One of my favorite words in 7th grade, other than “puke” and “revolution” would be “idiosyncrasy”. This is not because of the intellectual nature of the world, that is the reason I like words such as “disinclined” and “elucidate”, but because it is closely connected with “genius”, something that I aspired to become. The modern man’s imagination is filled with stories of Nikola Tesla squishing his toes believing that such an act can be a brain stimulant and Isaac Newton working 22 hours a day. To that end, I, wallowing in my own folly, put on the presence of having bipolar disorder and substituted variables such as “x” and “y” for “?” and “?”. But even still, there is a type of idiosyncrasy that I do not welcome, or even tolerate.

As my 7th grade history teacher, Ms. Kapraun was acute enough to point out, not all forms of idiosyncrasy go hand in hand with genius or else there would not be any Kamikaze pilots or mental asylum patients. That is the type of idiosyncrasy that I do not tolerate.


Ellen Oscar, if classified idiosyncratic would definitely belong in the category of suicide bombers and asylum patients. The name “Ellen” in Ancient Greek, means sun-ray; although to her, a sun-ray is the defecation of a dead unicorn. Or at least, that is what I think it means to her. I never bothered to check further. A more appropriate name for her would be Old Faithful as while it erupts every hour, Ellen gets sent to the director’s office every hour for the most trivial infractions.


The great irony was that I, for most of the year, was actually looking forward to that history project in which we were supposed to write and perform a mock Ancient Greek play, and as Ms. Kapraun boasted, was the greatest and most fun project she ever gave. But the truth is, from the experience gathered by all the group projects I had to do, I would have committed the crime of counting my chickens before they hatched if I looked forward to a group project before I actually started it. This is because of the simple reason that I do not know who is going to be in my team. Sometimes I think that Ms. Kapraun put me with Ellen, who had a track record of ruining skits by refusing to memorize her lines, on purpose.


Ms. Kapraun unfortunately, was exactly the type of person who would do a thing. Put the sadism of Commodus with the autocratic attitude of Louis XIV who claimed “I am the State!” with the sarcasm of Voltaire, and you get Ms. Kapraun. My suspicions were significantly substantiated when we were having a discussion during class about that project, in the way natural to the human race; by shouting, and Ms. Kapraun came over and after shouting at us for being loud “When I put this group together, I knew it was going to have some problems.” She said.


“So why put it together like this?”, I thought. “Did you put this together on purpose so that you can watch us struggle and fight? What is this, a gladiator contest?”


As loud and uncouth as our discussion was, it was in some ways, fruitful. I was in a group with Josh Perret, Maryann Gao, Angel Shen, Kevin Miao, Lucy Yang, and Ellen Oscar. As it was with most groups, two people did most of the planning while the others sat there pretending to work on something, if they were smart or just sitting there if they weren’t so smart. In this case, the two people who were working Josh Perret and me. After the class was over, I congratulated myself. Despite being with Ellen Oscar, our group actually had a decent plan and outline of the story by the time class ended. I had won the first match.


I was in charge of writing the first draft. It was supposed to be about, as according the outline we created in class, a young adventurer whose friend gets taken away by Hera and who then embarks on an adventure to save her. Hera then, admiring the adventurer’s courage and skill, gives him a considerable sum of money, which caused him to become miserly as opposed to the kind youth he was before. Hermes then comes and takes away his wealth. Thus, he becomes humble again and lives to the end of his days generous.


However, Ms. Kapraun laid a stumbling block for my second match. She took my shield, that is, my main tool of defense away, by putting in the requirement that every person must have four lines. This combined with Ellen’s persistent and ferocious attack by her insistence that she would be Hera, one of the main roles, left me with little I could do to salvage the situation. However, I was able to remove a few other redundant groupmates, who although were more responsible by Ellen, were not that proficient in English. The following is the part of the script that corresponds to the scene where the adventurer finds the friend, whom Hera had a knife pointed at and tells the adventurer to decide whom shall die. Lucy Yang acted the part of the friend; Josh Perret as the Adventurer, Ellen Oscar as Hera, Kevin Miao as Hermes, and the rest as the chorus.

Hera: “Decide, who shall die and be ferried across the mighty river Styx”
Adventurer: “I shall die; free her”
Friend: “No”
Adventurer: “Yes”
Friend: “No”
Adventurer: “Yes”
Friend: “No”
Adventurer: “Yes”
Friend: “No me instead”


That maneuver, which appeared so brilliant and ingenious when I typed it up, didn’t look so great when I had to execute it in front of the audience during rehearsal time the next History class as Ms. Kapraun insisted that she see all the plays. That was a death sentence, not unlike the thumb turned down. To begin with, she would definitely not appreciate my sense of humor in the scene with the argument between the friend and the adventurer, and second of all, I was pretty sure none of us memorized our lines despite Ms. Kapraun’s quite clear requirements last class. Failure to complete homework, in Ms. Kapraun’s class, is the equivalent of sacrilege; equivalent to Nero burning Rome. Sure enough, after we completed, Ms. Kapraun gave us the thumbs down. “They, (referring to the two other groups) are good and ready to go, you, need some work.” I guess she wasn’t pleased that I used her impediment to my advantage and removed several formidable opponents to my desire of achieving a decent grade.


Soon after that, my group mates superseded Ms. Kapraun as the most formidable enemy to that desire. After class, Josh Perret came up to me and told me he would edit the script. It was a mark of the logical and intuitional inaccuracies of my conviction and prejudice that idiosyncracy is closely related with genius. Josh was idiosyncratic enough; he occasionally cried in class for no apparent reason and discovered, in Chinese class, how to make all the logic gates in Minecraft. However his writing was the worst in the world. That, in my group in a language oriented history class, was the equivalent of a thousand hydras sent to destroy both me and that goal. Yes, I knew that he was more interested in mathematics and science rather than literature and I would forgive him for lack of emotion in his writing, but it should at least, for someone proficient in those two subjects, be logical. It wasn’t, when I read it, I could neither recognize nor make sense of it. But, as he and Ellen became my greatest opponents, he refused, or rather I did not ask for the script until the day of the dress rehearsal for our play, one day before we were supposed to perform.


To give you an idea of how bad our play was, I will give you a brief description of the two other plays in the class, which were better, not just by a sliver, than ours. One of them was about this girl who struck a deal with the Artemis who lent the moon to her for a year. After the year was over, the girl begged to Artemis to allow her to keep the moon forever and Artemis allowed, but had her last laugh, by banishing the girl to that lonely sphere orbiting one and a quarter light-seconds from earth. Now, to begin with, the whole idea of striking a deal with a deity and having to repay it is simply the Legend of the Flying Dutchman although Davy Jones had been transformed into a benevolent Greek Goddess instead of the cynical and blasphemous demon that he was. I am not saying that borrowing ideas from other literature is bad but maybe they could have been a bit more historically authentic as the Flying Dutchman came a millennium after the last of Ancient Greek plays. Second, the moon, according to the play, was shrunk to a five centimeter orb, which would make it a neutron star. As beautiful as neutron stars look with Hawking radiation and its sea of neutrons, I doubt a twelve year old girl would appreciate, or even have the chance to look at it. Third of all, as cosmopolitan as ancient Greece was, Grecian girls did not speak with Chinese accents.


The other play was of this boy who embarks on the quest to find this magical fluid with healing properties and who had to compete with another person, who is portrayed as the most nefarious villain to date who also tries to find it. They meet numerous characters who punish the latter and award the former which in the end, cause the boy to find the fluid. Again, this play hits the folly of drawing inspiration from a work of literature that came centuries after the last of the plays of the antiquity, although this play drew inspiration from Germanic, rather than nautical folklore. They also made the mistake of choosing the worst person possible for the role of the antagonist, one who is docile by nature and who could not say the word “whatever” without a blush.


So you can see how bad our play was. Our group, not just Josh and I, were actually shamed to do some last minute improvisation when we listened, other’s backstage, to the other’s presentations. It was then that I learned that Ellen, again, did not memorize her lines, which prompted Josh and I to start berating at her. This would have continued for some time if Ms. Kapraun had not shouted at us from the seats of the audience to be quiet. I made no effort to continue after that to prepare. Ellen and Josh had defeated me and I was waiting for the thumbs down by Ms. Kapraun. “Who wrote this script?” she asked, after we got to the aforementioned part.

In fact, after the dress rehearsal, Ms. Kapraun told us to come to her office during lunch to prepare. Ellen did not come; although, the foreseeable nature of such an attack did not make it any less devastating, as I had no mechanism of defense against it. Predicting that your enemy would decapitate you before they do would not do you any good if you do not have a shield. That was when I probably realized that I lost the fight. The act of refusing had been, as I saw it, a message, not unlike how the Cuban Missile Crisis was intended as a message of Soviet superiority, that she would not memorize her lines. That, however, did not stop us from accosting her after our meeting was finished and we planned out the final draft of our script which Josh was going to write and I to make the final edits.


“Well, uh, I have to eat.” she replied in her characteristic tone that was something between the voice of the most snobbish of the First Estate of the Ancien Regime and of the worst villain from the films about the Prohibition, after we found her before Chinese class.


“Eat,” I said with military-grade sarcasm, “it does not take Louis XVI an hour to eat a meal.”


“Well, I’m sorry.”



“Well just memorize your lines that we will send you tonight.” said Josh. With the feeling that we, Josh came to my side, were going to face an enemy tomorrow that we could not defeat, I left the school and waited for Josh’s email.


It came, and Josh, apparently trying to repeal the mistakes he made with his disastrous earlier draft, wrote a fairly decent one this time. I wrote some final edits, cringed with horror at the aforementioned scene with Hera, the Adventurer and the Friend, there was nothing I could do to change that and still maintain the four lines rule, and sent it off to my group.


That type of desperation, of Didius Julianus when Septimius Severus was bearing on Rome, of Napoleon after the rout of his army after Waterloo, was one of a person waiting for his doom. I felt as if I was being dragged into the arena to face an enemy I had the slimmest chance of defeating, as much chance as there is of me forcing Ellen to memorize her relatively verbose lines in the five minutes between homeroom and first period history.


My bus arrived at school, but when I walked into homeroom, Ellen was not there. It was then that I remembered; she was sent to the secondary director’s office by our Science teacher. and didn’t come back. “Right,” I thought, “she was suspended.

That did, however, did not immediately send me into ecstasy the way Frederich the Great did after learning of the death of Tzarina Catherine, there was still the formidable dilemma of just how were we going to perform. In the end, Ms. Kapraun, showing clemency, decided to pair us with a substitute, rather than wait the next class for Ellen Oscar.


That substitute for Ellen, however, did memorize her lines in the five minutes between the previous performance and ours, and because of that, it went smoothly.


It was after that performance that I went into ecstasy in the aforementioned way. Of my wildest hopes, this, Ellen not only being absent, but suspended, had never entered my mind. I, too convicted by the scene before the performance of Ellen’s sarcastic apology, had insisted that she would, even if she memorized her lines, trash our performance in her unique way that can neither be on accident nor on purpose. It appeared, that I again, had counted my chickens before they hatched, which, in the end, caused my earlier conviction that this history project was going to be a fun one to be correct.