Anyway, on Television
I knew way more about America than any American knew about Germany. German textbooks were packed with Columbus looking for shortcuts and finding fat continents, Vikings maybe, who knows. I watched American sitcoms with American families in American cities doing American things—King of Queens, Modern Family, That 70s Show. It’s fashionable now to trash America as a nation of the overfed and warmongering, and sure, that’s not wrong. But I was jealous as hell I wasn’t born there. Specifically because of their schools.
Not because the system is well-designed or gives graduates some golden future. Just because it looked so varied and full of possibility. Anyway, on television.
My school had exactly two activities outside mandatory classes. A theater program that lured in maybe three weird kids every year and then they disappeared forever. And the bathroom on the third floor, which worked the same way. Meanwhile American high schools seemed to have everything. Football, cheerleading, debate team, baseball, student newspaper, food fights in the cafeteria, apparently show choirs where everyone just sang and danced through the hallways like it was Glee or something.
I’d wake up and eat a full breakfast with my whole family—bacon and grapefruit and some magic cereal. Then I’d ride the yellow bus at sunrise. Once I got there I figured out where I fit. If I was lucky I was a football player or a cheerleader or the guy with the leather jacket. If I wasn’t, I was a loser or an emo or the acne guy. If I was really unlucky I’d died in a school shooting three years ago and just hadn’t noticed yet. But that was rare. Anyway, on television.
I’d have a locker decorated with photos and funny stuff. First period I’d watch the cheerleaders on the field in their colorful uniforms, screaming letter combinations at the sky while I waved at them like an idiot. One of them was definitely my girlfriend for that particular afternoon. Between classes I’d run to my locker, maybe hit the student newspaper meeting (the cool kind, not the trash nobody reads), then lunch at the regular time—one o’clock, every day. After that maybe baseball practice, or debate club, or we’d just sing something stupid in unison in the hallway.
I had two best friends in this version. The first one was a witty geek in all black with huge glasses and giraffes on his pants, the kind of guy who’d burn the best porn onto CDs and knew his way around the school computer system. The other was a sharp-tongued girl with a cute nose and red hair, had been my next-door neighbor forever, and I’d kiss her with my tongue at prom for the first time. That’s how it works on television.
Obviously this entire sick fantasy is based on years of watching TV and has nothing to do with actual American public schools, especially not the ones in New York City, and probably only exists in the suburbs Disney built. But anything even remotely close to this has to be a thousand times better than what I sat through in German school, day after day after day, for what felt like forever.
So if I’m lucky—if I don’t get reborn as cattle or as Boris Becker’s son—I have one wish: Please God, let me actually live through this. Put me in a real American high school, or at the very least in a sitcom. Anywhere but here.