In grade seven, in science class of all places, our teacher Monsieur LaPlante, before he settled into his habit of spending the entire class writing out paragraph after paragraph of biology lessons on the blackboard for us to copy down, would encourage the students to take five minutes and write down our thoughts in a journal. He would not read this journal. It was for us, to express ourselves. We had five minutes at the start of every class to write our thoughts in our journals. Every class I would spend the five minutes expounding on how boring school was, how bored I was, how boring M. LaPlante was, how boring writing in the journal was. It is surprising to see, many years later, that it took me almost a whole year of writing virtually the same boringness every day before I started getting fanciful with my typography. Boring in Superman letters. Boring in KISS letters. Boring in bubble letters. Boring melting or Boring in flames. Boring getting smaller and smaller or bigger and bigger. Every letter of Boring punctuated with boring periods. It is surprising to me, upon finding and reading this journal many years later, to reveal to myself how utterly incapable of verbal expression or even thought I seemed to be as a twelve year old. No mention of Stacey Katsampas. No mention of Monsieur Mardikian saying the f-word in class. No mention a wasp crawling down my shirt in Mme. Assoulin's homeroom. No mention of any of the one hundred distinct memories I have of grade seven. The food fight. The Jimmies getting expelled. The fact that Robyn smoked. Her supremely tight Sergio Valente jeans. Or how I swung and missed Anthony Pio's face by one centimetre. Only boring entries of how bored I was. Only variations of Boring.
