Cucumber

...

My poor goldfish. He's not dead yet, but he seems to have caught the slow-acting strain of Columnaris, or cotton mouth disease. His mouth hasn't been infected yet, though. Which is odd because that is normally where the disease begins. Comparing Othello to fish on the internet, his white fuzzies are a bit different from theirs. He might not actually have cotton mouth, but I'm taking pictures of him to the pet store tomorrow to see what we can do.

Having a sick goldfish is really depressing me.
Not to mention stressing me.

My english class has finally turned into an English class (as opposed to a Culminating Project class). Our first assignment is to write a short story, and today was spent developing two characters. Remember, oh so long ago, that I said I was writing a story? I've gone ahead and used two characters from that instead of being creative and coming up with something new. For the story I will probably be turning in, I want to rewrite when Girl meets Boy, and lead that into when Girl shares a class with Boy. Even though the events are boring (but important), the characters that appear there are colorful, outlandish, and kinda strange.

OH GOD I'm just like Stephanie Meyers. The main characters are boring in relation to the background characters. This is a horrible thing. I was just trying to make sure that nobody was mentioned unless I could give them a bit of a backstory, is all. I wanted everyone to be someone. We meet the crazy-wrong teacher who gets fired from his job, we meet the counselor who is too busy with divorce papers to care about his students, and we meet the teacher who is so bright and happy his desks are arranged in a rainbow formation. Not to mention his walls are painted YELLOW.

I really like the happy teacher, actually. So far, he is the most complex character I have. He is always bright, and happy, and smiling. His shirts are colorful and tucked in, his belt always matches his polished shoes. It is almost sickening to be around him because he is sweating joy and reeking of love. He writes in a different colored pen for every day of the week, with the intent to create a whirlwhind of color and fun and change (and because he has a specialy affinity for rainbows). But, at some point in the story, I want Girl to find him in an alley one day, drunk out of his mind and depairing over his life. "It's all fake!" His voice would break on that last word. "It's nothing but lies! My life is so f-fucked up," He'd be madly waving his bottle of whiskey around, still wrapped in its paper sack. "You God Damned kids don't under stand what it's like, don't know how h-hard it is! You ungrateful little cunts--" He'd throw his bottle of whiskey the at wall, splashing it's contents all over himself and Girl. The bottle would shatter, but most of the peices are contained within its bag. Teacher would obviously be drunk and dangerous, and Girl would run (she is too ditzy and too involved with other people to have avoided that scene in the first place).

He is a fun character, and I'm excited to see how despairing he can be. I want him to randomly text one of his students with "CUNT" in the middle of the night. And then the next day, the student will bring it up loud enough for the entire class (or at least Girl) to hear, and the teacher will have no idea what they're talking about. And it'll be believable, because Teacher is just way too nice and happy to do such a thing.

The destruction of the innocent! It is a fun thing.