Evening Traffic By Andrey Surnov

I fucking despise when a middle schooler is like “I hate being 13.” and everyone is like “Oh honey, it only gets worse. You don’t know the meaning of struggle.” like no. Let’s be honest. 12-15 is a really difficult age to be. It’s usually when you start waking up to how fucked up the world around you is but you’re still so young and immature that you can’t begin to fix it. It’s a time of horrible change, mentally, physically, prospective-wise.

Personally, it was when the onset of my mental illness developed. My parents’ marriage dissolved in a series of drunk sometimes violent arguments, I was stuck in the house with them, helpless to leave. I would rather kill myself than be 13 again in all honesty. The best part of being 13/14 is that you’ll never be 13/14 again.

late night shopping

my favorite bus gags

- teaching kids how to play sweet & sour so they start waving at people

- pretending to not know where we are and describing our normal surroundings as if we're on a wildlife tour

- telling them that they need to not keep their feet in the middle lane so when the invisible saw blade comes through it during the trip they don't lose their legs (I explain that the metal stripes on the floor are the sawblade tracks and will make a sawblade noise when they put their feet out)

- sitting in the very back and trying to get them to pass objects all the way up to another teacher

- lying about where we're going as if we changed course during the trip to a degree that isn't physically possible

- acting like I don't know that the building we're next to is our school we go to every day and I have never seen it before

- not announcing my presence in the bus so they, lacking environmental awareness, don't realize I am there and I can hear what they say until I sit up and look over the bus seat

- writing huge messages on my phone like 'hey what's up' and showing it to a kid who's too far away to talk to so we end up in a conversation

- instigating repetitive song behavior

Jill Mulleady Mouth-to-Mouth Galerie Neu, Berlin November 16, 2018 – January 12, 2019