Not Much

I don’t know much about the world. Heck, I don’t know much about anything. But something I do know is that you are always coming up short. Whenever you’re trying to tie something, you are just a couple inches too short. Whenever you need change, you are just a few cents too short. Whenever you are going somewhere, you are just a few gallons too short. Whenever you are building a hyper-quantum physics nuclear reactor, you are just a few stabilizers too short.       
        The saying goes when life gives you lemons…well that’s when I stop listening, philosophy isn’t something I’m too good at.
        As on any other day, I woke up to the sight I always do. The birds were singing, the sun shining. It was as if the day was heralding my entrance into it. The colors were richer. The grass was greener. The birdsong brighter. The sky bluer than usual. I rolled over and asked for five more minutes. When my five minutes were up, I rolled out of bed grudgingly to find that the world had ditched me and gone to appeal some other mook. It was complete and utter blackness. I couldn’t see a thing. The sun had gone out and left me in shadow.
        In such an occasion I did what any other red-blooded human would do. I screamed, cried, and ran in a circle, though not necessarily in that order. My mother eventually came into my room and stopped me.
        “Open your eyes you numbskull.” She said. You see, when I wake up in the morning I’m not the brightest bulb in the shed. I’m not the brightest bulb on my best day. So every morning I woke up and the same thing happened. It made life eventful. Mixed things up a little.
        After such a frightening ordeal I felt I needed some food to make up for all the lost energy I had put into letting the world know what had happened. Nothing fixed that like a bowl of Sugar-O’s with an adrenaline drink. As I was eating breakfast I decided to contemplate the vast universe that was my life and the ultimate question itself. As I was on the verge of a breakthrough discovery I heard the horn of a very familiar sounding vehicle. I looked up to see my school bus pulling away, leaving me behind; my mouth wide open and cereal dripping down my now dirty shirt.
        I ran off to my room, peeled off my shirt, replaced it, and took off out of the house after my bus. I came back about thirty seconds later, remembering that I had forgotten my pants. Then I ran out of the house again, taking the shortcut I knew through old man Jenkins yard to get to the next bus stop.
        I greeted him in my standard way, “HIOLDMANJENKINS!” I yelled as I bolted through his yard.
        Knowing he only had half of a second he replied with “Stay of my yard you…” I am stopping because even though the word old man Jenkins uses, along with a gesture special to the two of us pertaining to one particular finger, is his way of greeting me in a friendly manner, it is not all together appropriate for younger audiences.
        As I returned the gesture I got to the curb just in time to see the bus pull to a stop. Rushing over there with the speed and endurance of an olympic athlete I got onto the bus, looking none the worse for my quarter-mile sprint.
        “Hey!” shouted one of my friends as I got on.
        “Gasp-Hi-gasp-Harry-gasp.” That’s about as far as I got before I fainted.
        I woke up in the nurse’s office about half an hour later. “Wha-, what happened?” I asked.
        “Shane, you go through this everyday, you need to be ready earlier.”
        “Yes ma’am.”
        “You’re not just saying that to try and get out of here are you?”
        “No ma’am.” I was just trying to get out of there. The nurse loved to check kids for their last shots and then send us to go and get them. She scared me quite a bit, but she was better than my first period teacher was.
        “Now go on and get to your class” she said.
        I nodded and got off the table. I fell to the ground, pretending to faint again.
        “Shane get up, I know you didn’t faint.”
        I rolled over and looked at the nurse. “How did you know?” I asked.
        “Because your arms caught you as you fell. Now go to class.”
        I slowly got up and made my way out the door. I wandered down the hallway, imagining it was a desert, with water fountains I needed to use every hundred feet.
        I finally reached my classroom five minutes before class got out. A new record I thought. My old record had left six minutes left in class.
        As I walked into the classroom my teacher was waiting next to the door. He shoved all the paperwork we had done that day into my arms.
        “Shane, I trust that you did last night’s homework?” He asked as I sat down in my desk.
        “Well, you see, I was planning on it, but then my house got so cold because our heater went out, and my dog was on the verge of death, being that he doesn’t have much fur and he was very hungry. So I had to start a fire and feed him, and having nothing else in the house, I had to use my homework.”
        “I’d love to say I believe you, but I don’t. And here’s why: One, it’s the middle of May. Two, yesterday we had a record high temperature. Three, your dog doesn’t have a thin fur coat and I know for a fact your mother keeps dog food in the house.”
        “Well, I-.” I had to admit he had me there. Unless I tried something so utterly drastic that he’d have to believe me.
        “You see, that really did happen, because we were in space, we had been abducted by aliens!”
        Everyone in the classroom shook their heads in disgust, of course they didn’t believe me, they had never seen an alien. Neither had I, but that wasn’t the point.
        “Shane, just do your homework tonight. Anyone have any questions about the quiz tomorrow?”
        I raised my hand, desperately wanting to be called on. I wiggled in my seat I wanted to be called on so much.
        “Yes Shane?” he said resignedly.
        “Yes, may I please use the bathroom?” All that water had really gone straight through me.