Life in the Madhouse

A bell rings, buzzing in your ear so that all you can hear are the people around you and its incessant tone. It stops, but already the pulsating mass of flesh around you is moving, struggling against itself as the herd becomes one and two and three—no, four! directions at once. The dynamics are on an impossible scale, yet you manage to cope anyway.

Welcome to life in the madhouse. In some places, also known as high school.

After one day, I‘ve already decided I don’t like big schools. Apparently Westgate now has a population of over 1300. That’s nice, except that the building really can’t support that many. Take the cafeteria, for example: it’s smaller than the one at FWCI, and as such, they cannot fit every student into it at lunch. So some students have to eat elsewhere. I didn’t even try to get into the cafeteria to buy milk, I made straight for the courtyard rather than enter the maddest part of the sanitarium.

Class sizes are larger than I‘m used to, but overall the classes themselves are as usual. I’ve already received the “we expect you to be more mature because you’re seniors now” maxim from my English teacher (and she’s right, but they do say it every year). After two years of English, I’m ready for whatever they throw at me. We’re doing The Taming of the Shrew as our play, which I have not read but have seen, and A Separate Peace as our novel study. Ironically, we were supposed to do Lord of the Flies, but students such as myself who came from FWCI already did that in Grade 10. So we’ll do a different novel even though the rest of the course thematically fits with Lord of the Flies.

Anyway, I digress. Classes are fine, between them is not. The hallways are way more crowded than I ever expected. There are so many people! It’s times like that when I realise I really am not a person who enjoys crowds. It’s not just the physical feeling (although that is unsettling) but the noise that accompanies it.

To end the day, my bus was late. It was supposedly arriving at 4 PM, but lo and behold it was past 4:15 before it arrived. Considering that I can get out at 3:30 and that I‘ve timed the walk home at about half an hour, this means that I can theoretically walk home on the nice days. And I could use the exercise (it’s not needed, but it’s nice to get some anyway).

I arrived home tired and burnt out again, I’m glad I don’t have homework (although that will be marginally better once I get my laptop back). Hopefully this entire week, maybe month, is just my physical adjustment back to school, and it will all become commonplace. If not, I will have to bend reality until it suits my will. MUWAHAHAHAHA.