The Tye-Dyed Shirt

The Tye-Dyed Shirt

 I'm in high school. My high school  is very weird for many reasons, but one thing my school does differently that might not be so confusing is the time taken out of each day for the half-hour class called "Career Advisory." It's not much of a class, really, just a time when people try to get us to learn stuff. It's basically trying to teach us, the kids, about getting a career and making goals and figuring out what the requirements are for those goals, blah blah blah. I know some other schools do this, but I don't actually know how common it is, so I'm explaining it anyway.

So Advisory is taught at about 10:30 in the morning, all at the same time, by all the teachers. Every class is pretty small, consisting of only about fifteen kids, but every Advisory stays together for all four years of high school, so everyone in this class is in the same grade.

Here comes the weird part: my school is divided up into four "Small Schools." Every Small School is designated with a color, and has its own principal, its own office, its own motto, so it's like a real mini-school. There's Silver School, Green School, Blue School, and the one I'm in, Yellow School. Every kid in the same Advisory as me is in Yellow School, too. The most confusing part about this, though, is that my Advisory teacher does not belong to Yellow School. He's in Silver School. Have I confused you enough yet?

Yeah, we all think this is a bit more complicated and boring than it needs to be. So every Advisory teacher spices it up a bit in their own way. Some have waffle breakfasts. Some design their own T-shirts. We get cookies the teacher's wife bakes and get to watch the original Star Wars. It's totally awesome.

We also tye-dyed our own T-shirts. See, our teacher has one of the best senses of humor ever, but sometimes it can go a bit too far. For example: our T-shirts. The idea came from our small school's motto. Yellow School is all about "Performing Academic Excellence." The teacher sort of rearranged that motto into "Performing Excellence Every Day," which, not counting Day, created the acronym P.E.E. It's especially funny because it's sort of Yellow School's motto, and, well, pee is yellow. If we had a different principal for Yellow School this might have never flown, but he has a similar sense of humor. In fact, our teacher was thinking of making a shirt for the principal.

So we dyed these shirts yellow, and printed them with this acronym. We all wore our shirts on the last day of freshman year, and with only a few explanations needed, got plenty of laughs from our "PEE" shirts. It's a joke that everyone got.

Wearing this shirt in public, though, is an entirely different story. When other people look at me wearing this shirt they don't see the joke so much as a poor confused girl who got tricked into wearing the word "PEE" on her chest. They feel bad for me, but don't even have the audacity to feel bad for me to my face. They only look at me when I'm not looking at them, but I can FEEL them feeling bad for me, and that's just plain annoying. I can feel them thinking, "Oh, poor girl."

It's like watching that one Batman movie and going, "Oh, poor Batman. He got stabbed. Well, time to do the dishes." Them feeling bad for me is like feeling bad for a fictional character. Like they're pretending to care, but only for their own benefit. They're lying to themselves and they think it's genuine pity.

Well, I'm NOT fiction! I'm as real as they are, but they don't take the time to consider this. How can they judge me when they only know a fifteenth of the real picture? They don't know me! They'll NEVER know me!! But how can I judge them, when I don't know them either? How can anyone judge anything? I don't know anyone, yet I judge them all, and they return the favor. What is this world coming to? How can we live in such a terrible world?!

I usually end up like this in the middle of the grocery store, leaving me unable to focus on the rest of the grocery shopping. This led to me never wearing the PEE shirt in public ever again.

But, hey, I started this post with a title this time. So that's a plus, I guess.

I'm not sure how to end this,
           PolarFarina