I didn’t realize until today what the “school” in the crazy house was really for. I’d known it was too simple and mindless to really be counted for school.

All we had to do was write a paragraph about whatever we wanted, then play that stupid “Rush Hour” game. No, nothing involving Jackie Chan. It’s that game where there are different length blocks or cars arranged inside an enclosed square. There’s a little opening on one side of the square, and the objective is to get a specific piece (or the red car) out of the opening by moving it and the other pieces in increasingly difficult patterns.

Anyway, if you’ve ever played it, it can be frustrating as hell. Worse than a game over in the first Mario game when you’re up against the last koopa. Worse than AOL. Maybe even worse than Eiffel 65, but that’s stretching it.

It’s probably pertinent to mention that I was only in “school” with one other person, who was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder.

The purpose of the paragraph was just to see what we were willing to talk about, gain some personal information on us, see what mattered to us or what we were thinking about.

The purpose of the game was to see how we handled problem-solving, how we worked with other humans in close proximity, and how quickly we’d become frustrated or give up.

I think the reason that I was paired with the person I was with is because they thought we were the most alike of the group. And we were somewhat alike, I suppose.

Our major difference became apparent during the game, as they had hoped. Since it had little cards with where to position the cars to begin each new puzzle, the boy would set up the cars and immediately begin shuffling them around in general mayhem. At least, it looked like mayhem, despite the fact that he did have some sort of system going that worked sometimes.

My fake teacher noticed one day that I’d stopped pushing at the pieces along with the other kid. I’d gotten sick of it. She pointed out that she was impressed that while he “solved the puzzle by experimentation” (i.e. randomly shoved shit around) I simply took the card that showed the starting positions of the little plastic cars and moved the pieces in my mind until I had, without touching anything, solved the puzzles. With the way I did it, all you needed were the cards. The physical game itself was rendered totally superfluous, and more often than not I would solve the puzzles much faster than my classmate.

I think this is when I became a robot. I no longer had emotional processes, just pure mental processing. First this, then this, and if this, then this. I was the ultimate artificial intelligence.

Of course, it wasn’t the game that made me that way. As I’ve said many times before, it’s less harmful to a person not to have hope at all. I certainly didn’t have any hope as a walking logic machine (with, I should state, quite a flawed sense of logic). It’s much more painful to create delicate hopes and have someone mercilessly destroy them.

I had no hopes because everything I had hoped in had been destroyed. It sounds pretty lame, but it’s about the easiest way to truthfully, straightforwardly explain my situation. Well, there was the fact that I was schizoid, but still. That didn’t really affect how we felt.

I felt, damn you!

I mean…

I was thinking about this in my usual thinking environment, which yes, is the shower. I discovered that I still have basically nothing to hope in. But “basically nothing” and “absolutely nothing” are still two different things. I can still hope to be a good teacher. And I can still hope to…um…be a good teacher. And teach well. In a classroom. With students. That I’m instructing.

Okay, you know what, fuck it.

I was also thinking today about hurt. There are a lot of clichés about hurt and love and hurting the ones we love and bullshit like that. But the truth is we hurt everyone and are hurt by everyone.

I’ve been hurt by everyone I know. I’m not exaggerating; I can’t think of one person, close to me or not, that I haven’t been hurt by. I’m not talking accidentally, but either knowingly or intentionally.

I can, on the other hand, think of a great number of people I have not ever considered knowingly or intentionally hurting.

I’m sure everyone can truthfully state the previous two paragraphs with full belief in them, though they do present a fallacy. Why is that, though? I don’t know…but I don’t really care anymore. You see, for the past several years I was struggling to be human. To think like an human and have human emotions and reactions. I thought that being robotic was wrong and unnatural. Perhaps it is. But one thing I can assure you is that I was much, much stronger before I found real emotion.

I feel like I’m selling my soul. Perhaps the stripping of emotion is quite similar. What good would a soul be without emotion? But I’m ready to be the pillar I once was. Humanity was far over-rated. There’s nothing in it but disappointment and pain. All the happiness it may bring is only a short term illusion in order to set you up for treachery later on.

It’s time to start hurting back. Hurting everyone. Destroying everything.