Tfish

The mention of both Jehovah's Witnesses and Halloween triggered a memory that I haven't thought about in a long time.

When I was in elementary school we had a pretty cool Halloween tradition. This was an old elementary school, and since the 1930's when it was first built there has always been a tradition of doing a Halloween parade through the neighborhood immediately surrounding the school. Kids could wear their costumes from home and all the kids would line up by class and we'd march down the street, do a loop around the school, and return back to class. Everyone's parents and people from the neighborhood would come out to watch the parade and take pictures, and usually have a bunch of candy they'd toss to the kids as they marched by.

When I entered 4th grade we got a new principal. That year she banned not only the Halloween parade but all other fun activities we used to do. You were no longer allowed to bring in cupcakes or candy to give to your class on your birthday. We stopped doing secret santa at christmas. We stopped giving out valentine cards on Valentine's day. We stopped decorating the classrooms during any holidays. We even stopped doing 100 day, a made up holiday to celebrate the 100th day of school.

I know a paper was sent home with us at the beginning of that year and it claimed that none of these events were conductive to a good learning environment and they were all too distracting to students. These events that had all been taking place like clockwork for decades, suddenly overnight, were somehow just found to be bad for kids.

I remember at the time I listened to my mom and grandmother complain about it, they said they'd seen our principal before and they knew the real reason for banning all of these activities was because our new principal was a Jehovah's Witness. At the time I didn't know what that was, and all I was told when I asked was that it was someone who thinks holidays are evil.

As an adult, I look back on that and all I can think is, what a selfish fucking cunt that principal was. She ended up moving on to something else when I was in high school and all of the old activities were reinstated immediately after she left. Pisses me off that I had to miss out on my favorite parts of school for 4th and 5th grade, and I feel especially bad for the kids who came into school after she took over and never once got to experience any of that fun stuff. All because that idiot felt that if she didn't want to participate nobody else should either.

Edit: oh and I just thought of another amusing anecdote about what a stuck up bitch that principal was. In 5th grade a girl that liked me kissed me on the cheek while we were on the playground. Other kids saw it and were laughing about it. After we go back inside I get called down to the principal's office. The girl is in there too. The principal starts screaming at me. Like, seemingly actually personally angry at me. She tells me that she needs to make an example of me to prevent this kind of behavior. I later find out through the grape vine that this weird kid supposedly went directly to the office to report this event that occurred on the playground for some reason (he ratted me out for calling a teacher stupid in a private conversation once before too, but that's another story.)

Even though I was the one who received a kiss I was being treated like I had just attempted to rape the girl who kissed me. She calls my dad to tell him I'm kissing girls and how inappropriate it is to engage in this kind of behavior at school. She puts him on speakerphone with the hope that he'll yell at me too I guess. He tells her to never call him at work for something this stupid again, then hangs up. I have to stay inside for recess and I couldn't eat lunch with my class for 3 days after that as punishment. I was literally the victim in this supposed crime. I can only imagine she thought I was some slick dick 10 year old out there corrupting innocent young girls into kissing me on the cheek.

That's what I liked about District 9. Granted it's not like the human technology was particularly futuristic, but I thought it was really interesting seeing the aliens living in human slums. You see an alien slum in another film and it seems so foreign and futuristic, but in district 9 the slum was something you can see in real life. It just happened to have aliens living inside of it.

Just kidless me. It's funny as hell. It's basically "it's always sunny in titans tower."

Then maybe you should try working on that.

It'd be interesting to see what they would do with someone from somewhere like Czechoslovakia. Do they go to the Czech republic or Slovakia now?