Beware the Rants of February

When you're doing something pretty unpleasant, you can still start off in a good mood. You chat with people, listen to some music, think entertaining thoughts, and the work isn't so bad. Yeah, you're cleaning your room, but you plug in your i-pod and crank up some Jet, and dance around a little. You're working for the next four hours, but you have side conversations when you can, make up stories about the people hanging around in the stacks, and play other little games to keep you sane.

And then something happens. Completely out of nowhere, and usually for no reason at all, a tiny internal switch flips. And it's really not fun anymore.

High school. Everyone hates it by now. Until this point you've been disliking it, but hanging in there and finding ways to make it fun. This morning I got up at 6:00 to watch nearly every school in the county run accross the "cancelation" bar except for mine. I took a hurried groggy shower and ate a hurried groggy breakfast. I bundled all up and went out into the dark and subzero degree cold, and went to school. I did make coffee, but it tasted like soap. In Euro I watched a long and dull movie about some old English Proffessor talking about early Indian Imperialism and didn't understand a word. Of course I didn't! It was not only a Monday morning, but Superbowl Monday morning, and I was watching a movie at 7:30 am in a dark classroom, and my coffee tasted like soap. I didn't stand a chance. I then spent an hour and a half in study hall, doing psych notes. After a loud and crowded and freezing lunch, I went to Psych class and took some more notes. Then I went to another hour and a half of study hall. Where I took some English notes.

It hit me in my third hour of study hall, with my hood up and gloves on because the room was so cold, trying to get 70 pages read in 90 minutes. Staring down the barrel of French class first thing tomorrow, followed by an agonizing gym class with only freshman and sophomores and juniors in it. Not to mention seven long and cruel months without any football whatsoever.
It stopped being fun.

I know I'm usually all upbeat and sunshiny and "look on the bright side of life." But I am in the infernal high school in the dead of winter (without any hope of a snow day) just waiting and waiting for college letters to come. A sane human being can only take so much. And my "let's make the best of it" minutes are gone. I feel like opening my window wide and screaming into the unforgiving, frigid black hole "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore!"

If you think I'm crazy to gamble obscene amounts of money and years of my life to learn how to make movies, this is why. If I roll out of bed every day of my life feeling like this, I just won't make it. I'll combust or something. There is no amount of money in the world that can bribe me into a job that makes me feel like this. I don't care how many hours a week I have to work or how poor I am. I want to be able to breathe.