The paragraph you’re about to read is – you guessed it – about NOTHING! The following paragraph is composed of a bunch of gibberish that changes from one random topic to the next with no hint of stopping. Why did I decide to write such a pointless paragraph? Well, I was recently inspired by the past books that I’m currently reading (“The Elephant Vanishes” by Haruki Murakami and “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” by Mark Haddon) where both authors have one thing in common: writing about total gibberish to show the raw, inner workings of what goes on in their heads. So, I decided to write about what goes on in mine. If you think that your life is too important to waste minutes reading a pointless essay then by all means, read other stories, but if you think to yourself – what the heck? – and decide to read this essay because you have nothing better to do, be my guest.
For all things creativity can spew out of its raging mouth of disarray, I’ve decided to write this tedious article on a Saturday, a Saturday night to be specific. Saturdays are wonderful yet not wonderful at the same time when you’re still a student at school. Like, you’re excited to do your personal activities and hobbies and go to your friends’ sleepovers and shop at malls, etc., but in the end, you dread going to school on Monday of next week. That is if you even have a dread for school in the first place. I mean, let’s be honest, do children really hold such emotional turmoil over entering an educational environment like how they’re depicted in movies, TV shows, and cartoons? Public children maybe, but I wouldn’t really say the same thing for those who go to BASIS schools. Unlike the events that happen around BASIS schools, public schools are a different breed of schools, that are likely to go extinct. I’ve been in public schools ever since I was in 5th grade and I dreaded going there every single day. There’s a large handful of teachers who don’t have a passion for what they teach and just spew out information to students so that they can hopefully retain enough knowledge to leave their classroom. The facilities are very unkempt with barely any janitor in sight to clean the eyesores inside bathrooms, classrooms, and hallways. The cafeteria food is composed of rancid lumps of hepatitis-spreading illnesses coupled with frozen, standard milk cartons. The role models that older students embody are horrible: bullying around lockers, food fights, obnoxious behavior, etc. All in all, it’s hell being a public school student. Speaking of hell, what is the afterlife like if there even is one? The age-old question still stands: What happens to us when we die? Will we fly with the angels in heaven for being patron saints who bought every last box of GirlScout cookies when little girls in aged camping uniforms would ring our doorbell every spring? Will we burn in the pits of bottomless, eternal damnation for placing gum under the school desks after it lost its flavor? Will we be reborn as gods or ants depending on how well we performed our civic duties in our past lifetime? Will we one day reach Purgatory? No one knows. To be honest, no one knows the strange mysteries that life provides for us. I’m not talking about mysteries that require detectives or the FBI to solve. I’m talking about mysteries that fly right past us, the ones we deal with daily. How did the “Happy Birthday” song come to be? Why do we dream the dreams we dream? Why is each nail polish color called something bizarre: Pet My Peacock, Erektus Klitoris, Lincoln Park After Dark, Oh My Purple? That last name is made up or is it? Even though there are answers to all these baffling questions, the average person that we come across when walking across the street wouldn’t know off the top of their head. Speaking of crossing the street, there are safe precautions one must take to walk on the crosswalk: no cars or vehicles in general must be crossing in the vicinity and the adjacent electric sign on the other side of the street must show the image of a white figure walking. If either of these precautions are violated, we can’t cross. But why is it that some people just cross the street when they see no cars, even when they see the red hand signal flashing on the electric sign? I know people in America do this, but I’m not sure people behave the same way in other countries. I know that South Korean citizens would carelessly walk across the street and that German citizens definitely would NOT, but that’s it. German is such a profound language; it’s easy to sound certain German words because some sound similar to their English equivalents but sentences altogether sound foreign and tricky. I remember the glorious days of summer break when my Duolingo streak was soaring by the 200-300s (before it, unfortunately, fell back to 0 at the start of a new school semester) and I would order coffee in German. German, like other European languages, categorizes their words by gender: male, female, and sometimes neutral. Apart from grammar, gender is such a central foundation to how an individual speaks a certain language to different groups of people. Sometimes, the gender of a word is easy to recognize from how the word is structured like in German, but sometimes you’ll just have to memorize them for each word like in Spanish. Grammatical gender, as the official term is called, is such a pain in the tush to memorize sometimes. Apart from noun and verb conjugations, gender is a difficult concept to grasp, memorize, and eventually utilize. It seems that there is no hardcore system to determine which is which because if one was created, there would always be exceptions. This phenomenon of exceptions to any word system created and tested is the reason why non-English speaking foreigners from around the world find English to be challenging. While it may not appear to be difficult to English-speaking people in America, English as a whole language is difficult to learn due to the presence of homophones (e.g. there, their, and they’re), irregular verbs (e.g. see, seen, and saw), comparative and superlative adjectives (e.g. good, better, and best), and so on and so forth. To be fair though, no language is more easy or difficult to learn than others. It doesn’t matter where we’re born in the world, the language we were born speaking will always be easy for us. For instance, I was born learning Chinese and Korean to an extent from my parents. But I can definitely picture how others may find it challenging to learn, just like how I see Spanish and French to be a pain in the bum to learn. In general, however, activities that we developed when we were younger become commonplace for us once we grow up, and along with it, the general order of how we complete such tasks. That’s why we innately react in an estranged way towards the abilities and order of tasks that other people perform. For example, every morning, I always brush my teeth first and then eat breakfast, but I see my other family members around the house eat breakfast before brushing their teeth. Now, personally, I think that this order of morning habits is strange because I wouldn’t begin to eat food and risk making my morning breath more stinkier than it already is. But that’s just me.
Alright, that pretty much sums up everything that’s been happening in my mind up until now. I hope you enjoyed my rant about absolutely nothing at all. 🙂
