You wake up, the year is 2010.
As you stretch, your lungs fill with pure, crisp air. You practically hurdle out of bed and race down the hall to the family room computer.
“Finally,” you think, “Now I can check my Gmail chat messages.”
As angelic morning light colors the room, you notice a new message from your friend Sam, or as Gmail chat knows him, “Xx_sillybandking_xX,” and open it immediately.
“Finally finished ‘The Lightning Thief’!” he writes. “If you were at Camp Half-Blood, you’d totally be a descendant of Hermes!”
You feel a kind of suffocating despondency due to the fact that no one understands you’d actually descend from Hades. Then again, you’re a little darker and edgier than most kids your age. You pull out your (PRODUCT)RED iPod nano and scroll to Music > Artists > Train > “Hey, Soul Sister - Single” and press play.
A biblical tsunami of dopamine courses though you as Patrick Monahan’s incredible lyrics fill the front lobe of your left-side brains. I literally cannot express how pure and crisp the air is outside.
You could sit there all day listening to incredible lines like “I'm so obsessed. My heart is bound to beat right out of my untrimmed chest” and “So gangsta, I'm so thug, you're the only one I'm dreaming of, you see,” because you DO see. You ARE so “gangsta” and so “thug.”
Alas, it’s time to put on a visually repulsive graphic T-shirt that says something like “CAUTION: Extreme Awesomeness” or hilariously looks like a tuxedo despite being a T-Shirt. You head out the door into a world which knows alarming little about Joseph Kony.
In social studies, Sam tries out some new physical comedy on you. He takes his .7 lead mechanical pencil out of his lockable stationery box and presses the button until the .7 lead reaches far past the metal tip. He then holds the button down and pushes the lead against his arm vein, hilariously mimicking heroin usage with something as ironically innocent as a writing utensil. You laugh so hard your kidneys hurt.
In second period, you get to miss class and watch a local city councilman dress up like a tree to talk about how nothing has more swag than recycling. “Sweet,” you think to yourself, “we’re getting on this earth saving stuff early, bet we won’t even have to worry about it by the time I’m in college.”
Third and fourth period fly by like a migrating pigeon. Some of the highlights include hearing a rendition of “Joy to the World” in which the popular television dinosaur Barney is brutally massacred. You’ve heard similar parodies of “Jingle Bells” and “I Love You” where he suffers the same fate.
It’s fifth period, the last of the day, when a sudden and primordial force takes over your mind. As if possessed by an ancient spirit, you draw two sets of three equidistant lines in your notebook. You remember connecting the bottom of the leftmost top line to the middle-lower line, before you blacked out. When you awake, there’s a mysterious “S” figure on your notebook, existing in an almost three dimensional space.
“What’s that?” asks Sam.
“I have no idea,” you explain, “But I can’t stop drawing it.”
“That’s pretty cool, how do you do it?” says your crush, leaning over to see it clearer.
In a fit of panic your brain struggles to differentiate between “Thanks” and “I’ll show you,” and what comes out can only be heard as, “Throw you.”
Uninterested in being thrown, you crush turns around. Meanwhile, thousands of miles away, Joseph Kony thanks God no one has made a viral video challenging his existence.
As the graceful wave of the school day pulls back from the shore, a new land known as “The Scholastic Book Fair” is revealed in the cold damp sand. You buy some kind of fuzzy creature to live on top of one of your wooden pencils, as well as the newest “Percy Jackson” before heading to the carpool smelling like sweat.
You go door-to-door for a few hours, selling overpriced magazine subscriptions so your class might be able to have a pizza day. After that, it’s time to throw your feet up, log onto AddictingGames.com and crack open a well-earned DanimalsⓇ.
That night’s sixth playthrough of “Hey, Soul Sister - Single” give you a kind of manic confidence. You log into Gmail chat and copy and paste the lyrics into a drafted message to your crush.
“Kinda reminds me of u lololol XD” you write. And like a great military general signaling for the dogs of war to invade some fortified coast, you hit “send.”
As the sun sets on the utopia of 2010, the world hums along, completely ignorant of Joseph Kony’s existence.
The nature of this article is satirical and the opinions presented in this column are the author’s and do not imply any endorsement from The State Press or its editors.
Reach the reporter at drustemp@asu.edu or follow @denzel_for on Twitter.
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