It’s the end of the day at Searcy High, and that ever-present question comes from my father’s mouth, “How was school today?”

To which I reply “Fine.” That was and always will be an outright lie, as blatant and glaring as a train wrecking and spilling a cargo of disco balls and air horns across five lanes of traffic.



Of course, I cast out the long-dead word, “fine,”  placated my work-weary father and settled into the seat dismissively. When a single thought buzzes persistently at the back of my skull, vying for attention: School is a prison.



For the entire course of my academic career, from kindergarten all the way up to senior year now, this is the primary complaint that I’ve always held regarding “the system.” The stark white brick walls, the uninspired motivational posters festooning the hallways, the same old writing prompt for every standardized test forced upon me over and over again, and even the nigh-unnoticeable hum and unnatural sheen of the fluorescent lights cemented my distaste for this establishment.



And many of us students have held this gripe since day one of elementary school. It’s a fact of life, we have always hated having to sit still and obey menial commands in a sterilized, institutional building where we can’t talk to our friends or run outside or shove crayons up our noses or other juvenile activities.



A sense of dread and oppression often rose up like bile in our throats at the end of each summer, made us cherish every second of freedom that we had. We, eager young scamps we were, couldn’t wait until we “grew up” or until we could move out of the ever-present shadow of our parents, to get out of school and strike out on our own.



How foolish were we?


Over the summer, I took a job at the local Wal-Mart, which I was absolutely ecstatic about. I finally had a job, a means of making well-needed cash and a way to spend the boundless time I had during the summertime, and I was raring to get going with it. The first few days were rough, of course, but I quickly picked up the pace, and by payday I had my first happily-earned paycheck in hand.



Then school came around, and things got complicated, to say the very least. First off, allow me to say that waking up at 7  in the morning to go to school without a job is an entirely different animal than waking up at 7 in the morning with a job.



Without a job, waking up in the morning is a slightly irritating experience, full of shaking yourself awake and blurry vision. With a job, waking up in the morning is a battle with your own mind, like fighting off a thousand bears made out of cotton that are absolutely determined to keep your eyes closed.



I am always utterly exhausted, regardless of whether I have slept at 2 in the morning or at 9 at night. Before I had a job, school was a chore. Now, it is merely the calm before the storm, a lull in the labor under the service of everybody’s favorite minimum wage slinging supermarket, Wal-Mart.



Working for around seven hours in high school, and then without so much as a thirty minute break in action, slaving away for another 4-6 hours behind a cash register, getting every preppy college student that happens to roam over to my register their precious Nutella can really leech the life out of someone.


Do not even get me started on extra-curriculars. On top of all of this, I am having to prepare for multiple plays and their requirements (practicing singing), and how to balance this with my already tipping seesaw of discontent. So little time is had to spare on my drama class, it isn’t even funny, like the people making the “hump day” references every Wednesday months after that uninspired commercial aired.



You know who you are. Please stop, for the sake of our braincells. Moving on. I often have to simply skip rehearsals and auditions for the fall play this year are looking bleak for me due to the burden of a job. Days that were meant to be an “off” days are now “drama days”, wherein I spend around a few hours acting and rehearsing. Often, there are no rehearsals when I’m off, so I have to devote a healthy chunk of time practicing in front of a mirror how to be a puppet or a cat or something equally ridiculous sounding without context.



Free time is absolutely precious, a time where I can communicate with friends or sit down and work on my writing or simply taking a minute to breathe. In short, I was an absolute slack jawed, idealistic idiot to think having a job would be awesome. It is hard.


But more importantly, juggling your time between school, a job, an extracurricular, and simple everyday life is a borderline psychotic experience to those of us that have not had any experience with the world of work.


Students of Searcy High, those of you that do not have to have a job yet, enjoy it while you can. Students that do, man, that sucks.



Students who have a job, an extracurricular, and still want to have a life…Good luck with that.