Highlights from my 8th Grade 1999/2000 Schedule Planner and Time Calsule

 

Middle School remains one of the worst times of my entire life. By the start of 8th grade I had been through the worst of it, but it had left me broken inside. The child I used to be had been thoroughly crushed and twisted. My dysthymia probably dates all the way back to those years. Still, there was some light at the end of the tunnel. At the end of the school year I would be out of this prison, and into another prison that might be better. Or just as bad. But at least it would be a different prison; although it happened to be right across the street.

At the beginning of the 1999/2000 school year, the students were all given these spiral-bound schedule planners. They had holographic covers, which were fun to scratch on and pretend we were DJs. I’m sure the teachers despised them. These schedule planners made a huge deal out of the year 2000 and “The New Millennium”. As if an arbitrary number on a year has any real significance. I remember this hype well (and a while back I blogged about what I did on New Years 2000 if you want to read more on that subject). The schedule planners contained all of the tyrannical school policies, the main calendar part, and at the end, a time capsule of sorts, out of paper of course. We were encouraged to keep these schedule planners and open the time capsules at a later date. For some reason I did keep it. And it is a time capsule in a lot of ways, not just the way it was intended to be. It allows me to see how much I’ve changed since I was 13, and how much I haven’t. Anyway, here are the best bits.

Valley View Federal Penitentiary and Insane Asylum. I had fun adding to the artwork throughout the planner in my own fashion. This jaguar drawing was made much more interesting by having it pounce on a security guard at a prison; whose appearance I’m almost certain I based on my 7th grade English and Social Studies teacher that I despised. 

Throughout this section I crossed out the word “school” and replaced it with “prison”, as well as “student” with “prisoner” wherever it appeared. It works, actually. My favorite sentence here, “The Valley View guards, torturers, officers, custodians, cafeteria workers, support staff, volunteer fiends and administrators are all working together to make this the worst year ever for you.” 

This is probably the edgiest page in the planner. X marks the spot where the bomb would go on the map to destroy the school. Now I had no ability or desire to actually carry out such a thing. I only wrote that out of sheer hatred for the school. It was merely a doodle. And what kid hasn’t thought about turning their school into a smoldering crater? There was even a Calvin and Hobbes comic about that. This being fresh off Columbine though, I’m pretty lucky no one saw it. This sort of thing earned me a reputation at school among the other students however, for being a psycho who was going to burn the school down one day. But being feared was better than being bullied, as I had been the previous two years. So I embraced it. Started adding a little more black to my wardrobe.

Here is the PE dress code and other rules. Oh how I hated PE. Forced to don uniforms emblazoned with the school logo and mascot, encouraging obedience through a false sense of “pride”. It wasn’t actually about fitness. It was about getting the students used to taking orders, so that we would be suited for either the military or whatever dead end minimum wage job we would end up with after accumulating massive student loan debt on a useless college degree. This was always the plan. I had some idea of this even back then. 

Lovely doodles, aren’t they?

 

There’s that infamous stylized S, incorporated into “School Sucks”, no less. I also would doodle on and cover up my English teacher’s negative feedback over my homework that I didn’t do with a red ink pen of my own. He required me to have a parent sign each day, but I’m pretty sure my mom just signed through the whole planner in one go near the beginning of the school year. What’s the teacher going to do about that, really? Not sure what grade I ended up getting in that class, but does that even matter in the slightest now, 21 years later? I wish I knew how little everything was going to matter back then; how utterly pointless all the struggle and suffering I went through turned out to be in the end. I’d have talked back more, and stood up for myself more. Just as long as you do the bare minimum to not get held back a grade or sent to summer school, it doesn’t matter at all what grade you get. Neither of those things ever happened to me, fortunately. But I still feel robbed of my childhood.

Oh goodie, the last day in this stupid school! How exciting that was. I knew I still had four more years in High School to go, but I was just so glad to be out of that nightmare. High School wasn’t as bad. Better teachers, less bullying, most of the other students were just a little bit more mature and no longer felt the need to project their insecurities on people who were different, like me. Not that it never happened. It still sucked but it was less of a toxic environment, by comparison. It could have been better if I wasn’t already so mentally scarred by Middle School. It made me very pessimistic. I went into High School already hating it before anything bad had even happened. 

I love the summer schedule I wrote here. Listen to radio, play video game, eat. Repeat to infinity. That’s still the schedule I wish I had. 

Here it is, the time capsule. It’s really corny. I knew it back then. I decided I would open it on the last day of High School, which really wasn’t long enough. Then I decided to open it again on December 21, 2012, because you know, that was the date of the Mayan apocalypse. I knew about that before most other people because of some speculative documentary I watched in the 90s that terrified me (I wrote about that on this blog before too). After 2012, I just left it open, to look at whenever. There’s nothing that amazing inside.

Some highlights from the main two pages: 

My fitness goal six months from now is: 

Nothing.

Addictions are unhealthy. To me these are the three worst addictions:

Pokemon, soap operas, cigarettes (in that order of course).

Three junk foods I like but should eat less more of:

Salsa Verde Chips, ShockTarts, Sour Strings (I largely cut candy out of my diet in my late 20s after a root canal on my molar, which I eventually had extracted).

Two Things I Do To Relax:

Play video games, listen to music (this is still true)

3 Things I like to do that help me stay fit:

Lift TV controllers, lift N64 controllers, lift (video game) cartridges (I was so funny back then).

This is what I wish to contribute to society:

I want to dominate society, end youth segregation, let kids vote and destroy school. 

(I used to love drawing over maps of the world with my own ideal country boundaries, under the fantasy that I would one day take over the world. World domination is the kind of thing you dream about when you feel powerless. And I felt very powerless in Middle School. I had no autonomy whatsoever, no control over my life.)

3 things I’m proud about myself:

My tapes. (And I still stubbornly make mixtapes.)

The middle part has my ominous message about the 2012 apocalypse, plus some of the music I liked at the time (some of which makes me cringe now, please don’t read it, Gods I hate Kid Rock what was I thinking). 

Another flap of the time capsule. Some further highlights:

My friends will remember me most for:

Being the small one. (I wonder if that’s true?)

The class I like most:

I hate school.

Why?

Because it takes over my life.

I took the liberty of listing more of my favorite songs, which are hit-or-miss to me today:

I’m Not Crazy (actually Institutionalized by Suicidal Tendencies)

Freak of the Week (by Marvelous 3)

Pretty Fly (for a white guy) by The Offspring 

Song 2 (by Blur)

Everything Dies (by Type O Negative)

Sehnsucht (by Rammstein)

Paul Revere (by The Beastie Boys)

My musical tastes were flawed, but gradually coming around, showing a flash here and there of what they would later become. Another thing to remember in younger me’s defense is that I was very limited by whatever the radio played. And CDs were expensive, I think at that point I owned less than ten. I wasn’t from a rich family. It wasn’t like today where I can hop on YouTube and find any song that’s ever been recorded. I would never even have imagined that back then, though it was less than ten years away.

And that’s the end. “Ehh shut up!” Was this the most significant thing I did all year? Nah. Probably the mixtapes I made that year were more significant, to me at least. But it gave me something to write about in my blog, and more fuel for my webcomic. So maybe it did end up being significant. It’s a terrible chapter in my life, but it’s part of what shaped me. I think what I find most interesting are the ways I haven’t changed. I’m still very cynical and anti-authoritarian (unless the authority was me, heh. But I don’t want to be an authority anymore). I still love music and video games, I still make mixtapes. I may have changed in many ways in the last 21 years, but at my core I’ve always been the same person. I’ve always been me.

One more doodle for the road. Here’s the back cover. Some typical anti-drug propaganda that never stopped anyone from doing drugs. I ought to rip this off and roll a joint with it. 

Anyway, I’m homeschooling my kid.