I would like to take this opportunity right here, right now, to show my immense appreciation and gratitude to teachers. You do what I cannot do. You have the patience that I will never have. You amaze me every day. Teachers, I love you. And I respect you. Will you marry me? I'll do anything, if you'll only promise to never leave me again. School is a point of contention in our household. I love it, my husband loves it, my daughter likes it occasionally, and my son hates it. I can't say that I blame him either. He has ADHD and is the square peg trying to fit into the round hole when it comes to getting along at school. In the couple months leading up to spring break 2020, he was completely unable to be in his classroom all day. I would get phone calls from the school telling me that he was hanging out in the hallway with the Education Assistant because the class was too distracting. We toyed with the idea of homeschooling him. But after a trial period of about 5 days where we brought him home at midday, we realised that we didn't have the stamina for it. He asks a lot of fucking questions. They come rapid-fire, like bullets out of a semi-automatic, and he doesn't wait for the answer to the first one before asking the next twelve. The vast majority of them are obscure, or require a PhD in something like mechanical, aeronautical, or medical engineering. Despite our best efforts, he wasn't interested in going on hikes or bike rides, or doing any at-home learning. He just wanted to watch tv and play Minecraft. In the end, we worked to get him back to school for full days and agreed that we would not be bringing up homeschooling again. Ever. Obviously we all know how that turned out when lockdown rolled around. Can we just agree that there are certain things that you need an actual human in front of you for? Yes, we have amazing technology at our disposal. Yes, it has opened up the world and made things possible that were previously impossible. But as a species, we have not yet evolved past the need for human connection. The in-person kind (I can't even believe I have to specify that.) We'll know when we've evolved past it because we won't ever feel lonely. In fact, we probably won't feel anything at all. We won't feel an urge to fall in love, or have sex, or make a real friend. Until that day, a day that I hope never comes for mankind, we still need each other: not virtually, but physically. Which is why this whole virtual schooling thing is not going to work. The platform our school is using for online learning is meant for adults, therefore it has a chat box as well as the video function. At any point, students with unlimited access to their technology and minimal parent supervision can contact their teachers day and night. And they have. At all hours of the night. The school has sent out numerous emails to the parents asking them to get a handle on their kids so they don't interrupt the private lives of their teachers. It's been a disaster. But that doesn't even begin to describe the online learning portion. Each day the class has a morning meeting from 09:30-09:50. It goes a little like this: “Good morning Tiana…good morning Tiana…can you unmute yourself please? Tiana? Please can you unmute yourself? Okay I think there's an issue there, good morning Rashid, can you mute your mic please, there's too much noise in the background. I need those students that are currently using the chat box to post memes and videos to please stop because it's distracting.” That carries on for a few minutes. Then the teacher says, “Okay so now that everyone is here, we're going to do our greeting chain.” The first time I heard that, I thought, surely there must be a mistake. She just greeted everyone, didn't she? But alas, they must now greet each other. The greeting chain has a theme based on the first letter of the day of the week, such as “Wine Guzzling Wednesday” or “Fuck This Pandemic Friday.” Its success was dependent entirely on the students' level of interest (somewhere in the negative numbers for my son) and willingness to participate. While I think the exercise was an unprecedented waste of time and resources, I found plenty to be amused by. My personal favourite was when the class was playing 20 questions. The teacher held up a paper bag and asked everyone to guess what was inside. After about 47 questions, the kids had it pinned down as a food item and proceeded to list off every variety of orange they could think of. Kid: Is it an orange? Teacher: It is not an orange. Kid: Is it a clementine? Teacher: It is not a clementine. It's not an orange. Kid:…Is it a mandarin? Teacher: O.K. you guys, it's not an orange. Kid: Is it a blood orange? Teacher: *exasperated* It is NOT an orange. Kid: Is it a tangerine? Teacher: IT'S A BAGEL. A BAGEL! IT'S A BAGEL! NOT AN ORANGE! A BAGEL! AND NOW IT'S COLD! *sigh* Lets work on multiplication now.

Peace of mind… is easy to find? Not, but apparently is easily underrated, like Lana del Rey. How about true happiness? For a guy that has it all and a brain without the ability to focus, something always seems to be missing. Have you ever felt truly at peace with no worries in your head and the feeling that you could die right then and there and everything would be alright? Well, of course you didn't, that's why you killed yourself. “Jack, are you talking to C.R. again?”, said my friend P as she passed the joint. “What if she's really listening?”, I said while holding my breath full of brown, before slowly letting the smoke out from left to right, left to right. P was my best friend during high school and the one I would sneak to the roof with during Civics. “I don't think she WANTS to listen, otherwise she would still be here wearing necklaces instead of a noose…”, she said while extending her hand. “Shut up and smoke”, I said as I handed her what would be roughly translated to English as “little cow” (vaquita in Spanish… or was it bachita?), the smallest smokable divisor of the joint, that is, except “1”, the filter, duh. The truth is we both missed C.R. and we both lit our cigarettes. “Are you ready”, asked P. I smiled and said “obvs bitch, I'm the one who showed you.” I never know if you should capitalize the first word after the quotation marks if you wrote something outside the quote before, like it's the beginning of the sentence, but the spoken sentence and capital letters are meant for written language not oral. We each held the cigs up to the sun, vertically with the lit end on top, so that the white engulfed it from every angle. Synchronizingly, we flipped it upside down, lowered it to our bare legs, looked at each other and, without shifting our gaze, gently put them out, each on our left calf. Yeah we do that sometimes. It's not like we're depressed and want to kill ourselves like C.R. did. She was actually the first person I knew to kill herself. We just liked to do it because I discovered that sometimes, just sometimes, there is too much going on inside your mind that you feel disconnected to reality and find yourself in desperate need of a tether, something to remind you to feel. My excuse? I have ADHD since for as long as I can remember. I'm easily distracted and never get tired, bodywise and mindwise. It's like someone long ago started a motorboat engine in my mind, caught some weird timeless momentum and became a uniformly accelerated rectilinear object or whatever. It doesn't even stop while I'm dreaming, I suffer from extremely vivid and sometimes lucid dreams. I tend to confuse dreams with memories, they are so strong I sometimes believe they happened and I get wildly disoriented. P's excuse? Things at home have been wild for her. Her parents are going through a nasty divorce and her sister is having an affair with our teacher. So yeah, sometimes we like to feel alive by putting out our cigs on our legs. Arms would work too, but they are so public. The bell rang with that characteristically nasty loud pitch. Why does every school on Earth needs an annoying bell to signal the beginning and end of classes? Why not use a pleasurable sound? Has anyone thought school experiences might improve if someone changed that Godforsaken sound? P and I lowered our pants to cover the marks, threw the cigarettes over to the parking lot and headed to Math. We were completely stoned so I decided to take a mini nap during class, to which the teacher replied: “Jack, why are you not participating this time? You always get extra points” “I'm not feeling well”. I think Mr. M actually likes me. He is always amazed at how Math just flows through me, even though I almost never pay attention to him. He is also certain I give my friends the answers to his tests during the tests, but he has never discovered how. It's actually quite simple: I grab extra pages for “operational purposes”, solve the exam quite fast and on those pages designated for detailing my operations I solve the exam all over again in a slightly different way than mine. Then, I drop those pages at the same time as one of my friends drops theirs and he or she just picks them all up and voilà. I realized I found an unspoken rule of teaching: if a student is doing really well in a class, the teacher will grant him or her more privileges than other students. I actually don't like Mr. M so I enjoy torturing him like this. I think he is a self-centered misogynistic prick who gets off by showing off his so-called rapid mental calculation and by fucking P's sister. Going to school in Mexico City can be one of the best unintentional social experiments.