Hello and welcome to Tales of an Idiot. This is the kinda sad and really true story of a stupid high school sophomore boy, namely me, who is currently living in a sinusoidal depression. First, I’d like to say a few words. If you dislike informal narrative, leave now. Run for your life and don’t turn back. I’m writing the whole thing like this, so save yourself while you can. As for the rest of you, you may want to leave because… well… I suck at writing, so yeah. If you’re willing to suffer through this work of disaster, then be my guest. It’s your funeral. Enough Insulting myself for now; on with the story.
So, as I said, I am a sophomore in high school, but I was not always so. At one point in time I was a freshmen. Though this may have been a whole year ago. I’m not quite sure. Anyways, the summer before my first year of high school was a bit of a disappointment. I was a pretty bright kid in middle school and I had applied for this engineering program at one of the high schools in my area. I was, and am, really into engineering, but this apparently doesn’t mean I’m good at it. Out of 7 people that applied, 6 got in. I’m going to assume you know who the one that did not was (Pssst, the answer is me. ME!). Even my best friend (who we will come back to later) got in and I was so totally better than him at math and things. They said the reason I was unable to attend the micro-school was because of a shortage of space in the program, but I know this to be untrue because four of the 6 that did get in didn’t even go. They just wanted to show off the fact that they could do whatever they wanted with their minds. Their stupid little genius minds that I hate so much. Now I expect you to say something along the lines of
“It’s your own fault for not getting in. You’re probably just dumb.” Well, that’s where you’re wrong… at least according to my brain. My brain said
“No, it’s not me! It’s all… uhhh… your parent’s fault! Yeah! They wouldn’t let you be in the highest level math class and now I don’t have all the information I would’ve needed to get you into that class.” My brain is also very bad at using quotation marks, so don’t blame me. It’s true though. I was one of the stupid kids placed in the middle level mathematics classes. I really shouldn’t have been, as I freakin’ ACED THE PRETEST! Oh well, the problem with this theory is that so was my friend. Let’s call him John. John was a good, smart kid. I’d say he was mostly on the same level as me academically, though I was better at writing. We’re both obsessed with the Legend of Zelda video games (I was first! LA at age 5, people!) and we quickly bonded over this fact. We were very close friends and would never really fought or anything. We were both in algebra I in 8th grade and we had more or less the same grade. He must have written some sort of lie in his engineering school application essay about flying to mars or something though, as I was the computer nerd and he was the one that got in… He should tell me the fsb frequency of the intel lga 775… 800mhz, bitch. Enough angst though. Who am I kidding, there’s never enough angst. So John was accepted into the little academy thing and I was shipped off to the stoner school. Before I continue, I’d like to say that I’m religious. I am against all the drug abuse, underage drinking, and premarital sex… that is happening in the hallways. No exaggeration. It’s like they’re TRYING to attract voyeurs. So I’m sent to this school along with the people that declined the opportunity (my opportunity!) to go to the engineering school and the people who did not apply. I was supposed to keep in contact with John, but he kinda decided that I was too stupid or something and just abandoned me. I did have other friends, but they were all of a… lower academic caliber. Well, excluding one, but he’s freaking genius. He’s currently… not building a nuclear reactor in his basement. Okay, so I was abandoned on the doorstep of the orphanage that was (redacted) High School and I was sad. Very sad. I spent the first few weeks writing anonymous hate mail and poorly coded batch file viruses to the engineering school. I did it all through an anonymous IP, so I guess I wasn’t traced. Once I got over this, I realized I had been sleeping through my classes. All of them. Somehow I managed to still ace Bio and Health, though Geometry’s B came as a bit of a surprise. Guess I really wasn’t that great at math. I picked myself up a bit, but the stress of doing so caused me to develop a light insomnia. Ever since then I have not been able to fall asleep before 3:00 am, though I easily will go days without sleep. This caused more drowsiness during the classes which made me have to work harder to keep grades up which caused a rise in stress eventually leading to a crash. I stopped caring about grades. I decided to focus on my terrible mental health instead. I was quite the introvert at the time and none of my pre-established friends were in my classes or even my lunch period, so I just sat alone and read during lunch. I also normally ate two or three lunches for some reason. That’s not important though. So as time went on, I developed small mental problems. I began to stop being cocky, which is good in itself, but I went overboard. I am now unable to give myself credit for any skill I may have. The only reason I’m able to recognize this is because of my love interest. She comes later though. So my… woah. I just realized I have one giant paragraph that I don’t know how to separate. Too bad I guess. I’m gonna indent here.
So my mental state started to deteriorate. I had always been the good child, which isn’t hard when you have my brothers, but I started to become easily agitated and I would snap at the smallest things. I mean, I don’t think they’re little, but my mom says that that’s what I do, so I’ll go with that. I also lost any and all organization skills that I had kept up to this point. As I am typing, there is a wooden block covered in leftover J.B. Weld sitting on top of an empty bottle of W.D. 40 right next to my arm. I have random blank dvds scattered over my floor, a disassembled HP tx1000 laptop that my little brother smashed (See? NOT A LITTLE THING!) sitting on my chair, an OS-less power mac g4 that WILL NOT ACCEPT THE UBUNTU INSTALL taking up my entire desk and random power chords just… all over the place. Quite literally. I’d also contemplated suicide a couple times while under increased stress, but I never really came closer than opening my window or looking at my knife from a distance at the time. I tried to address this situation by taking up a martial art. I’m not a sporty person, but I’m not out of shape by any means, so I must say Tae Kwon Do has really gotten me fit, though it’s done little for me mentally. I also tried to express myself in writing. What came out was the first few chapters of a shitty children’s fantasy novel that I wrote only at 4:00-6:30 am, so it was a bit nonsensical. I stuck with Tae Kwon Do, and I’m nearly black belt already. My master instructor says I’m really good, but I look so stupid doing it all and even the basic kicks hurt my 90 year old arthritic joints. Enough lamenting my ineptitude though. Eventually I accepted the fact that I was meant to be pathetic and just kinda rolled with, though I became quite the cynic. I started to dislike people in general and just kind of stayed my distance, with good reason, if you remember what I said about our student body. There were some good people though. I remember quite clearly this one incident in Geometry when this one girl made a reference to the anime Lucky Star and it got me to laugh a bit. I hadn’t smiled too much in front of people I didn’t know well since the first few weeks into 6th grade when some kid in Math told me I had the “gayest smile [she had] ever seen.” so it was kind of a big deal to me, but the next 5 minutes of class were spent everyone gawking at me saying things such as “That’s the first time I’ve ever seen you smile.” or “The weird emo Jewish kid” (of which I am neither…) “just laughed!” This was a pretty nice feeling, but it also made me shrink back a bit more into the corner of the room as I disliked the excess attention.
Every good story has a love interest, right? Well, mine does, so you can go shove that… oh, you agreed? Huh. Anyways, I mentioned mine back in the first… monstrous block of text and now I’m going to talk about her for a bit. I am not a ladies man. In fact, the last time I had talked to a girl was 4 years before in 5th grade, so at first she wasn’t love interest, she was just “GIRRRRL!” So I had met Girl, who we will call Emily (one of my favorite names), in Biology. She had known and hated my older brother, but then again, so did everyone in the school. This did not help my confidence. Anyway, my Bio teacher was wearing a shirt from the web comic XKCD and she pointed this out to him. I was standing within earshot and, without a word, pulled out my netbook, loaded up xkcd.com, and positioned myself in an area easily viewable by Emily. She did not take notice of me the first few times I did this (What? I wanted a new friend…) but I eventually got her attention by “accidentally” leaving the volume on when Avast! Free Virus Security (I’m not advertising! I’m not making shifty eyes either. Not at all.) had an update. The whole class turned there heads towards me at the exclamation of
“Avast! Virus database has been updated!” The effects where a bit too strong, but it worked and she did take notice of what I was actually doing on my computer. We eventually got into a pretty weak conversation about the comic. It was a bit disappointing, but what can you expect when the main thought running through your head is “GIRRRRRRRRRL! NERR!”? Anyways, we developed an acquaintanceship through this and I would sometimes run a reference by her making her giggle a bit. It was fun. We run on a weird block schedule at our school, so some classes only last a single semester. Bio was one of those classes and I was afraid of not seeing Emily for the rest of the year as she was a sophomore and I a freshmen. As luck would have it, we happened to be taking the same algebra II class the next semester and I was able to talk to her a bit then. Most of it consisted of carebearstares though. Our friendship didn’t really begin until this year.
Skipping the rest of freshmen year because I’m writing this all in one sitting and I don’t want to run out of clementines (which I inhale like a vacuum), the next year is even weirder. As I said, Emily and I became real friends this year. We have (ooh, present tense. Special) the same free period class every other day at the end of the day, so I was actually able to talk to her this year. Most of our early conversations were about how I did not resemble my older brother and how that was a good thing, then they were about her “exposing” me to a couple anime, mainly Hetalia, but also a few I’d already seen or heard of, and then they were about how I resemble a bunny somehow… which I do not understand. I told her my goal for the year was to get her to stop calling me Bunny (Last Name Redacted) and instead to call me Luke. She laughed at the prospect, but eventually, after getting her email address and having extensive chat sessions over gmail, I was able to do just that and it only took a couple months. The catalyst for this would probably be the night where… there were domestic problems at her house and I stayed up to comfort her through it, not that I would’ve slept anyway. She claims the whole night was a bit of a blur, but I remember it in excruciating detail. For her sake, I will not recount what happened in this story, as she will probably read this at some point and would get mad at me if I said anything. Anyways, after this we became pretty darn close friends, staying up being insomniacs together, and I began to open up. I had not yet developed feelings for her, but I was already at the pint where she made up for the loss of John ten times. One day, she had the idea to start a student run musical production with her as the director. It was to be Joss Whedon’s “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog”. You know, the one with Neil Patrick Harris as the mad scientist and Felicia Day as the Mary-Sue love interest. Well I thought it was a great idea and supported her thoroughly. Little did I know that she had plans for me. Apparently, our Bio teacher had heard me singing the end credits to Portal (Still Alive, for those with less knowledge of the gaming world) under my breath and had told her that I could sing. She dragged me to the auditions and forced me to sing. Sadly for me, the only songs I knew were either The instrumentals from Zelda (I only know every song from all 15 [16 in two days!] games), the Portal and Portal 2 credit songs, Fall Out Boy (which is highly embarrassing to admit in high school), and the Decemberists, who Emily had introduced to me just a short few weeks before. I chose to sing “We Both Go Down Together”… stupidly, as it was her current favorite song and I sill believe she was biased towards me for that. It turned out that I could actually sing according to everyone there, though I think I sucked pretty damn bad then. I was chosen to take the place of NPH, the fangirl-dubbed “walking orgasm” (who is, sadly for them, homosexual) as Dr. Horrible, the titular character. I have spent countless hours since then practicing singing to the point where I may actually be pretty good at singing this stuff, but I digress back to my story of woe. This is where I met my friend who shall be dubbed Sarah. Sarah likes me. I mean this as in she kinda obsessed over me for a little while. I picked up on this and was ecstatic. She’s nice, pretty, funny, etc. and I was just about ready to ask her out (after being told by other sources that she liked me) when I just had to realize that I actually had much stronger feelings for someone else. Who might this be? Why Emily of course! I had developed a form of unconditional love for her in my subconscious mind. My conscious mind was too stupid to realize this even when we started to say farewell with the words “I love you”. I gave it a night to think about it and the next day after school, I confessed. It was a heartfelt, pre-rejected confession, meaning I knew she didn’t feel the same way. Even though I said this to her while telling her, she still felt horrible denying me a requited love and burst into tears. This sent me over the edge. I had not cried in years but the dam broke down that night. Ever since, it’s come so easily that it’s become more of a tri-weekly event than an emotional response. Oh look at that, it’s Monday. I guess I should allow blood to gather in my head and my eyes to overproduce their salty protective liquids. Anyhow, just to make things worse, Sarah decided that it would be best to confess the next day. I was quickly placed in the shoes Emily had been in only one day earlier and I was forced to deal with both sides of a rejection. It was too much. For the next few weeks, it was all I could do to keep myself from committing suicide. School, Dr. Horrible (Which will fail MISERABLY with our cast, by the way), my robotics team, tae kwon do, Sarah, and Emily. The only reason I’m still well and alive at the moment is because I couldn’t stand to think what it would do to Emily and Sarah if I did kill myself. They both know about my contemplation and both their reactions were horrifying. Also, quite sadly, another factor in my life is the one day (it’s 2 am) till release of the new Zelda game, Skyward Sword. I’ve been waiting for 3 years since E3 09’s teaser art, and I’m not going down without seeing the spoils of my patience. I mean, I haven’t even started one mob directed at NoA HQ to get a dev. copy of the game this time. That was disastrous those 5 years ago before the release of Twilight Princess.
So here I am, still alive. Still alive, but stupider than ever. A while ago, Sarah invited me to see a movie as a friend. I agreed, not wanting our friendship to be ruined by me. We had a good time through the movie, but, in the spur of the moment, something snapped in my brain and caused me to do something so incredibly idiotic (and NOT SEXUAL! I already said I was religious) that I almost completely destroyed my friendship with her. I asked her out. She said yes and we went along with it for a bit, but the whole time, my head was just screeching
“NO! THIS IS WRONG! YOU DON’T HAVE FEELINGS OR HER! ABORT! ABANDON SHIP!” I eventually snapped and broke up with her OVER GMAIL CHAT. I couldn’t take it any more, but I could have waited for a better medium of communication… like speech. But I was able to do it kind of lightly ish an she doesn’t completely hate me. In fact, we still talk more or less the same to each other. I’m apparently a big flatterer. Now go to present… week. I’ve more or less given up on Emily (though I will never stop feeling the same way about her, I just know it’s a lost cause) and I believe I found someone else. I actually met her a while ago, about 2 weeks into sophomore year. We’ll call her Erin. I met her in gym and we just kinda talked about stuff sometimes. It wasn’t anything really more than a forced friendship through lack of others to talk to in the class, but as time went on we got to be real friends. I also noticed how cute she is. She’s about 5′ 2″ and can’t weigh more than 100lb or so, but she looks completely healthy. She also has shoulder-length smooth red hair which is strangely attractive, but not being a lusty person, this is not why I like her, it’s just a perk. She’s funny, nice, cute, about as cynical as I (still) am, etc. and most importantly, she puts up with my strangeness. I asked her out a while ago and the exact quote was
“Well, the line is pretty long, but it’s all fictional so… considering.” Ahh writers. They’re so… creative. Well, that’s more or less where I am, my emotions varying with the days, sometimes the hours. The bus ride home was great, being home sent me into another slump which caused me to write for a couple hours. If you, for some reason, read all the way through this, I commend you on your tenacity. You have now read the ramblings of an angsty teen. Congratulations, and I’ll see you again if I decide to write something else.