by Katz, Danny
Inside I.T. Hub, everyone’s still laughing and talking about the pig.
‘Heee heee.’
‘So cuuuuuuuute.’
Everyone sits at their desks and turns on their computers. DRANNNNG is the noise the computers make when they start up, DRANNNNG.
‘It was in a nappy.’
‘Haw haw.’
Taleeesha Monk sits next to me at my double-desk and she turns on her computer, DRANNNNNG. So does Wiggy on the other double-desk beside me, DRANNNNNG.
And mine, DRANNNNNNG. Outside Pooksy is in the corridor, I can see him through the class windows, he is on his phone.
‘Dah-yam, that’s a sexxxy shirt.’ Wiggy is leaning over and looking at my shirt.
‘Yard Duty,' I say.
‘You like boys?’
‘Nah.’
Wiggy’s just joking, he’s pretty nice actually, but he says it a bit loud and Carruthers and Brincat hear what he says from over at the next double-desk.
‘Hey Zurb is looking for boys, he’s advertising on his shirt!’ (Brincat)
‘He’s wearing the traditional costume of Gay-land.’ (Carruthers)
‘Backs to the wall, lads HAHAHAHA.’ (Dougy Mansour way over near the window)
Pooksy sticks his head in through the door and goes ‘PLEASE WORK QUIETLY, UNDERSTAND???’
Poor Pooks, bet he wishes he lived in another time when teachers could be violent and hurt kids, like in ye olde days.
Seriously, teachers could do that back then: Dad said when he went to school they’d hit boys on the hand with a stick if they did bad stuff, till blood came out and everything. Even Mum said she’d get a wooden-ruler-slap to the back of the leg for chatterboxing in assembly. If a teacher did that to a kid now, they’d probs go to jail like Bartle the Pedo.
Still waiting for this old computer to boot up. Little ball thing is spinning.
I.T. is a massive bludddddddge. You just learn about computery-stuff that everyone already knows like how to turn on computers and also how to turn off computers. Also you learn about the history of computers, like how even cavemen had basic computers. Seriously, they’d stack rocks on top of each other to count how many giraffes and elephants they’d killed and the cavemen upgraded their rock piles every two or three years to get faster rocks with more memory haha.
And the ancient Chinese people had a wooden computer called an ‘abacus’ which is little sticks with wooden beads on them and the Chinese people used it for adding and subtracting and other maths stuff. Don’t know if they still use abacuses in China, they probably have iAbacuses which are hipper and have cool chopstick apps.
And in the big war with the Nazis, these brainy English geeks built the first proper computer to read secret war-messages that the Nazis were sending each other – the computer was called Colossus and helped kill lots of Nazis and beat Hitler. When they weren’t using it to kill Nazis and beat Hitler, I wonder if they used it to go on Instagram and stuff. Probs.
My little ball is still spinning, this computer is so old and slow it’s probably the next version up from Colossus. Here we go: desktop’s just coming up now. Open my account, type in my password.
F - L - U - F - F - Y
Name of our cat. It’s the only good reason to have a cat: so you’ve got a password for stuff.
On my screen there is a file called Me In 30 Seconds.mp4.
This is our video term-project that we’ve been working on for the last three weeks and it’s due next week – we have to make a 30-second multi-media presentation with photos and video and music about how we see ourselves, what our interests are, who are the most important people in our lives. But it’s hard to do a movie about yourself when you have the kind of me-life that’s not worth telling anyone about.
Taleeesha Monk’s computer is up and she has opened her movie file and I can see what she is doing if I lean a bit sideways. She is playing her Me In 30 Seconds movie and it is pretty good. It starts with a pic of her when she was a baby sitting in a highchair with cake all over her face and under the pic is a caption that says ‘WHAT A GREEDY GUTS!!!!!’ Then there’s a pic of her with her grandparents: she’s like five or something and she is holding a guinea pig with a caption under it that says ‘BEST XMAS PRESENT EVVVVA, THANKS NONNA AND POP6!!!!!!!!!!’
The pics go through her whole life and there are lots of captions with lots of exclamation marks like ‘LOVING THE SNOW!!!!!’ and ‘WHITE-WATER RAFTING IN BALI WITH MY MUM AND STEP-DAD!!!!’ The pics go all the way to today with a pic of her and Cayleb Bukor at a party, sticking their tongues out at the camera and doing rock-fingers: ‘ROCKSTARZZZZZ!!!!!!!!’
Cayleb is her boyfriend, he’s in Year 10, and they’ve done stuff together apparently, that is the rumour. Hard to believe I am sitting so close to someone who has actually, like possibly DONE stuff.
What is interesting about her Me In 30 Seconds movie is that she has chosen a Hilltop Hoods song in the background, a really violent one. It’s about corpses and pouring petrol over a lake and it shouldn’t go together with the happy pics, but it works, it’s really good and I even make a little hmmmmm noise which makes her turn to look at me and I have to turn away fast so she doesn’t think I’m peeking.
On the other side of me, Wiggy is working on his Me In 30 Seconds movie. Lots of footy pics from all the footy games he’s played. Wiggy is a quality footy player who won the regional under-15’s best and fairest award so he’s got pics of him going hard at tackles and taking flying speckies and his team all jumping around happy cos they won the grand final.
All the way through there’s an Adele lovesong playing in the background, really soft and nice and vom-lovely, and it shouldn’t really go with the footy shots but it kind of does in a weird way, it makes it very emotional.
At the end is a short vid of him with his mum at some footy awards. He’s holding a massive trophy and his mum is crying and Adele is singing about how when she’s far away, she’ll keep being in love and flarp, it makes me almost cry. I make a little sniff and Wiggy looks over so I quickly go back to my computer and lean forward and look like I’m concentrating hard on my work.
Wiggy’s Me In 30 Seconds movie really tells you everything about Wiggy. How he’s all opposites, like shy and quiet in normal life but he’s full-on confident when he plays footy. And how he’s dark and Aboriginal but he has like yellow blond hair on his head. And how he is a boy but he likes Adele songs. Lots of opposites in one person, that makes me like him.
Better get started on my 30 Seconds of Me movie, double click on my file and it opens. Here, have a look. Okay, this is what I have been working on all term. Here we go …
Black screen …
Titles slowly fade up …
ME IN 30 SECONDS
And fade to black.
That’s it. Three seconds done. Twenty-seven seconds to go.
It’s not easy making a movie about your life when you don’t really have a me-life. I haven’t really travelled anywhere outside of the city. Haven’t really done any interesting things. I’m flarping crap at sport. Never won a trophy. Never won a ribbon. Don’t have a girlfriend. Never done stuff with a girl. Don’t celebrate Christmas and get presents from grandparents. Don’t even have a face that looks good in photos: it’s a bad face with a big freckle on my nose that looks like an ant walking up it. Sometimes people even try to squash it, it’s pretty awkward for everyone.
What am I supposed to put in the twenty-seven seconds left of my Me In 30 Seconds movie?
Do I put in a pic of Mum and Dad taking me bowling at Moorabbin Bowls with my little sis because I have nowhere else to go on Saturday night? A pic of me holding my Certificate of Participation I got for participating in the Maths Olympiad? A pic of me standing round wearing crap clothes that came from the op-shop and have the word BOY on the front? A pic of sad Dad sitting round in his undies all day? – he used to be a sound-effect composer who wrote sound-effects for TV shows but now he’s an out of work lamer who just watche
s Ahhhhh Bra ads on the TV shopping channel. A pic of sad Mum working part-time in a lightbulb shop because she has to make all the money for us? – she used to be an artist who painted these weird little Japanese ladies holding fans, but now she has to stand round all day explaining to people that an 18-watt eco-bulb is equivalent to 90 watts in the old-fashioned bulb system.
Maybe I could put a pic of my little sister Abie in it: she’s adopted from Vietnam and she’s twelve and she’s pretty cool. We play BeastHunter together but she beats me every time cos she is like a profesh gamer. She even had to help me go up a rank by getting me a double metal axe and a double silver axe.
Got to put in something, got to get this finished. Maybe I should try different titles, get it exactly right so at least I look busy.
ME IN 30 SECONDS
Nah.
ME IN 30 SECONDS
Don’t mind that.
ME IN 30 SECONDS
Nah.
ME IN 30 SECONDS
ME IN 30 SECONDS
ME IN 30 SECONDS
Out the corridor-window Mr Pooks is still in the corridor. King Bozz the Yard Guy has come with his bucket and rag. Pooksy is pointing at the plops.
ME IN 30 SECONDS
King Bozz gets down on his knees to clean it up and now I can’t see him anymore. Muck Up Day must be the worst day of the year for him, having to clean up pig plops. Normally he can just sit in his maintenance shed and drink alchie because there’s nothing to do.
ME IN 30 SECONDS
What about this …
ME IN 30 SECONDS
Bigger?
ME IN 30 SECONDS
Actually might go back to my original.
ME IN 30 SECONDS
Wish I could be like Wiggy and put stuff in my movie that I’m actually proud of, but everything I’m interested in is kind of embarrassing and I wouldn’t show or tell anybody about it. Like I really want to be a movie director but I wouldn’t tell people about that. Last school hols I made a movie called King Kong Junior with my little sis Abie in it – I shot it on Mum’s camera so the quality’s crap but it’s pretty funny. I got Abie’s stuffed monkey and I pretended it was King Kong and it attacked her in the backyard while she slept in the hammock. Bloody hilarious, it was really well shot and had these great camera angles where the monkey ran through the grass and the camera was low down following the monkey really fast. I wish I could put that bit in my Me In 30 Seconds movie but if Carruthers or Brincat saw me and my little sis and a stuffed monkey running through grass, they would beat my arse f’sure.
King Bozz just finished cleaning up the plops and walks off with his bucket and rag but Pooks stays in the corridor, just looking at nothing.
Can’t put pics of me playing guitar either.
I’m a bit of a freak at guitar actually. Dad taught me how to play when he used to play guitar lots – we used to play our guitars together and it sounded pretty good – but then he stopped wanting to play when he lost his job and got all sad and I just play by myself now. I know a ton of chords and I can do bar-chords which are painful – you have to hold your finger straight over all the strings and it kills like hell, even Wiggy would find it painful.
One day I want to be a singer-songwriter like Thom Yorke from Radiohead. Wish I could put some of my songs in my Me In 30 Seconds movie, with pics of me sitting on my bed, playing guitar and singing, but that’d be an arse-beatingly stupid idea.
I’m secretly writing a rock opera at the moment, true dat, a real rock opera that could go in a theatre one day. Wish I could put that into my Me In 30 Seconds movie but writing a rock opera would be punishable by death.
It’s called HumanKind and I got the name because ‘humankind’ has actually got two words in it … ‘human’ and ‘kind’. HumanKIND. Get it? Like HUMANS are supposed to be KIND to each other. So when I realised this, I got an amazing idea which was to write a rock opera about a guy who needs more kindness and love in his life. It’s a pretty serious rock opera, not funny. It’s like if Thom Yorke of Radiohead wrote a rock opera, it’s heavy like that and is going to be massively famous all around the world, I’m sure of it.
I don’t know what the story is about or what the ending will be, I’m just making it up as I go. That’s called impro when you do that. But it’s about this guy who goes through life without love or happiness and I have started writing the first song which starts with an empty stage, there’s no one there, it’s all black. Then the lights come up slow and there’s a line of singers wearing black so you can only see their heads. A sad guitar starts playing, just soft and nice, but really sad.
And here’s the good bit, the chords jump out of D and go to, of all places, F-sharp, F FLIPPIN’ SHARP; that’s hard to play on guitar, you gotta do a bar-chord which bloody kills so not many guitar-composers use it.
Reckon it’s a pretty massive chord-change, and the words are good compared to boring stuff you hear normally in rock operas. It’s just a tiny bit ripped off from a song by a band that Dad likes called The Beatles and the song is called ‘Eleanor Rigby’, but I actually think my song is better than—
Pook-sy - is - a - dick-y - dick
A weirdy lady-voice just said that in the classroom and it came from the double-desk next to the window where Angus Smits and Dougy Mansour are sitting. They’re piss-laughing.
- who - steps - in - piggy - plop.
Angus is typing rude stuff into Google Translate then making the Google Translate lady-voice say it. Everyone’s laughing because it’s such a dense thing Google-lady is saying but her voice says it all robo-serious like it’s real important.
Mister - Pooks - is - a - plopper -
Steph and Jackleen-Dellulah laugh at anything Angus does, so they’re both laughing their heads off (they both want to get hooks with Angus but they’re best friends so neither of them can have him cos they don’t want to start a love-triangle).
piggggggy-plopper - plo—
Pooks has come into class and Angus Smits turns off robo-lady fast. Pooks sits down at his computer at his teacher-desk in the front, all tired from so much yelling and stress.
Angus and Dougy go back to their Me In 30 Seconds movies and pretend they’re such hard-workin’ lads haw haw. I can see Angus’s computer from here and he’s got a cool vid of him skating in a carpark with Cesar Hildago; they filmed themselves on a mobile phone while they were riding, looks pretty sick actually. Not Dougy Mansour’s though, he’s just got a stack of LeBron James dunk shots he got off Google Images and he’s whacked them all together using that Ken Burns effect.
If Dougy’s just getting pics off the net, maybe I should do that too. Just get some pics of famous footy players taking speckies. Everyone loves footy specky-shots. And I will look like I’m into footy even though I am not. And if I play Thom Yorke’s ‘Paranoid Android’ in the background, I’ve pretty much got my Me In 30 Seconds …
1. TITLE (3 secs)
2. Pics of random footy players taking super-speckies, using Ken Burns effect (10 secs)
3. Pic of Fluffy the cat, I’ll bring one from home (3 secs)
4. Pic of Thom Yorke from Radiohead, who is the greatest singer-songwriter of all time, though I will beat him one day (3 secs)
5. Pic of Abie my twelve-year-old sister. The one where she is drinking from a juicebox with a straw and looking cute. It is my favourite photo in the world and she’s my favourite person (3 secs)
6. Some pics of Mum and Dad when they went to Cambodia long ago before I was born. They went for a holiday, just the two of them, and it’s got nothing to do with me but they are nice photos because the two of them look happy together. Yeah that was when they were—
BRNNNNNGGGGG, bell goes, everyone saves their files.
—when they were really happy. I could show some of the temples they visited because they took about 400,000 photos with them standing in front of temples. Eight seconds of that and I’m done.
Press Command-S on the keyboard to save my title. Still n
ot sure about the title font. Next week I might try some others.
PA crackles and it’s Bitchface Fruehling’s voice talking …
‘Students, please feel free to go outside and enjoy recess in the quad. All gates are being monitored and the yard is completely secure. Again, we are sorry for the disruptions, we are doing everything we can to keep our daily routine normal. Thank you.’
Brincat and Carruthers are away from their desks first and passing Pooks: ‘Hope ya didn’t step in any piggy poo-poo, Ezzzzzra.’
Poor Pooksy just ignores them and taps at his computer with his head down like he didn’t hear. You just know he’s wishing he could grab Carruthers and Brincat and bash their cunjevoidal heads together until they are dead, then go off to the teachers’ staffroom for morning tea, like teachers could in the olde days.
Everyone else is gone and Wiggy and I are the last to get up. I follow him out of the room: I want to tell him how good his Me In 30 Seconds movie is, but I don’t want him to think I was peeking so I just walk behind him out the door. On the other side of the corridor, something tiny is peeking round the corner that goes into Art Block, something no one else has seen. The pig in the nappy. When it sees me, it takes off back round the corner.
Funnysad.
10:32 a.m.
Recess
The tree near the handball courts had a bad disease so King Bozz cut off all the branches and now it’s just this dead tree with cobwebs and a bench under it. Nobody ever sits under the cut-off dead tree because the bench is old and broken but that’s where Jack S and Jarrell are sitting at recess. I can see them as I walk across the quad: they are vommy-holding hands as usual and talking to each other. When Jack S sees me he starts waving and yelling ‘OVER HERE, ZURB, WE’RE SITTING OVER HERE.’
Derrrrrrrrrrrrrr, Jack S. He’s sucking on a Golden Pash juicebox as usual, that’s why he’s so skinny-arsed, it’s all you’ll ever see him eat. Juice.
Jarrell’s eating one of her disgusting eco-vege-biscuits: her parents are Xtreme-health super-ripped fitness-freaks so pretty much everything she brings to school is made with nuts or seeds or beans or grain, or sometimes, for a special treat, a delicious bag of husks. See how she won’t even look at me when I get close? See how she’s making like she’s looking at other stuff going on? – so obvious she’s just pretending.
