2001-01-26 - 21:49:07

It's official. I have decided to go see a surgeon so that he can open my brain and have a gander inside to look for the little honing/communication device that my eleventh grade math teacher, Mr. Sivhonen had implanted while I was not looking.

Context: Mr. Sivhonen and I had a very love/hate relationship because of my inability and pure, white-hot obstinancy to learn anything in his math classes. He was, however, a very sarcastic, entertaining teacher and because I was a snarky, sarcastic teenager we established quite a lively rapport.

Of course, in grade ten I was so far from caring about school, having discovered cigarette smoking and skipping classes which took up considerable amounts of time. I even learned how to forge notes and my mother's signature.

(heh, heh, remember that mum?)

Needless to say, I did not often attend Mr. Sivhonen's class and I missed many of the daily quizzes that he based a great portion of our final marks on.

You can guess what consequences my two new-found hobbies meant with respect to my mark in that class: I failed fantastically with a 33 percent as a final grade.

All this happened in the first round of the course.. yes, I took the course over again the following year with guess who. I'm still not sure why I took it - the Ontario high school system only necessitates the drudgery of number crunching until tenth grade. And the second time around, I was still doing horribly but this time I learned my lesson and dropped the course with 51 percent. A pass - just!

By now you might be wondering why Mr. Sivhonen is still haunting me and it's because he's been in my dreams for the last two weeks acting as an aggravation on my soon-to-graduate nerves.

Last night I dreamt again that I hadn't been attending his course which blocked my ability to graduate and go to Japan.

So I can only come to the miserable solution that either Mr. S implanted a controller in my brain or that I have residual regrets on not having finished eleventh grade math. Strange, because I dropped out of high school and never earned a diploma, entered university five years later and now find myself disturbed by one course.

It's ridiculous that my only one feeling of needing closure comes from that - aren't there more important things in my cosmos to need closure from? Apparently not.