Good Bad Luck

2003-08-27 - 9:21 p.m.

Before I get into the "workers of the world unite" entry (eventually), I should let everyone know that I have finally, just tonight, come to know peace with my high school yearbook comment.

First, some background...

I was unpopular in junior high and high school. In high school, I did find some friends, but of that group, only a couple were in French Immersion, and by Grade 12 I think I was the only one.

For those who haven't experienced the "Immersion Experience," it's a process in which students are forced to endure the same classes with the same people, forever. The teachers you have for classes are different than the teachers everyone else has, the course schedule is different than anyone else's, etc. (To complicate matters further, I also was in band, but that's a different and more depressing story).

Anyway, "Yearbook Time" came at an interesting crossroads for me. I was simultaneously the only person in every classroom that I was friends with and in the advanced french class we were reading a joyful book about a Quebecois teen who was dying of leukemia (is -every- hero of high school books dying of something, or is it just me? Should I start saying "Class of '95 - the Leukemia Generation?"). The main character's favourite catch phrase was "C'est y'inque maudite bad luck." Which means, in Quebecois slang (cleaned up for the viewing audience) "It's nothing but shitty bad luck."

For some reason, I selected -this- as my "favourite comment" for the yearbook. I have never actually used "C'est y'inque maudite bad luck" in conversation, but at the tender age of 17 I thought it was witty.

Of course, when I actually saw the yearbook a few months later (my family couldn't afford the yearbook, so I looked at a friend's), I was mortified. I was, of course, the only person to actually lift a quote from an obscure, French book about a dying leukemia boy as my comment, and really, the saying had nothing to do with me.

I carried this shame with me until I forgot about it.

Until, actually, today. "It's nothing but shitty bad luck" is actually quite a good saying for someone who was a teenager in the '90s. I mean, weren't we all supposed to be angst-ridden and lamenting our lot in life? And isn't it great that I have an angst-ridden saying, not just apt but in a different language?

I thought so,

Cheers,

The Magus

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