Leftover Kumquats.

The Daily Urinal and school plagues.

My high school, a small private affair, was a typical prep-school. It was even once an all girls boarding school. We wore uniforms (saddle shoes every day for six years. No wonder I have no sense of fashion in college). We had a milk break.

In 2004 a student started the daily one-sheet, two-column newspaper “The Daily Urinal”. It was originally politically (and conservatively) slanted but has morphed since then into a hotbed forum for students to talk (rant) about pretty much anything. The DU published silly debates (which sport is better) or serious ones (political, school policy) between students or students and teachers. One boy’s article attacking the lack of diversity at school caused a large schism among students and staff alike. The administration got involved. This was, I think, the point at which the DU surpassed the school paper as “the” paper to read. The DU began a small circulation to only boys bathrooms. The staff was completely male, though they accepted guest articles from either gender. I wrote several guest articles. My junior year they began staffing one female who wrote under a pseudonym and revealed her identity at the end of the year. I was the female staff writer in 2008 writing under the name James Tiptree.

Here is one article I wrote:

“San Francisco Zookeepers Mystified on Escape Again“ Attention urinators: It’s time to dust off your gas masks, fight like rabid soccer moms for the Costco sized hand sanitizers (or just steal Hartman’s), and haul out your ever-handy full body bubble. Two kids were not-so-mysteriously missing from my math class today. I saw the nurse make the somber call to a seventh grader’s parents on Friday. Honey, it’s baaack. The ’06 winter plague escaped from its inadequate cardboard box enclosure at the San Francisco Zoo and it smells juicy Bishop’s immune systems.

The plague did a number on us last winter, depleting class sizes to the actual student teacher ratio Bishop’s advertises on its pamphlets. It ruined my perfect attendance record – not that I didn’t try my best to knock my mother out so that I could go to school. But it seems for the millionth time that my mother had a point – and this time it was a good one (I love you mom). The plague is a sadistic machine that feeds on our fear of missing school, ending up at Parker, and consequently failing at life. Thus, we stumble to class to share fevers and phlegm and other bodily fluids that should be spread to siblings at home rather than to our schoolmates. It’s fun to brag that you suffered swallowing your stomach contents so that you wouldn’t miss APUSH. It isn’t as much fun for the three kids in APUSH and your Spanish teacher that you infected. So rather than making it easier for the aliens to beam us away for their many experiments do us all a favor and stay home.