#5 of 431 Class of 2005

I lost my four-hundred dollar school ring yesterday. It has my initials engraved on its white gold inner lining, a soccer ball on the side and a gleaming sunburst-emerald cut pink topaz towering over the center catching everyone's eye. This morning I wished I had never bought one. I scowled at the thought of making my Dad spend three hundred and eighty two dollars for a piece of tradition that I only but often wrapped around my finger. I remember the words of Mr. Willard, my philosophic English teacher: "They're taking essay-writing time out of your day to sit you down in an auditorium where they use straw-man rhetoric to persuade you to engage in a financial agreement with them to....." He might have seemed crazy at the time but I knew his argument made sense, yet I was not about to end the "tradition" of buying my class ring. The glittery little trinket was a symbol of achievement. Well, it is supposed to be at least. Getting a diploma is a piece of cake for people who feel it's worth their time and can temporarily stand the idiots who crowd public education arenas. I filled out the form, went to the Woodlands to pick it up, paid for it, and wore it.... for a while. Then, I lost it in the dryers that spin at Moore-Hill. There it went tumbling around warmly in permanent press and then coldly when I retrieved my terrycloths and left the laundry room with an overflowing basket. I even remember hurriedly picking up my six dollar underwear that fell from my basket while the ring was indifferently left behind. I hated people this morning. I asked what I did to deserve this. I knew noone would turn this expensive ring in to lost and found; people suck. I never wrongly took someone else's personal property, so why me? I even reported some dumbass who hit somebody else's car at school and laughed; I provided justice for someone who did not deserve damaged property, but I knew, for a fact, that hope for a soapy pink topaz was gone. Saw II changed my perspective on this incident. Just like those people in Saw II didn't appreciate their lives; I did not appreciate the life of my ring. My ring was sacrificed. Sacrificed for my own good. I have to strongly value the things I own or else they will die. We're talking about a lot of things here: unnecessary expenses, the importance of tradition, advice and when to take it, materialistic significance, weightless accomplishment, dumbasses, morality, irony, displacement of anger, parallelism, Karma and an epiphanistic appreciation of lost posessions. All these thoughts were haunting me today until I went to the front desk at Moore Hill and asked if anyone turned in a high school class ring. They handed it over. My heart jumped, and all these thoughts were mentally discarded into my trash can of worthless thoughts. There is hope for the morality of humans.