Because God forbid you should have to part with your precious fuckin' flip-flops.

Well, I paid nearly $40 to bowl this quarter, and now I'm not going to get to bowl all next week. Why? Because ten or fifteen overcooked airheads wore flipflops on the bowling alley (as opposed to getting bowling shoes, which takes all of thirty seconds) and a bunch more wore regular tennis shoes. So because half the class is composed of spoiled fucks, we've been kicked out of Parkside Lanes and they're going to call the administration to chew them out. What is so damn difficult about changing your shoes? Or are bowling shoes too hopelessly unfashionable to ever be caught dead with them, even in a God damn bowling alley? The worst part is, they're not the ones being punished. They only took bowling to get an excuse for being late to their next class and because you don't have to change... they don't give a flying crap on a stick about not getting to bowl, and they care even less about no one else getting to bowl. They don't care because they're not being left out of anything, and Mommy and Daddy probably paid for them to bowl. What would be better is if everyone who wore bowling shoes still got to bowl; and all the stupid fucks who wore fucking SANDALS would get to stay at school and sweat it out in the cardio room all period. These kids are spoiled at home and they're spoiled at school. No one punishes anyone any more, because OH NOES, it might cause emotional scarring!!! Good, chop their overblown egos up, prepare them for real life. But by the time they hit the workforce, firing will have been regarded as a barbaric practice and anyone who applies for a job will get hired and be kept on regardless of talent, because it's mean to fire someone for having no skills whatsoever. And if you don't give them the job in the first place, you'll hurt their feewings. Awww. Why can't people just curl up on a cot and suck their damn thumbs all day? Oh wait, that's degrading. We expect our children to attend classes for everything from accounting to zeromancy, and be accepted into college by the time they're potty trained. Soon enough, more will be expected of children than of adults. They're giving standardized tests to fucking KINDERGARTENERS now. How the blue fuck can you expect a five-year-old to sit still for four hours and fill in bubbles? They can't color a 3-inch circle inside the lines, let alone a 3mm one. People are holding their kids back from kindergarten until they're six or seven so they can handle the tests. Jesus tapdancing Christ, in kindergarten I fingerpainted, chucked cardboard bricks at classmates' heads, and was so poorly-behaved that I was "diagnosed" with severe ADHD (since that was the trendy disorder at the time), and I GOT ACCEPTED EARLY INTO COLLEGE. A GOOD college, not frickin' DeVry or anything. What the hell is wrong with people? They're going to fucking burn these kids out before they can even know what all these tests are for. No wonder kids are dropping out like hell; even parents think all this testing and bullcrap is pointless. Good job, Bush; your No Child Left Behind horsehockey is denying funding to schools that need it most (schools with low test scores don't get funding to buy textbooks with current and correct information, schools with high scores get millions of dollars to blow on fuckin' DDR machines, true story) and is encouraging low-income and/or poorly-performing students to drop out because they lower test scores (also true, at least where I live- students don't need parent permission to drop out here). They go to shitty schools that are forced to remain shitty because they're shitty in the first place. And the way to de-shittify schools and edumacate kids is to kick them out because their school's shittiness precludes their doing well on tests and their low scores preclude the school's receipt of funding to de-shittify itself? How the hell is this going to help anyone? If they'd just reverse it- give funding to low-scoring schools and no funding to high-scoring schools- it'd work. Administrators are tweaking test scores so they're high enough for the school to get enough funding to stay upright... what message does this send about the government? The only message that could be sent about the Bush White House... the only way to live is to lie.

Moral of the story: Cardboard bricks rule. I miss those.