Maxigumee

I need to chill out. I need a chill pill. School this year is turning me into a nervous, obsessive compulsive, socially anxious wreck. Today in physics, my teacher was going over the answers to a homework sheet we had had a few days ago. She’s a really nice person, she is, but her accent (Romanian?) sort of turns into a drone after a while and a start to drift off into day-dreamland. I didn’t understand that there was an order to the way people were being called on to answer the questions. I guess there was. The teacher called out “13….. 13? Um…. number 13?” a few times before I realized that I was supposed to read number 13. The usual adrenaline rush and reddening of the face that happens when I’m called on followed. “Two point four three times ten to the 8th power?” I asked, my voice shaking. My teacher looked at me with a look that sort of said, “huh?” And then “oooh! I get what you did wrong. You did [what she thought I did which is nowhere near what I did]. Am I right?” I pretended to know what she was talking about and just nodded. As I looked down at my paper, I realized that not only had I gotten the question horrifyingly wrong, all I had really done was copy one side of the equation into the answer blank. Let’s say that the equation was 3+2. In the answer blank, I wrote 2. What the heck? My brain has not been functioning properly lately. I’m wondering if it’s brain damage from banging my head against the door too many times when I was younger.

Maybe it was the distracting study hall I had yesterday. It was seventh period and there were a few more people than usual in the study hall room than usual, probably because of schedule changes. Anyway, the room was pretty noisy, and that was bad enough. To make it worse, though, every time the room got too loud, the attendant watching us would make an extremely loud and high pitched whistling sound that would make me head jerk up violently and my adrenal glands go absolutely insane. Once was bad enough, but the attendant went on to do it about three more times, none less surprising than the last. All the while, I was trying to complete my physics homework.

I can’t tell whether by the end of the school day I’m extremely jittery or dead tired. True, my mind is complete mush by then and almost completely disconnected from the external word, but everything also gets me very worked up, too. After my wrong answer in physics, I spent the rest of the school day with a three period long adrenaline rush, fidgeting and drawing elaborate borders around my paper in literature class. And now I’m exhausted. So good night.