I want to go back to high school.
I want to dress cool and compete with all the other kids, see who can look the most interesting, develop my own unique interesting look in front of thousands of people my age stuck together in a small space.
I want to show people how smart I am, give interesting answers in class, compete with the other kids and show that I'm the best, that I can concentrate better than them, that I'm smarter and more informed and more articulate and funny.
I want to sit at a long table in the cafeteria with 20 other fun-loving people, eating our respective favorite foods, laughing, talking loud, yelling, screeching, joking, being rude and happy, making fun of unfair teachers and bullies with no lives, plotting pranks, speculating and trading rumors.
I want to walk down a long hallway full of other kids my age who are also trapped in there, and feel the solidairty with the other "prisoners".
I want to watch with mounting horror/amusement/suspense as a teacher gets all worked up chewing out a poor kid who didn't really do anything wrong, and stand up and start putting the teacher in his place, and get the whole class to walk out on him and crowd the principal's office until something is done!
I want to stick up for bullied kids and join a gang/club of them.
I want to experiment with drugs, and not to be on antidepressants so that I can do so.
I want to hang out in the resource room and get to know all these interesting kids with ADD and ADHD and bipolar disorder, help out kids who are having trouble in subjects and exchange fun stories with the kids with behavioral issues.
I want to go up to a kid with slash marks on his arms and ask him about them.
I want to write essays about the school in English class and get a standing ovation from the class!
I want to skip class with my good friends and just see what happens, play a game to see how good and convincing we can make our excuses.
I want to go with a huge gang of friends to one of their places after school: sometimes to my rich friend in her mansion, sometimes to my poor friend in his inner-city apartment with eh cracked paint and the shaky fire escape and the toilet and faucets that don't work and the furniture taken from people's garbage.
I want to join the debate club.
I want to join the public speaking club and give my impassioned speeches to the whole school, and have them screech with delight that someone understands them after all, and give me a standing ovation!
I want to join the chess club and show how smart and clever I am, how I'm such a good tactician!
I want to FINISH my world issues class this time instead of dropping out.
I want to sneak weapons and cell phones into school right under the noses of the security detail.
I want to find loopholes in the rules and expose them in controversial ways.
I want to go with my friends to the movies, to the mall, to the park to do drugs, to restaurants, to the skateboard park.
I want to get a job for a while, just to see if I like it... getting one through the school, of course, because they have so many resources and there's no pressure, as I'm still a kid in school.
I want to make up fun rap songs about how school sucks.
I want to walk down the hallway and stare at the different colors of people's skin, of their hair, their clothes, their books and binders and folders, their backpacks and lunch bags and purses and pencil cases.
I want to put quick-drying cement on the teacher's chair, go to the office, and do the same thing to the principal!
I want to stand in the schoolyard with my friends under the bare, bright, stormy-blue sky, chatting, laughing, replaying funny scenes from class and the resource room, passing around a joint, going to tim Horton's and getting 60 Timbits that we all share.
I want to have parties in the classes of teachers who allow it.
I want to go to the dances, the semiformal, the prom and the after-parties.
I want to go to the convocation and make something funny happen there, like putting Plastic Wood on the chair of an enemy so that when he has to get up to the platform his robes rip almost off!
I want to become the valedictorian and make a speech that will outrage all the bureaucrats but get the kids to all applaud me and carry me out of the hall!