Weird Metaphor Night!

I still have my bag of pencils and pens from AP testing.  Mostly because pencils and pens would get lost in the drawstring bag which has replaced my backpack.  During one especially dull moment in class today, I started pushing some of the pencils through the side of the bag, poking little holes.  With the mechanical pencils it was easy; they were small and just poked little holes.  The regular pencils were harder.

None of my regular pencils were sharp (AP testing saw to that, and I was to lazy to sharpen them again).  So, as I pushed them against the plastic of the bag, they wouldn't break straight through.  They'd stretch the plastic around them, stretching and stretching until finally they popped through.  So I made a game of it, to see how far I could stretch the bag without breaking it.  The bad news is that now I have a plastic bag filled with pencil shaped holes which likes to leak the occasional pencil.

If you read the title, you're probably wondering where this is going (and reading what I just wrote, I could definitely go to some crazy places).  When you're suffering the braincrush of senior year, and sitting in a dark classroom as a friend attempts to explain taxes, your brain wanders.  Today, I started identifying with my pencils.  I decided that that plastic bag was my world right now.

As you push the pencil, the plastic around it stretches.  Everything strains to keep up with the change, to keep the bag from breaking and pencil from making it through.  But the more you stretch, the thinner the plastic gets.  The walls of that plastic bag, which had seemed so real, start to get flimsy and weak.  What's going to happen next becomes more apparent with every millimeter, and more urgent because you've pretty much already poked this hole, so why stop now?

Then you start to realize that you're going to poke a hole in that bag.  After that you'll pretty much have to throw it out, because that hole will just get bigger.  You start to regret pushing the pencil as far as you have, but there's no turning back now.  Finally the pencil breaks through and you have a little moment that sits somewhere between "mission accomplished" and "what the hell did I do that for?"  In the little world of that bag, the goal was getting that pencil to poke through.  But why?  Why did that matter?  Why was that what you wanted?  Have you really accomplished something, or have you just screwed up something that was good?  Who even cares--you'll get a better bag in a little bit.

Don't worry though, this kind of introspection lasts about half a second.  Then I get to work on another hole.  And another, and another, until the bell rings for me to leave.  Because, what else is there to do?