“teenagers are never joking. when seeking to prove a point, principals and teachers should remember that teenagers are never, ever sarcasic or ironic. if they say "I wish someone would drop a bomb on this school right now," that means they have arranged for a nuclear arsenal to be emptied onto the school and should be immediately suspended and ridiculed. if they say they were merely coming up with a joking excuse to postpone a bio test, reply that all jokes are funny, and that since dropping a bomb on a school is not funny, it is therefore not a joke.”

“These jokes the world plays, they're not funny at all.”

“every morning i pray that the school bus will crash and we'll all die in a fiery wreck. then my mom will be able to sue the school bus company for never making school buses with seat belts, and she'll be able to get more money for my tragic death than i would've ever made in my tragic life. unless the lawyers from the school bus company can prove to the jury that i was guaranteed to be a fuckup. then they'd get away with buying my mom a used ford fiesta and call it even.”

“I move my feet, turn away from her, try to pretend she's not there, which is the biggest fucking joke I've ever not laughed at.”

“The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible.”

“It is not easy to hurl snowballs while holding on to a plastic bag of groceries, so my first few efforts were subpar, missing their mark. The nine maybe ten nine-maybe-ten-year-olds ridiculed me - if I turned to aim at one, four others outflanked me and shot from the sides and the back. I was, in the parlance of an ancient day, cruising for a bruising, and while a more disdainful teenager would have walked away, and a more aggressive teenager wouls have dropped the bag and kicked some major preteen ass, I kept fighting snowball with snowball, laughing as if Boomer and I were playing a school yard game, flinging my orbs with abandon.”

“aloof, adj. It has always been my habit, ever since junior high school, to ask that question: “What are you thinking?” It is always an act of desperation, and I keep on asking, even though I know it will never work the way I want it to.”