Three Weird Things I Imagine a Lot

School vacation

Not in the sense of having a vacation from school, but more of the school pays for us to go relax in a resort somewhere for a few days. There’s just something about the idea of having all of us be in a setting outside of schoolwork. There would be no graded worksheets that distract us from fun (looking at you astronight), and there would be no boring workshops or talks that take up too much of our time and teach us nothing we already knew (looking at you retreat, I’ve already forgotten what servant leadership is).

As a massive tangent, I dislike these self-improvement seminars that just reiterate info you already know. It’s never engaging, and you completely forget anything you’ve learned after the seminar ends. If you disagree with me, name one piece of advice you learned and used from those seminars.

Pisay used to do this a lot, and I think that instead of paying speakers to talk about mental health advice we won’t follow, all that effort and money is better spent on one-on-one or group sessions and promoting/requiring those sessions. Tangent over.

I think this started with my grade 1 field trip, where we went to this camp and some people went swimming. Not me though, since I broke my hand running away from an ant. Then I read the… black Diary of a Wimpy Kid book (I have all of them up to Meltdown by the way), where Greg goes on this trip with his classmates or something like that. Back in grade 7, I used to imagine this vacation as a road trip with my section, then in grade 8 it turned into a private boat or something like that. Recently, I had a dream about it, and my girlfriend pointed out that I imagine stuff like this a lot, prompting me to write this blog post.

And sure, you can plan a vacation with a small group of close friends and all that. Just like how you can have a party with a small group of friends. But there’s just something more fun about the idea of the whole school having fun. That’s why gradball worked so much. And sometimes, you wanna have fun with a casual friend you don’t really talk to that much, but they’re cool.

My idea of a perfect school vacation is a resort where you have everything from pools to a beach to zoos to an archery place. (If you guys have gone to Fort Ilocandia, pretty much that). Putting aside all the logistics and money problems of such a trip, the idea of just being able to do whatever with my batchmates is so fun to me. I could play pool with them (despite not knowing how), I could share my amazing delicacy of cheese and spaghetti sauce on toasted bread, I could swim with them.

I ragged on the retreat earlier, but honestly, everything after the talks (+war games) is almost a perfect school vacation. Burning marshmallows, recreating our old performances, standing there waiting for someone to tag you and save you from your misery. It was really fun. The only sad point (aside from the talks) is that it got shortened from three days to two. I accidentally overheard the batch council talk about their plans, and it seemed like there were a lot more before it got cut down.

School disaster where we have to survive

Now for the complete opposite of the previous. For whatever reason, I really like to imagine us in a perilous situation where there is no hope of rescue and we have to survive on our own. I don’t know why, maybe it’s because I really like the idea of putting us in the stress of life-or-death situations and seeing how we respond. Like some sadistic author. Probably inspired by my love of shipwrecked-on-an-island stories (Which I actually wrote a story about. It’s horrible, but more on that eventually.).

My favorite variant is a variant of the private boat vacation, where we’re thrown off course and have to survive off the food on the ship and whatever we can get. That would probably end with cannibalism or scurvy, but who knows.

Another variant is that our field trip bus crashed and I’m the only one alive, along with one person. This person would hate my guts. It’s just funny to think about how we’d work together since we really have to.

Scenes from imaginary books/movies/whatever medium that I wrote

I’m an aspiring author. I like to imagine that my first book will be a huge success, and I’d go on to write at least a hundred more. Of course, that’s a lot of work, and it’s so much easier to just imagine how they’d look.

I have this (very barebones, as in I pretty much thought about the premise and nothing else) idea for a high school comic strip, borne out of my distaste for Comic-Book Time and Status Quo is God (warning, tvtropes links). It would be presented similar to the short comic strips you see in newspapers, but they’d actually tell an overarching story from one strip to another.

One of the final stories would be about the two main characters of the strip at prom. They’ve had a lot of ups and downs in terms of their relationships and in high school life altogether. The guy used to be pretty much Greg Heffley. Then he got humbled hard by high school, maybe a bit too hard. Then he learns kindness and confidence and whatever. The girl has the opposite arc, going from humble to full of herself to just confident. All their troubles are past them; they won over the rival school for rich kids in this tournament (probably frisbee-related), the girl’s awful ex got busted for a crime and got expelled, and now all that’s left to do is to party. They share a dance to the Back to the Future rendition of Earth Angel, in his blue suit and her red dress. Then they share a kiss at the song’s climax, and the girl twirls.

I have another scene in mind, but this time it’s from a movie. I find it really hard to describe, but it’s set to Classic Builds from the Loki score (I was going to go on a tangent about the differences between a score and a soundtrack before realizing I don’t understand what they are), both the original Natalie Holt piece and the cover by Samuel Kim.