No Principals

I don’t have any principals and it’s really starting to show. My whole life is governed by nothing and no one remotely resembling a high school principal. An individual redolent of an educational epoch when double-breasted blazers were all the rage and one’s pocket square was the sole place for genuine self-expression. With shoulder patches, the options were far more limited. Tartan plaid was about it, the repurposed kilt from a Scotsman sick of feeling sudden drafts.

But not having any principals is simply the beginning of my bizarre journey down the unsupervised corridors of civilization. Not only do I not have principals, but I don’t have vice principals either. Nor do I have people in my life called “deans.” What if you’re a dean who’s also named Dean? Double Dean? What then? 

Nevertheless, allow me to digress. So, as you can see, I have no principals, no headmaster, no teachers and surely no hall monitors in my relative peer group wearing a reflective sash and carrying a clipboard cataloging the movement of every student in the proverbial locker lounge. 

It’s not only the people who are different in my world without principals. There are other things that have changed, too. This means I have no homework, no detentions, no suspensions and definitely no expulsions. There aren’t grades, classes or extracurricular activities to speak of. There’s no band practice with a failed tubadour living out his Sousian dreams of gridiron glory through halftime heroics – melodies at midfield. There are no books with a thick spine and fine print taxing my vertebra. There aren’t janitors sweeping up after me either. No nurse whose solution to every ailment is a sugary cough drop and to “walk it off.”

There’s no school spirit, no pompoms or locker combination to remember. I have no need for buses, lunch trays or school plays. That’s the thing about not having principals. It never stops there.