Part of averageness is being afraid of things I guess. There’s probably some great poem out there I could reiterate for your ears here… That is, some poem about how people are afraid to be above average. I know because… everyone is like me and has gone through this whole thing.

I am 16 years old now, and I still go to school like lots of other average people. I’m gonna go to college one day because… that’s what it takes to stay average. I do pretty well in class, I guess. Grades don’t excite me much though. My parents hate it when I fail a test though. It’s all kinda… average, y’know? Well yeah… what I really like to do is… sit around an do nothing. I wouldn’t mind doing that for all my life. Maybe I could get an award for it.

On nice days like these, I can’t help but imagine that nothing could happen to make my life any less average. After all, aren’t great summer days supposed to be like the epitome of average life goodness? Yeah, totally not feeling it.

I wouldn’t really mind if the sun suddenly sucked me up. But in the moment I think this, the only thing to force me away from my comfortable state of unaccelerating resting inertia is my mom. “Lunch time, Madeline! Everyone else already ate!” she yells. I wish she wouldn’t yell so loud; it’d be so much easier to drown her out and just fall asleep then. Average teenage reaction to parents.

I go to lunch. My mom had spent her good sweet time preparing some absolutely amazing meal that I just can’t fathom. I’m just too bored of eating to care, but I compliment her anyways because it’s the average thing to do. “The rotisserie chicken is delicious, Mom,” I say.

She’s washing the dishes, but she turns around. She has short brown hair which she always ties into a ponytail when she works. She smiles with those perfect teeth that everyone gets with braces and says, “Really? You think so? I thought I might have put way too much salt on it.”

This is the sort of thing people say when they’re really proud of something but want to act modest. In truth, she was probably proud of the chicken and thought she had happened to put just the right amount of salt on it. It’s another thing of averageness. I’m so cynical. I do this all the time of course. That’s the only reason I know people do this, of course. I’m pretty ashamed of myself sometimes when I think of how similar I can be to my mom. And how my mom is similar to any other average mom. “No, mom, you didn’t. The chicken tastes great,” I say regardless.

“Thanks, Madeline,” she says. “I’m glad you liked it!”

I finish my lunch. Then I say bye to my mom and go upstairs. It’s Saturday. I don’t want to do my homework. It’s not Sunday yet. I go to my room and lay on my bed. I really don’t have much of a life. No, I have an average amount of a life… the same bit of a life everyone else has, too. Except I’m some sort of narcissistic freak who thinks I deserve more than an average bit of life. Ahhh…

Somehow I fall asleep into an afternoon nap. It’s become a kind of routine with me lately although I still never expect it. I wake up. I think to myself, “I want to do something amazing before today is over.” So I start thinking in my head. The month is November. It’s the month of novel writing. I want to consider writing some sort of pointless story that someone out there will analyze as being the deepest work of the 21st century, but I think of my science teacher and her story of her friend. Yeah, dying is average, too.

I wind up watching TV. I had to make my little brother turn off his video games. He always plays video games; I swear he’s the most addicted little kid ever, and he’ll probably grow up to be a video game maker just because he likes video games so much.

On TV, I go channel flipping. I don’t have any real interests. I just sort of stop at the second most colorful channel I see. Most of the time the advertisements are the most colorful things around, but I end up watching the channel anyways. Whatever TV program I watch, it’s all pretty trivial anyways.

Today, I am a couch potato. I see an ad on the TV for a new video game, so I flip to a different channel at random. There’s a women on TV washing her hair, and it’s another shampoo commercial. I flip channels again. Two cartoon characters are fighting now. One fires a huge blast from his hands into the abdomen of the other character, presumably an alien of some sort. I keep watching without really knowing what’s happening. Hey, action cartoons are pretty cool.

Yeah, another day of life. Somehow my whole days disappears, and I found enough to do to give me a reason to stay up an hour past my bedtime. Life is full of miracles, isn’t it?

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 7th, 2009 at 5:59 pm and is filed under Entertaining Lies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.