“Secrets” by Alexa

You said we could write about anything for this assignment and you won’t read it. I doubt that very much. I mean, if you didn’t read what kids are writing, how would you know they wrote anything at all? I guess it’s nice that you let me type then print it out and put it in this journal. I mean, I doubt I’m the only one who silently rejoiced when you said we didn’t have to use handwriting, but we both know I’m the one you made the rule for. I don’t know why my writing looks like those scribbles four year olds make when they’re pretending to write. It’s not that I have shaky hands or anything. I’m great at basketball. That does not mean I like basketball, but I don’t hate it either. My mom thought it would be a good way to get out aggressive energy and I guess she was right, I’m too tired to get in trouble after practice. Basketball is just one of those things I don’t have any feelings about, I want to win when I’m on the court, but other than that I just don’t care what happens enough to bother practicing on my own time. I guess that’s why I don’t have any friends my age-I just don’t care about most of the things they care about. 

I guess I’ll know if you’re reading the journals now. If you are, you’ll try to make some other kid be my friend after you read this. If you don’t read this, you’ll wait until it becomes apparent I don’t have any. Unless you really want to keep the fact that you read this stuff secret. That’s fine, that’s not how friendship works anyway. One of the most unrealistic things about books is that if you put two kids who dislike each other together in a group they’ll learn they’re more complicated than they think and become friends. That’s just not how friendship works, you have to be compatible with each other and I’m just not compatible with most kids. They just aren’t interesting enough. In books everyone is always more complex on the inside, but in reality, most people are boring through and through. Authors just know no one wants to read about boring people. I wonder if the successful authors are all interesting people, or if they just know what is and isn’t interesting.

People are very protective of their secrets. There are some little secrets they don’t really care about, but the big ones, people do crazy things to protect them. Most people have secrets, but, like I said, real people just aren’t very interesting so most of their secrets aren’t very good. I know some real interesting secrets, but they aren’t mine per say. They belong to my friends and family and they either trusted me with them, or I figured them out myself. Before you go ‘Wait, I thought she didn’t have any friends!’, I said I don’t have any friends my age, not friends period. I’m better at being friends with adults than kids. They’ve had more time to become interesting. They still usually aren’t, but there are better odds. It’s not that I don’t know how to be polite, I just don’t bother most of the time. That’s why I’m in trouble a lot. You’d think getting in trouble would be a good deterrent for being rude, but not for me. If I cared what the other students, or the teachers, or the principal thought about me I wouldn’t have been rude in the first place. It’s not like my parents are going to do anything about it. My mom’s too busy and my dad doesn’t mind, he calls me his little rebel. I guess I am a rebel but it’s not really intentional. I don’t have some amazing cause, I didn’t swear on someone’s grave I would spread as much chaos as possible, I don’t even really care about being a rebel-it’s just what I’m drawn towards, it’s the easiest option. Come to think of it, I’m pretty apathetic towards most things.

It’s not like I don’t like anything. I like listening to podcasts, pondering ethical dilemmas, and solving puzzles of all kinds. Honestly though, ethical dilemmas are just unsolvable puzzles. I know that might not sound like a lot of things, but anything can be a puzzle when you put your mind to it. That puzzle I’m working on now is the puzzle of how to figure out if you were telling the truth about not reading our journals. You’d think that being someone we’re supposed to trust to educate us, teacher’s would never lie, but they do all the time. I’m not even talking about whether or not Santa is real, I mean just how much you oversimplify things. I guess it would take too much time to explain that Christopher Columbus wasn’t the first European to discover America and it was actually discovered by Vikings, but it still is technically a lie. Even when you don’t flat out lie, you can still imply things that aren’t true, which is a lie by omission. It might not be really saying anything false, but it’s still something you aren’t allowed to do in court which makes it a lie in my book.  Anyway, I’ve gotten over a page now so I’m done, bye! 

Okay, I know I said I was finished, but I’m just about to go to bed and I just figured out how to figure out if you’re reading our journals. All I have to do is put some secrets in here. Like I said, they aren’t my secrets, they aren’t even that dark, they’re just the kinds of things that will make you look at me slightly differently. If you don’t know what I mean by that you will soon. If you aren’t looking through this then I guess I’ll be using this diary well at the very least. Goodbye, for real this time.