I am only somewhat.

Today at school my speech teacher caught me outside of the science building and we had a cross-ways conversation while I ran to math with quick steps and he headed to interpersonal communications with long strides. He always makes me really flustered because I feel like I'm doing something wrong with my voice inflections when I talk to him. He's from the East coast. One time he wrote me a long email and told me very blatantly that I need to be more outgoing and talk a lot more in class. A lot more. Because I never talk in class. He felt I was robbing the rest of the students of some secret knowledge that I never even had.
I am not that smart.
Only somewhat.
But I know I have a California voice with an Oregon accent that could get me in some trouble.

Today in biology we had to look at these leaves under a microscope that made them a really vibrant green. My biology teacher hiked through a meadow to get them for us. I wish I was so into botany that I could know which little plants to collect for a biology class. I was partners with a guy named James and another guy named Randall. There's a little girl from the high school who is just a little bit a snob who sits at the table across from us, and she was funny today. She put the entire plant on her slide and tried to shove it under the microscope. Randall had to gently tell her that she only actually needed a single leaf. A really tiny leaf. Like a rosemary leaf almost. That size. I swear, her face was the color of the cherry tomatoes my sister had on the kitchen counter this morning. James laughed so hard I started to feel bad. For almost five minutes.
I am not that smart.
Only somewhat.
But I know to read the instructions before you do something in biology lab.

Today I had a French exam.
I am not that smart.
Only somewhat.
But I'm pretty sure I flunked the oral.

I am realizing daily that sometimes I just want to ignore all this school and education stuff and smartness and not-so-smartness, and I just want to go somewhere else for a while.
Just for a while.
A girl gets tired of sitting in the ugly hallways of a community college.