I want to tell you a story, CHS. It’s about my shower. I used to really like my shower. We had some good times, and some bad, but through it all we stayed good friends. That’s not the case anymore. Now I can only look at my shower with discontent and scorn. See, the drain in my shower is broken, and it’s really bringing me down.

Ironically, a drain that does not suck, really just makes shower time suck. As the water just builds up at my feet, not only does it greatly restrict my motions, but it’s hard to feel clean and refreshed when you find yourself submerged in a foot and half of lukewarm water.

It’s kind of surprising how I let it get this bad. Drains, considering they’re simply empty space covered by a grate, are pretty resilient appliances by nature. So it must have taken quite a bit of time for my drain to finally go caput. I’m guessing that if I had ever taken a moment and bothered to look, I would have noticed its deterioration long ago and avoided the situation all together.

I bring up this story, not only to prove that I do in fact shower, but because I see a similar phenomena happening at CHS. It’s undeniable that even the average CHS student is under an extreme amount of pressure; the very essence of this place demands perfection and looks down upon the so called “average” (whatever the hell that is). So it’s to be expected that we’re wound a little tighter than most other kids out there, yet never have I felt, or seen, so many kids on edge as I do now. Not unlike the girl behind you in math, the pressure isn’t going away like it used to, and as it builds up upon our backs, it’s driving us insane. The culprit, as with my shower, is a faulty drain.

I didn’t really plan on ever divulging so much information about my shower to the student body, but the fact is, something is definitely wrong. We use the front of school as a demolition derby track for our cars and never before have I felt that this place is so disjointed and out of whack. I think the only explanation can be that our drain is damn near clogged, and I fear we’re all in danger of ending up underwater.

There’s a lot you could put the blame on. Swine flu is simply having its way with us, not to mention every other team is having their way with the Redskins and nobody is having their way with the new cell phone policy. But I think the real offender is something we can control. The criminal here, what’s destroying what little drain we once had, is our obsession with displacing our frustration in school onto everyday events as we exaggerate the insignificant. And to think you would have gotten away with it if it hadn’t been for that meddling columnist…

What I’m saying is that we’ve taken a fancy to exaggerating everything for the worse. This isn’t Noggin and we’re not Degrassi. Too often we want the antics of our everyday behavior to mirror what we see in pop culture. We see the bruise of a friend who simply fell down the stairs and lost a fight with the banister and assume he must have been involved in a massive fight, involving num-chucks, bayonets and hell-bent stink bugs to say the least. Or we believe the friend out sick with a minor flu must in fact be hinged up to life support at the hospital, with House at his side struggling to find a diagnosis.

Our addiction is hurting us. By validating the things that don’t matter we blow everything out of proportion. We make the mistake of giving substance to things that don’t deserve any. In our hotheadedness we let nothing slip by, and our drains become clogged. Everything now is simply regurgitating back at us, coming back tenfold. But things don’t have to look this gloomy. If we can only let the right things pass us by then everything else will be able to slide on down as well.

It’s about time we brought some Drano into our lives and started forgetting about the little things and focusing on what matters. We need to get the thinking out of our heads that everything should be construed as negative, or maybe even construed at all, and let it simply slide down the drain. As we straighten out our priorities we need to focus on the right little things, things like Megan Fox, the sound of Taylor Swift, our football team, burritos and the song “Party in the USA.”