These differ from the mini log in the hall in that they're not about recent events in my life, but brief thoughts.
20.09.25: liar liar, desk on fireEvery schoolkid grows to form some sort of attachment to their classroom desk: be it for the decade-old carvings they traced with their fingers, the hole they themselves dug in the side with scissors over months, or the humongous artwork they drew which they were forced to wipe off with alcohol and napkins. Some kids have all sorts of accidents on desks, too. One of my friends tripped over a desk and had to go to the hospital cause her finger got all fucked up. As for me and my class, in middle school we finally upgraded from large square desks to slightly smaller desks with a grate underneath, in which you could store books and notes. Exciting! That's just like Good Old Americans do with their school lockers in tv shows! I'm just like the guy on Nickelodeon!
Except, we weren't allowed to store things there after school hours. We were told it was a "fire hazard", although i could never understand, for one, why it only mattered if it was overnight, when you'd think it would be preferable if a school burned down overnight rather than when it was full of small tweens and sleep deprived teachers, and for two, the exact logistics of that. Would a stack of paper act as an accelerant when stored in a desk that's 50% wood? Or was it because someone might accidentally knock it over and send a flood of loose sheets all over the floor, and kids would slip over them and smash their heads into the corners of the desks and bleed everywhere, and everyone would start slipping over the blood be stuck there like me when I try and go ice skating while the fire roasts them alive? And again, why would that only be a problem if the notes were stored overnight? Why was keeping them there during class fine if they were so dangerous? Unfortunately for my inquisitive soul, nobody ever clarified. Halfway through the second year of middle school everyone stopped caring about keeping anything there at any time, so I began accidentally leaving my books there and having to study for oral tests during the previous class. That was the only real prolem our poor man's lockers gave me. Our school never caught fire, despite all the fire drills and the two or three budding arsonists trying their best to destroy other's personal property for the hell of it.
On the subject of school fires, when my mother was in high school she once tossed alcohol on the floor around a janitor and set it on fire, but nothing really happened. Maybe schools were less flammable back then. The janitor had it coming, by the way, and she escaped the ring of fire unscathed, unlike the other member of the school staff who got second-degree burns because of my mom, but that's a story for another time.
18.09.25: the outer ringI grew up in what in my language is called the "periferia", which most dictionaries translate to "suburbs". I found out embarrassingly late (about 15 years old) that these two words carry completely different implications. See, the comparison was made on a geographical basis: both refer to the outer ring of a city. The significant difference is that living in the "suburbs" denotes middle (now upper middle) class comfort, whereas "periferia" makes one think of a place with poor infrastructure and lower to middle class inhabitants. The confusion is not helped by the fact that "suburbs" is used to describe places such as the French banlieues, another culturally specific type of area on the outskirts of cities inhabited by the less wealthy. I'm not especially poor, but I could never afford to live anywhere but in the periferia unless I moved out of the city and into a town.
So, what's the point of this whole spiel? Basically, I spent years of my life saying I lived in "the suburbs", which in the US-dominated internet implies that I live in a nice two-story house in a nice neighbourhood, when I actually live "on the outskirts of the city", which is where you occasionally see syringe needles/bullet shells/nitrous canisters on the ground and shrug and go on with your day. I must say, though, I would hate to live in a US suburb. I love being 5 minutes away from a corner shop.