Misconceptions

Aug 11

I know boarding school sounds like it’s only for trust fund babies, international heirs, and kids who got kicked out of their last school for drugs, but sometimes a kid gets sent to boarding school so he doesn’t have to watch his mom wilt away from bone cancer a hallway away.

I know it seems like prosecutors just like to put people in jail, but sometimes justice doesn’t work the way you thought it did, and you buck the system so it works as well as possible inside the small part you can control.

It’s hard not to judge people when we spend most of our time judging ourselves. Dumb-looking shirt. Stupid haircut. Why did I say that the way that I did? His name is Robert, not Richard. I stepped in gum because I deserved it.

I know it sounds funny to ask someone if they are going to “Jew you down,” but maybe you didn’t know that their stepmom used to call them “The Little Jew Boy” to get back at their father. It wasn’t the kind of nickname you get on the back of a jersey.

Social media makes it too easy for people to cast stones from behind cream-colored Walmart blinders of anonymity. Although “say it to my face” is a physical call-to-action, it’s also kind of a test. You know you wouldn’t, and if you would, it says more about you than me.

All bald women have cancer or alopecia. Generalizations are the projection of a simple mind. See, that was judgment on a silver platter next to pigs-in-a-blanket and a small tub of spicy mustard.

Just because I wore a Band-Aid on my face at boarding school didn’t mean I was hiding a pimple that I tried to squeeze so many times that it became a globule. Actually, that was not a misconception. Sometimes life is just cruel to teenagers.