28(i.e. the journal of an extremely confused seventh grader)
Monday, December 9, 2001
I sleepily turned over, and looked at the round clock on the bulletin board in my room. It was white, with large black numbers, three black hands, and a thick red rim. 1:00. For a second I was startled. Had I really overslept that much? Then I remembered. Oh, the many horrors that come from sharing a room with someone who gets all paranoid when they hear clocks ticking in the dark.
My twin sister, Amy, couldn’t stand the sound of clocks ticking. She always got all freaked out at night if she woke up and heard them, so all the many millions of clocks we (for some strange reason) kept in our room were either dismantled, or had batteries that were forced to retire at an early age. It was rather disorienting, coming into a room, and being immediately confronted by clocks of all shapes and sizes, each telling a different time. Only two of them, besides our watches, worked.
Those ones were silent, electric clocks that told us the time back in Eugene Oregon, and San José California. Though that might sound pretty bizarre, it was because before we moved here, my family lived in Eugene. Before that, we lived in San José. Eugene was possibly the most boring city, excluding all the miniscule towns not marked on many maps. The only thing it had going for it was the University of Oregon. (I mean really! Almost EVERYONE was a teacher!)
Their team was the called the…… Ducks! And if you thought that having a college football team called the Ducks was bad, there was always the rivaling college a few towns away from Eugene. They were the Beavers. Somehow, they managed to make the Beaver mascot look quite scary, indeed. It had an orange sailor hat, and a frightening face. Rather like a cereal- box logo character on cocaine. The mascot for the Ducks, was Donald Duck, from Disney, which was indeed much more intimidating (in a demented sort of way) than a drugged-out beaver.
You have to understand that me and my sister do not like mascots at all. Idiots wearing big white fluffy suits for the Ducks (that must be around 190 degrees inside), green and yellow (the team’s colors) sailor suits, and huge eyes, should remind you of something you had in nightmares in 2nd grade. Well, maybe not that last part, but the one thing that they didn’t look like was a duck.
And at this school that we went to for grade school, we always had these assemblies, and sometimes they’d get a “mystery guestâ€