By: Troy Qian

I’m in language arts class, listening to my teacher explain something about a poem that I don’t like, something about two people stuck in mud. My teacher is bland, long black hair and the voice of a normal language arts teacher. In contrast, she’s well known by students throughout our school. Not because she is good at teaching, but because everything she teaches gets boring.

While she was talking about the poem, I was just staring into space not really thinking of anything much. But suddenly, I feel that my nose is runny. I get up, walk, get the tissues, blow my nose — which is kind of loud in a quiet classroom — then throw it away. I really don’t enjoy it because it’s a lot of walking and the school year just started, so everybody is staring at me for making the same trip repeatedly across the classroom.

And it doesn’t help when my friend keeps giggling about the most random things. He literally just drew a random thing on his paper and looked at me straight in the eye and started laughing for no apparent reason. And I’m still blowing my nose, so mid-way of blowing my nose, I laugh. Which makes my already long trip even longer because I need a new tissue to blow on, and I need to make sure my friend doesn’t make me laugh.

Due to my allergies in the room, I am forced to go blow my nose over, and over again. And it would be more painful considering my face gets rubbed against by tissues so much, it would hurt even when I touch the part of my face. If you were in my shoes, you wouldn’t enjoy it would you? And if I didn’t have a runny nose, I would live a normal day, of listening to boring poems, taking a math test, playing educational games in world history, and coding in robotics. And I would get to stay in my seat without making extensive trips across the classroom.