As such, the administrators have drafted a new-and-improved attendance policy for Garfield. Under the revised attendance policy, an unplanned absence will ONLY be excused if it falls under one of the following three categories: a sudden, gruesome death in the family caused by heavy machinery or similar; a severe, life-threatening illness or injury requiring the amputation of one or more of the four major limbs; or a doctor’s appointment for the purpose of discussing said life-threatening illness or injury. Observance of a religious holiday and suspension are no longer valid excuses for missing class.

The school must be notified within 48 hours of the absence. In order to ensure that the student’s excuse is valid, proof of the death, illness/injury or appointment must be provided for inspection at the time of notification.

Providing proof is relatively simple, but does vary according to the excuse. In the case of a death in the family, the student or a parent/guardian must provide a copy of the program from the funeral; the program must be signed and dated by no fewer than five funeral guests as well as the owner of the funeral parlor at which the service took place.  Furthermore, while at the funeral, the student must collect approximately one milliliter of his or her own tears in a lidded plastic cylinder*. The absence will not be excused until district lab analysts have certified that the tears are genuine and were secreted by human lacrimal glands. As an added precaution, every student must submit a copy of his family tree to the attendance office at the beginning of the school year. This document will be kept on file. Each time someone in a student’s family dies, that person’s name will be crossed off the tree, thus preventing any student from gleaning multiple excused absences by claiming that Grandma Sue has died for the third time.

In the case of a severe, life-threatening illness or injury requiring amputation, the student will presumably not be able to bring proof to the attendance office himself, because he will be either bedridden or newly disabled. As such, a parent/guardian must collect and deliver suitable evidence in an appropriately-sized plastic cylinder. For example, if the student has pneumonia, a phlegm sample is required. If he has the stomach flu, a vomit sample is required. If the student has undergone an amputation, a foam or rubber model of the severed limb(s) must be delivered to the school within three business days, along with a color photograph of the student’s new stump(s).

In the case of a doctor’s appointment, the student or parent/guardian must provide a two-minute video of the doctor having a discussion with the student in a certified medical examination room.

The policy will go into effect this September.
garfield.messenger@thisopinioncolumniscompletelyfabricated.com  

*Regulation plastic cylinders (two-centimeters in diameter) are available in the attendance office for a small fee of seventy-five cents each.

Luckily, one girl stood out from the crowd. Carmen*, the oldest Spanish girl at the camp, was 17. Within the first week, the linguistically-inclined pair found themselves alone in an empty corridor, à la Harry Potter and Ginny Weasley.

“We went to an empty floor of Hagget Hall,” Jake said. “We made out there for 15 minutes.”

The next day, Carmen abruptly ended the fling. She said there was “too much pressure,” and “too many people” knew what was going on.

“They [the Spanish students] came on government grants,” Jake said. “Our exploits were being recorded in the town newspaper back in Spain.”

While Carmen fretted about losing her grant and ruining her reputation, Jake nursed his wounds in the dorms.

“For the next two days, I was heartbroken,” he said. “I played a lot of guitar.”

From afar, he noticed that Carmen was paying a suspicious amount of attention to Rodrigo*, her guy friend from Spain. Yet she still insisted that the two were just friends. After Jake witnessed Rodrigo pinching Carmen’s upper thighs, he concluded that people in Spain are more intimate with friends of the opposite gender.

Jake and Carmen got back together toward the end of the three weeks. When they had to say goodbye on the last day, Carmen was upset.

“I thought this was just like a summer thing but she was sobbing and distraught,” Jake said.

Jake isn’t the only Garfield student who has learned about foreign sexuality first-hand. Many other Bulldogs have returned from trips abroad with newfound knowledge of international attitudes toward romance and sex.

Okoye Berry, a senior at Garfield who traveled to Cuba this summer, remarks that Cubans seem much more open about doin’ tha nasty than Americans and are sometimes so open that they have trouble remembering to wear clothes. As a foreigner in Cuba, he experienced the forwardness of some natives firsthand.

“‘You want sex?’ might be the only English words they know,” he said, “If you’re American, it’s like $ signs come into their eyes. They will [d]uck you in a minute, maybe just to rob you.”

It’s possible that teenage sex is less frowned upon in Cuban society because people come of age earlier; there a sixteen year-old qualifies as an adult. Because of this, late teens/adults have much more open conversations with their parents about (gulp) sex. Indeed, Cuban parents probably don’t rudely wait until their children are fifteen to explain that storks did not actually play a vital role in their births (unless your name’s Zoe).

However, it seems that although Cubans are much more comfortable discussing/having sex, a double standard similar to one in America still exists.

“Guys are always gonna get high 5s; girls get a kick in the [tush],” says Okoye.

A thousand miles away, junior Cally Shine has born witness to some Irish attitudes towards sexual activity. Cally says Irish boys tend to be very forward, at least with American girls. While staying in Ireland she received many flirtatious texts like “so you’re the yank.”

She says that although the older Catholic generations regard sexual expression more strictly, the dirty deed has become much more acceptable with younger generations.

“I think it’s a little more okay to be slutty in Ireland, from my impressions,” she says.

Cally has a cousin who became pregnant at age seventeen and an aunt who was incredibly supportive to her impregnated daughter. Another one of her cousins lost her virginity at the age of 13.

Rhonda*, a former Garfield student who now does full-time Running Start, traveled to Norway during her junior year.

“Relationships and the sexual aspects of relationships in Norway, at least to me, seemed a lot more respectful,” Rhonda said. “Granted, there are still many random hookups, but it became really clear that relationships are taken very slowly and there is a lot of patience regarding sexual activities. Also, I found it really bizarre that couples that begin in the last year or so of their high school are typically expected to get married.”

The dynamics of Garfield’s senior class would change significantly if couples within the class were expected to get married.

Some people explore the world; some people explore their sexuality. Students at Garfield explore both at the same time, and they have discovered with certainty that sex does exist in other countries.
*Name has been changed.

Learning to analyze literature is the point of Language Arts classes at Garfield, and analyzing literature usually requires interpreting symbols. Unfortunately, to interpret a symbol, one must first identify the symbol. Even more unfortunately, any living thing or inanimate object can be a symbol for something else, without any particularly good reason.

Over the past four years, teachers have explained that the ashes near East Egg represent poor people, that Yorick’s skull represents the inevitability of death, and that Janie’s hair represents sexuality. Everything else represents Britain.

I want to believe my teachers, I really do. But I stopped trusting authority figures when my doctor started using phrases like, “I think there’s a 50 percent chance it’s probably just a lymph node.”

Most of the time, I only see the symbolism in a book after hearing the explanation. Maybe I’m symbolically challenged—or maybe the symbolism isn’t actually there. Fitzgerald might have written about the ashes in The Great Gatsby because he liked the color gray. Shakespeare might have written about Yorick’s skull because he wanted Hamlet to be even more gruesome. Zora Neale Hurston might have focused on Janie’s hair because she liked hair.

I make arbitrary choices every day; I slap someone or sit on the floor because I feel like it. Authors must make arbitrary choices, too, and nobody else can know for sure if a symbol is a symbol. It could be just a lucky but meaningless accident of choice.

I have Ms. Harris for AP LA this year. Sometime around the beginning of September, she told my class that her high school LA teacher said all of the dashes in Emily Dickinson’s poetry were phallic symbols; he insisted they revealed her repressed sexuality. Although Dickinson was a hermit and probably didn’t get much action, Ms. Harris disagrees with that interpretation. But if two language arts teachers disagree on a poem’s symbolism, which teacher should students trust?

If Dickinson, Fitzgerald, Shakespeare, Hurston, and all their author peers weren’t dead, students could ask them about the symbols in their books. But they are dead, and Ouija boards don’t work very well for multi-clause questions.

I have an equally hard time understanding symbolism in art. Art has meaning because the artist says it has meaning, and people buy art when they believe in that meaning. I felt confused when a video of a naked woman hitting a punching bag made it into the Henry Art Gallery, while my sculpture, “Trash From Parking Lot Piled into Plastic Container—2001,” did not. Either the punching bag represented something, or people believed the artist when she said that it did. When I said that the trash in the plastic container symbolized the worn, ragged citizens of a city devoid of nature, nobody could prove me wrong. Yet because I had little artistic authority back in 2001, nobody believed in my symbols.

So, something is a symbol because an authority figure says it’s a symbol. That’s like how I have to do chores because my mom and dad say I have to do chores.

Since Flamechild and I invented lunch analysis, we are naturally the figures with the most authority in the field. If she says that a container of rice and beans represents a dumpster, she must be right.

Mr. Johnson

This summer, former Garfield chemistry teacher Meade Johnson moved to a small village in England with his family. He and his wife, Laurie, decided to leave the United States for a couple of years because they wanted to expose their kids to a different way of life.

“We both love to travel and value learning from different experiences, from being out of our comfort zone, and from different cultures,” he said. “We want to expand upon our international-mindedness, and then to be able to travel too from where we are.”

Johnson says he misses the energy and the cultural diversity of the Garfield student body.

“I miss my colleagues,” he said, “and I miss the kids.”

Since his arrival in the United Kingdom, Johnson has faced the fact that people in England speak a different type of English.

“I’ve picked up at least a couple dozen words,” he said. “It’s not cell phone, it’s ‘mobile’; gas, ‘petrol’; ‘trousers’ are pants, and ‘pants’ are underpants.”

He ran into trouble when he used his American English in a conversation with women who were talking about lost arts.

“I said I used to sew, and one time I hemmed my sister’s pants,” he said. “They all burst into laughter.”

Although his three-year-old son speaks with an accent half the time, Johnson insists he won’t adopt a British accent any time soon. He also claims to be loyal to American spelling, even though spell check frequently reminds him that ‘color’ should be spelled ‘colour.’

“I remain proud of my spelling,” he said, “but the British spelling looks nice, so in a few months I might feel differently.”

Johnson said he doesn’t miss Seattle’s so-called natural beauty.

“If you call the number 26 bus line in front of my house natural beauty, then I’m faring far better here,” he said. “There’s a lot more green space here than in Seattle. And there are fields with horses and cows and meadows.”

At times, his new neighborhood resembles a farm.

“On the road that we live there are regularly giant piles of horse poo,” he admitted.

Mr. Miranda

After years of teaching at Garfield and advising the school newspaper, legendary writing teacher Steve Miranda quit his job to find a school more fitting for him.

He had begun to wonder about the effectiveness of the classroom and the system of learning that was presented. One of Miranda’s biggest issues with the teaching style at Garfield was the negative atmosphere that circulated around the grading system.

On his blog, stevemiranda.wordpress.com, Miranda explains how he tried to teach freely, focusing on discussions and projects, not homework and grades. Instead of embracing the new style, students took advantage of the freedom, claiming to “do nothing” in his class.

When he initiated a schedule of regular worksheets and multiple-choice tests, however, the students decided they were actually in a real classroom again.

“When I teach well,” he wrote, “students think I’m teaching poorly. When I teach poorly, they think I’m teaching well.”

He knew it wasn’t the students’ fault, but rather the fault of the societal system present at most schools. Miranda found the style he was looking for at Puget Sound Community School, where he now happily works as an administrator.

Miranda likes his new job, and embraces the unique style of the school.

“At PSCS, we try to help students discover what they’re passionate about, then help them pursue it,” Miranda said. “There are no grades, no academic requirements. It’s an incredible place.”

He went on to explain that the mood of the school is extremely happy; students can choose to participate in the certain activities that they are truly passionate about.

“That doesn’t mean that people sit around playing video games all day,” added Miranda.

Most of the older students all meet for a pre-calc class, getting together three days a week and receiving a fair amount of homework. Miranda believes that the students all chose to enroll for this class because the system gave them the freedom to pick what they wanted.

“They came to the conclusion on their own that math is important,” said Miranda. “When you trust young people, amazing things tend to happen, a notion that society has a very hard time grasping.”

Although he loves the system in his new school, Miranda admits to missing Garfield’s community.

“I miss a lot of people,” said Miranda. “Garfield is filled with wonderful, amazing people who made my life richer than it otherwise would have been. I have very fond memories of Garfield.”

The attendees broke up into small groups, trading suggestions regarding the location of and activities available at the center.

“One of the things that came up would be that it would be a good idea to have it in south Wallingford so it could serve Wallingford and Fremont,” Wallingford Community Council President Mary Heim said.

Heim said that the center will not be affiliated with Seattle Parks and Recreation, unlike Ravenna-Eckstein and Greenlake Community Centers. This means that programs and activities will emerge from the ground up, based on the types of things neighbors want to learn.

The project steering committee is comprised of twelve members, including representatives from three schools, the Wallingford Boys and Girls Club, and Weaving Wallingford. Jake Weber, director of FamilyWorks Resource Center and Food Bank, is the chair. The committee received significant funding from the Wallingford Chamber of Commerce, Community Senior Center, Neighborhood Office, and Community Council, as well as a $15,000 grant from the Department of Neighborhoods.

“The way the Department of Neighborhoods grant works is that volunteer hours count as a dollar match,” Heim said. “For every hour people go to meetings and volunteer, there’s a certain amount of money that will be matched as a grant. Part of the focus is bringing people together.”

The steering committee has not decided on a name for the center.

“I like the Hyphy Hangout,” Heim said, “but I have no idea. I think it could probably be named anything. If there’s some sugar daddy or sugar mommy who comes in and donates a million dollars, it could be the Bill Gates Community Center or the Jimi Hendrix Community Center.”

According to one of the documents on the community center website, the area centered at 45th and Wallingford is one of the most underserved areas in the city. The distance to the nearest community center is simply too far.

Garfield senior Fred Ness, one of several Garfield students who reside in Wallingford, gave the center his stamp of approval.

“I’ve been a part of the Wallingford community for a long time and I’ve seen the changes that have been happening,” he said. “I’m really looking forward to having a community center.”

Unfortunately, Heim estimated that the community center won’t open for five or six more years; Ness won’t be able to hang out there until after college.

Recently, my dad took it to the extreme when he brought home the September/October issue of Adbusters, a publication most likely owned by an English-speaking, global warming-obsessed version of Che Guevara. Adbusters costs $8.95. It’s thicker than a composition notebook. On the back cover, the words “Your Economy Needs YOU to Keep Consuming” are superimposed over a creepy green clown. This particular issue was a collection of charts and essays that relate to the current economic system and its impact on the environment. It reads more like a coffee-table book than a magazine; it has no table of contents, and the drawings and photographs take up full pages.

I started reading the magazine while camping, so I was able to ponder the material without feeling too guilty about my own eco-footprint. But I still felt like Julia Roberts trying to stop Dermot Mulroney from marrying Cameron Diaz in My Best Friend’s Wedding—frantic, vaguely hopeless, and aware that the wedding is in less than 48 hours.

We have more than 48 hours to figure out how to solve the environmental crisis and prevent global catastrophe. However, Adbusters warned me that finding a solution will be more difficult than the world wants to admit.

In an untitled essay on an unnumbered page, a University of Texas professor named Robert Jensen told me that making slight changes to our current systems won’t save the planet. Cutting back on fuel consumption won’t bring carbon dioxide levels down to a safe level. Taking shorter showers won’t save enough clean water for future use. Humans must come up with entirely different systems, and fast.

Jensen compared our current way of life to a ride “on a sleek train.” The train tracks end abruptly in the distance, and the train will derail if it continues. Some think we should stop the train and continue our journey on foot. Most of us, however, say that we like the train, and that getting off the train “is not realistic.”

On the contrary, getting off the train is the only realistic plan. If we stay on the train, we will die. Even if we slow it down, it will eventually derail, and we will die.

Conserving resources, like reducing the train’s speed, buys us time without solving our problems. We need to find the equivalent of walking. We need a completely different idea of how to live.

Unfortunately, humans fail at thinking of completely different ideas. I know this. I watch alien movies.

Aliens in movies always look like something that we’ve seen before. E.T. looks like a withered human, and the aliens in “War of the Worlds” have heads like Triceratops. The aliens in “Zathura” resemble lizards, the aliens in “Alien” look like arthropods, and the aliens in “District 9” are called “prawns,” because they look like prawns.

Even in Hollywood, a place that relies on imagination to make a profit, nobody can think of a new idea.

After reading Jensen’s article and thinking about alien movies, the future didn’t seem so bright. But just before I succumbed to hopelessness and drove two blocks to the grocery store, Adbusters gave me some hope. The essays in it suggested a couple of ways to change.

One essay pointed out that humans sell natural resources to make money. Selling oil and dead trees is like selling pieces of one’s house; the practice helps in the short run, but later we’ll be left with no clean air. We could stop doing this.

The other essay suggested that we pay the “true cost” of whatever we buy. We could price items according to the damage their production inflicts on the planet.

If we make many individual drastic changes like these, a total solution might emerge. I really hope it won’t involve walking long distances.

Jones came to Garfield as an advocate for both the environment and Barack Obama. Yet the assembly was neither overly scientific nor political; it was downright inspirational. His combination of charisma and credentials made him a more popular assembly guest than many before.

Jones’ credentials are extensive; he has done a significant amount of good in his time. He founded the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland, California; co-founded a political organization for black Americans called Color of Change; wrote a book, “The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems”; and founded and managed the organization Green For All, also based in Oakland.

In March of 2009, Jones was offered a position as the Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise, and Innovation for the White House Council of Environmental Quality (CEQ). Naturally, he accepted. Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins replaced Jones as Chief Executive Officer of Green For All.

While working with the Obama administration, Jones facilitated connection and cooperation between many green organizations around the country. He also earned the nickname “green jobs czar.”

Unfortunately for Jones, Fox News host Glenn Beck had a bone to pick.

On July 28, Beck called President Obama a “racist,” and claimed that Jones was a “self-professed communist.” Color of Change, with which Jones is no longer affiliated, organized a boycott of Beck’s show. Beck retaliated on August 24, running a short profile on Jones that exposed his “rowdy” past. The profile suggested that Jones is a dangerous revolutionary.

Republicans had even less faith in Jones after September 3, when it was uncovered that he once signed a petition calling for an investigation into the Bush administration’s involvement in the attacks of September 11, 2001.

A quick search on YouTube reveals videos of the environmental advisor calling former president George W. Bush “a crackhead.” And saying that only “suburban white kids” shoot up schools. And making jokes about ebonics.

Dangerous revolutionary or not, Jones’ unorthodox, often humorous speeches failed to amuse congressman Mike Pence (R-IN), who publicly showed disdain for such “extremist views and coarse rhetoric.”

According to the Huffington Post, Jones resigned on September 5 because he didn’t want to get in the way of Obama’s agenda.

Actually, I don’t.

I don’t keep a list of personal hardships or barriers, either. Because if I did, that list would read something like this: I’m not good at sports, all my babysitting money is gone, I fell and started bleeding in public again, my sister woke me up by jumping on me, a possible employer never replied to my four emails.

Needless to say, my life hasn’t been particularly difficult thus far. I’ve encountered some challenges, but overcoming them wasn’t an epic triumph that other people want to experience vicariously in essay form. I’m not a character in an urban teen dance flick.

Millions of students have lived, and currently live, lives like mine. Uneventful childhoods aren’t a new trend or anything. And yet, scholarship and college applications consistently ask for essays about facing adversity.

Like desperate male hippos spraying urine into the air to attract females, many college-bound seniors start taking drastic measures to seem more attractive to certain colleges. So if a desperate applicant thinks a college wants to read about serious adversity, he will write seriously about adversity, dammit—even if the only challenge he’s faced has been wearing glasses.

“We lost everything in the hailstorm.” “All I wanted was to become a doctor.” “My seven brothers and sisters were dying of alopecia*, and I could only watch, powerless.”

I can hear the admissions counselors groaning already.

Health-care aspirations and hair-loss aside, some students actually have overcome significant obstacles. That doesn’t mean they want to write in detail about them. It’s rude for colleges and scholarship programs to assume that they will.

Furthermore, adversity prompts focus on the negative. They ask for descriptions of hardships, challenges, and obstacles. Such descriptions reveal nothing about a person, because adversity is random and external. Anyone’s belongings could have been destroyed in a hailstorm. Colleges would be better off asking for descriptions of how students overcame hardships, because the way a person reacts to adversity reveals much more about his character.

Enya**, the mother of a girl on my sister’s soccer team, is an admissions officer at the University of Washington. She and I started talking and I explained my frustration with adversity essays. She reminded me that the UW admissions team doesn’t expect to read 17,000 heartbreaking essays. After all, 18-year-olds have only experienced so much.

“Sometimes people write about trying out for a new sport,” she said. “It seems silly to me, but for them it was a real challenge.”

We laughed, wondering what type of person would think sports are a real challenge. Unfortunately, I was only pretending to wonder.

I’m the type of person who thinks sports are a real challenge.

After I recovered from Enya’s accidental blow to my self-esteem, I realized that her words were meant to be comforting. And ultimately, they were. She wanted me to know that an essay about adversity doesn’t need to bring tears to an officer’s eyes. It doesn’t even need to be completely serious. Admissions teams learn about applicants from their essays. If they learn that an applicant faced her fears by trying out for the bowling team, then so be it.

Members of the class of 2010 will spend the next six months writing about obstacles, character-defining moments, people who have influenced them, and those ever-vague “experiences you have had.” It won’t be pretty. But someday, it will be over.

And on that note, I wish all Garfield seniors good luck.

*Extreme hair loss

**Name has been changed

According to the Associated Press, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) estimates that swine flu, also known as the H1N1 virus, could cause between 30,000 and 90,000 deaths in the U.S. this year.

In order to keep Garfield as swine-free as possible this fall, those inside must take extra flu precautions. Most students have heard the following five health suggestions repeatedly since the H1N1 virus crossed the border last year; the sixth and seventh suggestions, however, are rather obscure. Read ‘em and weep.

Wash your hands or use alcohol-based hand sanitizer as often as possible, especially before touching your eyes, nose, or mouth. Flu germs can survive on surfaces like desks and chairs for up to 48 hours. Please don’t be the student who gets swine flu by touching a desk and then picking his nose.

Do not take aspirin. The Mayo Clinic says people under 19 should not take aspirin, especially when recovering from a viral infection (such as swine flu). Young people who do take aspirin are at increased risk for Reye’s Syndrome, an illness that damages the brain and liver.

Stay home if you are sick, or if someone you live with has the flu. CDC recommends that students with sick family members stay home for at least five days from when the person became ill.

Don’t sit close to your friends or enemies. Don’t sit close to anybody, actually; CDC suggests that students move their desks farther apart this year. Say goodbye to that fun little table group in your math class.

Get vaccinated. The H1N1 vaccine isn’t out yet, but may be available in October or November.

Don’t hug, shake hands, or fist bump. Dr. David Zieve says medical authorities recommend that students replace traditional greetings with “elbow shakes.” It’s not sexual harassment if a creep touches your elbow; similarly, it’s not a flu transfer if a friend touches your elbow – with his elbow.

The final tip concerns the state of the mind rather than the state of the body.

Stay optimistic. Yes, that’s right. According to “Learned Optimism” by Martin E.P. Seligman, the director of the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania, maintaining an optimistic mindset can decrease your risk of catching infectious diseases. Keep in mind that the term “optimistic” doesn’t mean “constantly, frighteningly happy.” An optimist is merely someone who views challenges as temporary and somewhat controllable, whereas a pessimist is someone who views challenges as permanent and uncontrollable. For instance, when concerned about catching swine flu, an optimist would exercise his control by taking preventative measures like washing his hands. A pessimist would take few or no preventative measures, assuming the situation was completely out of his control.

In a year-long study of 150 college students in the mid-1980s, scientist Chris Peterson found that the pessimists caught twice as many infectious diseases as the optimists. In a study of 34 women dealing with breast cancer remission, the optimistic women survived the longest. In a study of several senior citizens from Connecticut, the optimists’ blood showed better immune activity than the pessimists’ blood.

These and other studies have shown that pessimism leads to decreased immune system function, and therefore a greater risk of illness and death. And what better way to avoid pessimism than to practice optimism?

If optimists are significantly less likely to become sick, health care professionals should recommend optimism as a preventative measure, alongside frequent hand-washing and sneezing into one’s sleeve. And yet, most of them don’t.

Employees from Swedish Medical Center, Group Health Cooperative, and UW Medical Center said they had not recommended optimism as prevention to patients or community members.

“I’m not an expert in that area,” said Clare Hegarty, Assistant Vice President for Media Relations at UW Medicine.

“I haven’t heard about [optimism as prevention],” said Group Health Cooperative spokesperson Katie McCarthy. “But I think it aligns well with our mission of preventative medicine. If you take care of yourself, you’re more likely to lead a healthy life.”

The websites for CDC, Group Health, Children’s Hospital, and the National Institutes of Health did not feature optimism on lists of swine flu precautions. Seligman and his colleagues established the connection between optimism and the immune system over twenty years ago, but the medical community seems to disregard the evidence. At the very least, hospitals seem reluctant to apply the information to a real-life scenario.

Swine flu may come to Garfield this year. But the sick and healthy alike can implement healthy habits to prevent the virus and other illnesses from spreading. A combination of hand-washing, vaccines, lack of contact, and optimism will keep Garfield students as safe as possible.

We’ll remember ’09 for their shadiness, their beauty, and their creative ways of asking people (mainly juniors) to prom. If they don’t take action soon, we’ll also remember them as the class that didn’t play any senior pranks.

Senior pranks are a long-held Garfield tradition. Each prank reestablishes the roles of seniors, underclassmen, and administrators within the context of a school. The seniors cause mayhem; the underclassmen respond by laughing or screaming, depending on the type of mayhem; and the administrators rush around trying to restore order while hiding their own amusement. A good senior prank breaks the monotony and refreshes school spirit. Garfield needs that right now.

“There’s been a gradual decline in spirit ever since I got here,” Garfield teacher Steve Miranda said.

Miranda arrived at Garfield at the beginning of the 2000–2001 school year. He called that year’s graduating class “frightening.”

“When I first came here, when I went to my first spirit assembly… It looked like a Nazi rally,” he said. “I couldn’t believe it. The cheerleaders would go over to the seniors, and… It was so loud and violent I thought a riot was going to happen!”

Today’s student body seems calm in comparison. School colors dominate on spirit days, but the out-of-control sense of spirit currently lies dormant. In these last four weeks, it’s up to ’09 to bring it out.

The mini-blimp at the homecoming assembly was a step in the right direction, as was the forbidden lust between students and dinosaurs at prom. But lasting infamy doesn’t result from such minor antics. The antics need to be big. They need to be disruptive. They need to be on a level somewhere between an earthquake and an inter-grade mosh pit involving people and snakes.

If the seniors want to be legendary, they may want to consider incorporating livestock into their pranks. One year, according to Garfield folklore, some students brought cows into the building and led them up to the top floor. Because of the way cows’ knees bend, they couldn’t get back down the stairs.

“I didn’t see it happen,” Abe Benson-Goldberg, class of 2007, said. “But I heard it was ’03.”

Amanda King, class of 2003, denied the rumor.

“As a proud graduate of the class of ’03, I have to say that I’m beginning to think the cow prank was a myth,” King said. “I remember hearing about it with some awe as a freshman – it was said to be the work of some ’01-ers, I think. It would have been brilliant if it were ever accomplished.”

As King concluded, the cow prank’s validity remains questionable. First of all, a quick Google search shows that other U.S. schools have identical bovine legends. Second of all, cows may or may not be able to walk down stairs. According to “Sideways Stories From Wayside School,” by Louis Sachar, they can’t; but according to YouTube (“Cow walks down stairs”), they can.

At some point, goats may have been present on campus as well. One class allegedly brought three goats into the school and numbered them 1, 2, and 4. Administrators and students ran around frantically looking for goat number 3, which did not exist.

Miranda said he never saw farm animals in the building, but he saw quite a few bugs. In 2001, a senior guy bought hundreds of crickets from a pet store and set them free inside the school. He probably hoped the crickets would chirp, hop into backpacks, and maybe make a few girls scream, but…

“They ran to a dark place and kept quiet,” Miranda said. “That prank flopped.”

Later that school year, in a fit of Bulldog righteousness, the same guy TP’d Roosevelt. He got suspended, and Miranda had to write him a character letter so that he could walk at graduation.

In the years that followed, students abandoned toilet paper for more sophisticated materials, like bricks. A girl built a brick wall – complete with mortar – blocking one of the Alder doors from the outside. Another time, two students went around and changed all of the classroom numbers to “2003.”

Miranda said he appreciates the creativity behind unusual pranks, but he doesn’t look back on all of them fondly. He remembers a year when the seniors greased one of the ramps leading to Alder and then pulled the fire alarm. Unsuspecting students and faculty were slipping as they tried to exit the building.

“Some folks lack the sort of cerebral development to know the difference between harmless fun and…dangerous…acts,” he said.

The greased-ramp prank wouldn’t work at the new Garfield; the ramps down to Alder are carpeted now.

Garfield teacher Carol Burton has a certain fondness for pranks that fill the air.

“Eytan [Nicholson, ’05] set up a smoke bomb in the green bathroom across the hall from the orchestra room,” she said, laughing. “It filled the senior hall with orange smoke.”

Another time, a senior brought a fog machine to Burton’s choir class. She was conducting when the fog started to fill the room, so she didn’t notice that it was floating around her knees. She couldn’t figure out why her entire choir was laughing.

Benson-Goldberg remembers seeing three seniors streaking around the Garfield campus his freshman year.

“I don’t really remember many pranks as much as I do generally weird s*** happening,” he said.

King also witnessed her fair share of weird s***.

“As an underclassman, I remember days when we’d all emerge from sixth period to find that the seniors had scattered chicken feet or squid bits all over the radiators and hallways,” she said. “The feet were gross; the squid stank; pandemonium usually ensued.”

King fondly recalled her junior year, when the juniors painted the smokestack with their year before the seniors could get their act together.

“My favorite ’03 prank moment by far,” she said. “Oh, the shame of having your senior year dominated by someone else’s school spirit…”

The smokestack was torn down in the remodel, and the new Garfield doesn’t have a smokestack equivalent.

“That was what made my friends and me saddest about the new building – that they took down that huge smokestack and denied y’all the pleasure of tagging it with your year,” King said.

The smokestack tradition might still live on. Last year, ’08 built a makeshift smokestack, painted it, and put it outside the entrance of Garfield-at-Lincoln. ’09 could come up with a similar solution.

Whatever they decide to do, they better decide to do it quickly. The juniors are already making plans for next year, and they won’t be afraid to put those plans into action early if ’09 continues to slack off.

The seniors haven’t spent thousands of hours in classrooms for nothing. It’s time for them to put their hard-earned secondary school education to work and come up with a decent prank. The rest of the school can’t wait to witness what will be remembered as the first prank in the new doghouse.