It’s hard to skip a class and have that overlooked by an overworked underpaid teacher when you are in a class of 15 or 20. You’re empty seat screams NOT HERE when attendance was called.

Catholic schools breed clever criminals.
Catholic schools speak money. If you have it, you can make the golden rules. If you don’t, basically don’t get caught. There’s no such thing as leniency for the underling peasants.

If you think for one red hot instant that there weren’t drugs ALL over the place at my high school (and grade school for that matter), I’d outright, to your face and possibly in an aggressive manner accuse YOU of smoking crack. Let’s be perfectly clear here. Private Catholic schools are regulated differently. They get funding from different places and they make the rules differently from anything state mandated.

We’d have “bomb threats”. All the kids knew what this meant. They didn’t happen every week or month or every other month for that matter. But they happened enough and the end result was always the same.

They carted all the kids outside to have them confined in one place – nowhere near your locker, your backpack, your purse – you get the idea. We were to move quickly and take nothing with us because shit, we might eat it today when this bullshit bomb goes off. When a “bomb threat” happened, the police came with their “bomb dogs” to secure the facility and search for this supposed “bomb”. Inevitably, no real bomb was ever found. Somewhere in the vicinity of 30minutes after the school was deemed safe, there was a list of kids that would be called down to the office. Yep. Oddly enough, it was all the potheads. Even odder, it was generally only the potheads who came from money or the ones that the school had been begging for a reason to get rid of them in the first place.

Drug raids under the guise of protecting me from being blown up.

Kids became exceptionally good at not being caught. And of course, it was a harsh lesson to learn for kids in their tender teen years – dude, never carry shit on your person or in your bags. Check. Lesson learned.

The bottom line really says that while the education might be a little better in a private Catholic school, kids are the same no matter what school they attend. At my high school, to raise money, they would auction off 3 of the best parking spots in the lot – right up front. They went to the highest bidders – aka families with indulged children and lots of money that didn’t have a better use. Needless to say, my family could afford the run of the mill parking pass to park on school property. In the fine print, however, it said that that could also mean if the gated parking lot was full (which it always was), you had to park on the public street behind the school. The neighborhood that my school was in is sketchy at best. Basically if you didn’t get to school early enough and you had to park on the pubic street running the risk of having your car broken into. I was familiar with such scenario.

When middle-class Angela went to complain about my car being broken into and demanding to know why it was that I had to pay for a parking pass to park on a public street the response from the Dean of Students was shitty at best.

He said, and I quote – We sell parking passes like any business. For example, airlines oversell seats on their planes all the time. The same concept applies here. Besides, the security guard (*who was a fat lazy old man with a chip on his shoulder*) drives down that street and keeps an eye on the cars.

Yeah, until he’s not back there or off being lazy and my car gets broken into, you ass. I didn’t exactly say that to him. I think I just stood there stunned by his own admission. You see, I was on a short list of people that they wanted kicked out. They were just waiting for me to fulfill the Williams/Athas tradition.

Back in the day, my mom attended the same high school I did. She was kicked out for raising her bra up the flag pole like the damn hippie she was. Her parents had money and she was subsequently let back into the school for an undisclosed amount. I’ve never confirmed they paid to get her back in, but the unspoken rules were exactly the same 15 years later. My brother was kicked out of my high school for essentially flicking some kids off. He was on probation from a fight that had happened earlier in the year and somehow my parents managed to keep him enrolled with the agreement that he was on a no-tolerance probation plan. At his junior ring ceremony, the kids he’d been in a fight with were nothing short of harassing him. He retorted with the old nonchalant head-scratch flick off. It’s personally one of my favorite moves. Not too dramatic of an event, except for the fact it was caught on film. Which, by the way, is funny now; it wasn’t then. Ok, I won’t lie – it’s always been funny to me. It’s just that now I can laugh about it with my parents without getting grounded.

Basically, my schools administration reminded me regularly that I was on a short leash.

Anyhow, these 3 prime parking spots were always won by the rich kids. They went for several thousand dollars and kids parked their way-too-expensive-for-a-16-year-old’s care right up front. One kid in particular, I remember vividly. His parents bought him one of the 3 prime spots. In the middle of the year, this kid showed up to a football game shit-canned drunk and got caught. Now, had it been me –expelled… non-negotiable. This kid gets this as a punishment… again, I repeat a PUNISHMENT that instead of being kicked out, put on probation or any other real punishment, he’d merely lose the privilege to park his car in the prime spot that his parents had purchased for him. You know where he had to park after that? On the public street behind the school.

Let’s recap. AS A PUNISHMENT, he had to now park his car where I had had to pay for a parking pass to the school to park there or risk being towed.

Oh and it should be noted that his parents didn’t get their money back for the spot and no it didn’t sit empty for the remainder of the year as a reminder of one his irresponsible behavior and two his parents having far too much loose money. No, no. They REAUCTIONED the spot off. They held a special event for the damn re-auctioning. There were several eager parents front and center ready to buy the damn thing. This is not a life I was ever familiar with. Several thousands of dollars were paid that year for a friggin parking spot. My mom’s theory was – walk, the fresh air will do you good OR after my car was broken into, she said – well that will teach you to leave things visible in your car on that street again. These events basically were building my character for later in life.

I call bullshit. It’s of the same mind as when the person who loses a game says – it doesn’t matter, I just play for fun. You never hear the winner saying that. It’s all about the win. So in essence, my parents neither had the money to fund an upfront parking spot nor would indulge me even if they did have the money. So no mom, it’s not about building character. That’s just the guise you chose to use to try and teach me the importance of making do with what you have and being happy with that fact. Blah, boring. I wanted an upfront parking spot. Conceptualizing the value of money was something that I learned 5 years later in college.

I honestly can come up with a million examples of how ridiculous private Catholic school was. In just remembering it, I might do a blog series on my high school years. But this whole rant was far from the original purpose of this blog. I would like to think my ADD medicine helps me focus and it did… just not on my original goal. But I was real focused on telling you what I told you. So, I’d call that a win.

I started this whole journey out by saying – So, I’ve decided something. It’s big. – And I don’t want to leave you hanging, but there will be a blog after this that goes into that story so that this one isn’t a 10-page long rant with no real purpose.
My big decision is as follows: I firmly believe that in order to save lives in the near future, I might need to start taking Xanax. I mean not dramatically or daily. The RX would read – Take 1-3 Xanax 4mg tablets 30minutes before you need to retrieve your monthly prescriptions from the CVS on Tennyson Road in Plano.

So we’re clear, I’m not a fan of taking medicine like Xanax for any kind of regular reason. The only dug I eat in mass quantities is Advil – which I happen to think that they should rename the Finger of God. Shit’s downright amazing. Period. End of story. And to further my point, about a year-and-a-half ago, I started to have breathing problems. I was short of breath, felt like I couldn’t ever really catch my breath and eventually resorted to yawing or making myself sneeze all the time to get that 2nd wind breath catch. I went to every doctor under the sun to figure out what was wrong with me. To make a long story short, my PCP tells me that it sounds like anxiety attacks. Screw that. I wasn’t anxious. He wanted me to start taking Xanax on a regular basis to calm it down. What about me says I’m not calm?! I refused the prescription. The last thing I need is a pill to fix everything.

One to get up.
One to go to bed.
One to calm down.
One to kill pain.
One to focus.
One to prevent pregnancy.
One to relieve allergies.
One so I can walk on my hurt feet.

The list could go on. There’s a pill for everything and the drug manufacturers and the doctors bought by those drug companies would have you believe that you need a cocktail consisting of one of each just to get through a day. I don’t buy into that at all. So, I’m only an advocate for taking exactly what I need and nothing more and I damn sure did not need Xanax. Which for the record, I ended up being right. The whole weird breathing thing was actually an allergic reaction to caffeine. I’m allergic to friggin caffeine! I’m the butt of yet another one of God’s cruel jokes. I’ve gotten used to this reality.

Xanax + CVS on Tennyson = not killing people. And let me tell you, I have considered black market C4 as to how I would take the whole operation down. I mean not literally. No one call the police or anything, but damn… I’m really just flabbergasted by the absolute incompetence of that place and in my daydreams, I see the thing leveled and it brings a smile to my face.

To be continued…