I... am most vexed.

I hate this school. I hate every brick, every gram of mortar, every speck of dust that collects on its stone-cold and terribly uncomfortable seats. I hate every bit of fanciful whingeing that I'm forced to endure as a force my way through hallways that reek of dying-flower perfume and my-god-you-think-that-attracks-women colonge. Most of all, I hate presumptuous paper-wavers who are strangling my English class into simile and metaphor rows.

My weed-eating hippie of an English teacher gave me a B- on my painstakingly crafted short story assignment, and then had the utter malevolence to have that gangly whip Shakespeare read his own page-long affonting ditty to the rest of the assembled class.

Trust a man who sees the word 'green' only in relation to getting stoned to fail to see how much effort was slaved into sixty three pages of enough detail to make the daVinci blind. I don't care if that upstart Bill somehow 'grasped the allegory of the cave' in nothing more than a pragraph of arrogant rhymes. If he's going to talk about a cave, then he should talk about a cave, not snippily sum it all up as being the same as the inside of a coconut on a deserted, soap-opera island.

Proof that these teachers don't even read what's put in front of them.

I just... can't understand it! If that daft, hulking brute of man can be convinced that a coconut is so perfectly identical to a cave in which men are chained by their necks to watch shadow puppets play for them in such a mocking attempt at life, how can he turn down something that goes right into the cave? I could have told them how the grains of the cave walks felt against the desperate fingernails of the chained men, how one man finally slipped his bonds for freedom, and then was burdened with the terrible responsibility of braving the dark depths of the cave to rescue and free all the others who thought him but an idealized child, a thing to be pitied... but he would have an inner strength beyond his stature, and-

Aw, bloody hell, I already did. Got 'EDIT' written on it in apple-red pen, underlined thrice. B-.

I think I'll go steal my father's pipe and smoke a bit out on the hill behind the back yard, entertaining thoughts of smacking Shakespeare with my failed manuscript... call it performance art, then. 'Allegory of the Dimming Future of Fine Writing.'

See how he likes his bloody 'allegory'...