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But wait, there's more.

There's just no polite way to say "Buy me things", is there?

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I'm baded and jitter. So are these people. (And why not follow the previous, next, or random links?)

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Doug vs. Japanese Snack Foods: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

rant is where the heart is

diaryland: sirilyan.diaryland.com: entry for 2001-01-20 (23:27:31)
In which our plucky young hero outlasted it, to his great surprise.

It's fair to say that I went to elementary school in another era.

I don't mean that my school days happened almost two decades ago (although, dear god, it is almost two decades). I mean that my school was literally an artifact from the ancient past.

Central School, on York Street, was built not too far into the first half of the 20th century (while I was doing some research, I found someone who was born in 1929 and went to elementary school there), and like most institutional architecture from that time, it was...

...well, it was big.

The school was an imposing concrete structure, all impossibly-high ceilings and wooden construction inside, with two separate entrances over which were carved BOYS and GIRLS in crisp, perfect Times New Roman. In every classroom the coathooks were bolted onto the wall, then painted over, then painted over again. A faint sense of musty on everything; the year they put fresh carpeting in the principal's office, it felt as out of place compared to the black wooden floors everywhere else as a ... no, it really can't compare to anything else.

When I finally made my way to Morrison, the junior high school, for the ninth grade, it felt like I'd been dumped into a time machine that took me all the way from 1929 to ... at least a decade before 1960. Morrison was a former high school, the one that both my parents had graduated from, and it was a product of mid-century architectural styles, which made every institution look like a government office.

(And then I went on to the new high school, constructed the year before I entered it, and that was late-century architectural style, which made every building look like a prison. But that's neither here nor there.)

It sure planted its ideas in me, though, that old Central School. My memories of "school" aren't shiny. They aren't carpeted and they don't have happy posters on the walls. No, I remember twenty-foot ceilings and wood floors older than I am and the weight of the educational ideals of sixty years ago, the disjointedness of a school that had to adapt with the times even when the room just plain wasn't there.

Turns out they tore down Central School last August or thereabouts. The school was "surplus to requirements" and so they've closed all of the town's elementary schools and funneled all the kids into the new Glace Bay Elementary, one of those squat new buildings that looks like a prison. I'll bet every classroom is carpeted and there are plenty of bright orange posters.

But I'll also bet the coathooks don't even have a single coat of paint on them yet.

Amateurs.

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