It seems to me over the past few months that some extremely passive-aggressive delinquent has been systematically removing all the tissues from the tissue carton in all South classrooms and leaving the box there to taunt the ill and needy.
The nose-dripping hordes of students suffering from cough-medicine induced narcosis, roaming the South hallways like zombies during the winter months, have thus been subject to ridicule and derision due to their untimely mucus explosions, and I, myself among them, am forced to ask, “Where are we going as a school — nay, a society! — if we can’t even provide the lowest rungs along the social hierarchy access to adequate Kleenex?”
Side-stepping the provocative, inflammatory controversy that can land an Opinions contributor in heaps of unwanted trouble, I firmly assert that this lack of tissues has nothing to do with our school funding. Tissues, unlike rare, high-priced luxury commodities such as paper, are relatively inexpensive and therefore cannot be explained away as part of some budgetary conspiracy.
With that in mind, and in a much more dignified and tasteful manner, I choose to blame our school librarians.
Now, follow my logic for a second: You’ve got the Sporcle machine cranking. You’re on a roll. Today will finally be the day you remember Monaco and complete the Europe-countries quiz.
There’s a minute left, and the pressure’s on.
30 seconds.
“Aha!” you shout, “Azerbaijan! How could I have forgotten?” Your cry startles a nearby librarian. With an anguished cry, knowing you have only seconds left, you struggle past the “j” when …
Darkness.
A lock appears with an audible “thud.”
You’ve been caught, young man, and you’ve been screen-blocked.
Enraged, you cautiously back away from the computer, them storm out of the library in justified tears.
What do you search for the second you make it past the librarian’s desk? Tissues, of course.
At a later date, you’re photocopying from your Chemistry textbook. You submit to your better principles, depositing dime after dime to fuel the paper policies that govern this cruel, cruel machine. Alas, you reach in your pocket for the final dime when your fingers fumble upon a penny.
“Curses!” you shout, indignant. “My academic forays have been spoiled again.”
A fellow comrade quells you, reminding you that “they can take away our sporcle, and they can take away our photocopier, but they can never take away our spirit!”
Before you know it, you’re swept up in a guerilla warfare campaign, covertly destroying the school from the inside out. You attack the one resource they’ve yet taken under dictatorial control: tissues.
The effect is immediate. Students are walking around with hands over their noses, trying in vain to conceal grotesque sneezes, finding solace in various chapters of assigned reading material and math textbooks. Teachers lose control of entire classes, decimated by students fleeing to salvage the last remains of a toilet paper roll.
And such a place, oddly enough, is where we find ourselves today. At a crossroads of necessity and principles, can we join together in nothing else than in the restoration of tissues to needy noses school-wide, a ceasefire, if you will, in the name of mucus?
Upon reflection, this isn’t the most efficient use of 600 words, so in another (less stupid) way: Please let us play sporcle, paper rationing is corrupting our youth, and seriously, where the heck have all the tissues gone?
