Title:           Week10 - GreentextSavant
Author:          AlexanderGrey
Pastebin link:   http://pastebin.com/shDQvKh4
First Edit:      Friday 27th of May 2016 07:24:01 PM CDT
Last Edit:       Friday 27th of May 2016 07:24:01 PM CDT

LISTEN:
>After you lock yourself into the mode of giving the impression that you’re listening, Cinch gives you a specific set of instructions to get the girls to behave.
>These instructions basically consist of you taking more and more of their things away and replacing them with detention slips.
>Not exactly considerate when one os trying to make a learning environment a fun place to be in. Every ounce of your well-being is against this, but you know when Cinch has her mind made up beyond any hope of being convinced otherwise.
>She wants you to take away what seems to be the only thing this girl truly loves in order to get her to pay attention in class and raise the average test scores… or something like that.
>You’ve honestly tuned about by now.
>Get up out of the chair and walk out after the lecture is finished, conversation over. Time to go to work.
>The last thing you remember Cinch saying is something about catching Lemon Zest right as she walks through the front doors before school begins. You have a homeroom class to look over, but still have enough spare time to linger by the front hallway of Crystal Prep and wait for the girl to appear, presumably with her headphones on her head.
 
FriENDship:
>The zombie largely ignores the blows it receives to the head as Bulk continues. The thing’s only objective is to sink its teeth into Bulks arm, nothing else even coming close to crossing its mind.
>”Hey!” Luna’s voice sounds from behind, almost throwing Bulk off guard. “Take this!” Luna can be seen holding a shovel in her hands after Bulk turns around to look at her.
>The man hadn’t even noticed the thing when he threw the zombie halfway across the room.
>Swinging motions towards the zombie’s head are almost uncontrollable when the shovel reaches Bulk’s hands. Feeling the urgency pushing him to eliminate this zombie as quickly as he can, Bulk pummels the zombie’s head with something immediately a lot more effective than the sole of his shoe.
>Had Bulk been paying more attention to his surroundings rather than immediately taking out the zombie, it’s flailing arms would have ceased grabbing a lot sooner than just now. Those who had turned away slowly allow their eyes to find the aftermath after the noises have stopped.
>As it hits the concrete floor, the metal head of the shovel makes an ear piercing clanging sound. The first thing Bulk does next is take a look at his upper forearm.
>That bite… despite how painful it was, just didn’t have enough force to break skin. The teeth marks don’t look like anything short of severe bruises, but nothing more either.
>He can’t dwell on it for long before a loud engine roars right outside the garage door, sounding like it’s approaching the building. Bulk and the others immediately jump out of the way.
 
TRIXIE THE TUMBLRITE:
>Trixie scrolls through the rows upon rows of posts on her Tumblr.
>The same thing as every time; no re-blogs, no notes, nothing.
>With a pair of clouding eyes, she seeks out the homepage for her blog. A couple of clicks of the mouse is what it takes to accurately select the little icon correctly with the cursor over it.
>Now the girl is searching through the sidebar for any notifications, anything that had happened when she was away. At the same time, she thinks up the new ideas for her next post or two, maybe more than that if today turns out to be another bad day.
>So far, Trixie is following 23 Tumblrs, which is 23 more than the number of other Tumblrs that follow Trixie.
>She doesn’t say anything this time… just looks at that one big zero on her screen. She then proceeds to go to her dashboard to see what everyone else has posted.
>All of these magnificent works of art. Some of the most unimaginable things Trixie has ever seen. No real words to describe the difference between them and the things that Trixie has done.
>Can’t bear to look at the page anymore, click back to the dashboard. Trixie open up her own drawing program and begins scribbling down whatever she can.
>There had been many many times when she could have practiced, and took time into learning how to draw something that didn’t look like chicken scratches for a change. Trixie had seen that opportunity for many years time and time again, but she never took it.
>And to this very day, she still understands why.
>Spending so much time sitting down and going over all of these drawing techniques, all of those confusing instructional videos, all those graded assignments, all of those things that turned the girl away from wanting to learn. The problem was the aspect of learning.
>It was always so tedious and boring, planning a seed of disdain in Trixie’s heart whenever she ever heard the phrase “Learning how to draw”.
>Trixie saves new document after new document, unrealistically waiting for some notification.
>Trixie still doesn’t know why she does it, but she clicks on the little icon with Twilight’s picture on it. She stares at the screen ad the images load, knowing what terrific and terrible things await her. Perhaps it some sort of self-punishment, but that’s still too far from a definite answer for Trixie to put her finger on it.
>It turns out that Twilight likes to write about as much as she likes to read. If anything, that does make perfect sense.
>Now, it was one thing when Trixie found all of the people online who were better than her at art. At least she had a semi-decent excuse for not being at their level. Being terrible at art was pretty much something that Trixie had come to terms with for a while, despite it mostly tearing her heart apart on some days anyway.
>But this… this is completely new.
>What Trixie notices is something indirect… at least to the original thing that Twilight had done.
>A short story. Having been finished not too long ago.
>All of that praise… all of those positive things Trixie has seen before… now seemingly all happening at once. All of those positive things she wish she had seen when people viewed her work.
>All of those things Trixie has never seen in response to something she did that wasn’t just her sock-puppeting from her phone.
>Everyone loves Twilight’s story… and Trixie knows exactly why. For years upon years, Twilight had read, and read and read. Knowing what people love to read.
>And Twilight has written, and written and written, gaining all of the experience she can get. Breaking her plateau long before Trixie even started trying to be good at anything. And all that makes Trixie feel is trapped.
>Trapped inside of her own limits that she wants nothing less than to put up with.
>The limits that Trixie holds no patience to slowly lift away from her day by day… week by week… year by year.
>No.
>Trixie doesn’t want to wait. She wants the praise now… that praise that she sees being beamed towards Twilight. It’s right there in front of her face, and she can’t grab it.
>The girl picks up her laptop and throws it across the room.
>With a soft thud the laptop lands on the surface of Trixie’s bed, still blaring the bright light of the screen in her direction. the light hurst Trixie’s eyes still, but not as much as what the light shows hurts her heart. Trixie can still see what people are saying about Twilight’s work.
>How much they adore her, how much work Twilight had put into her creations.
>It revs up a deep seated disdain within Trixie as she walks over to the bed to pick up the laptop once more. Everything inside of her is screaming to turn the computer off before she does something she’ll regret.
>Trixie folds the laptop closed and turns the light back on in her room. The relative brightness that almost stings her eyes gives her a good idea how long she had been sitting in her chair facing the screen with the darkness surrounding her. If anything, the sudden influx of light brings a gradually prevailing moment of common sense.
>The creaking sound of the chair soothes Trixie as she sits back down into it and lowers her shoulders. She breathes a lot more slowly and takes another glance at the laptop still on her bed.
>She can no longer see what she read on the screen, but she can still feel those words. Her hands ball up in to fists as she imagines Twilight reading all of those positive comments. All of that praise and feedback that Trixie had wanted to hear about her work for so long.
>The laptop is placed back onto the desk and Trixie hops onto the bed where the closed laptop used to rest and drifts off to sleep in silence.
>She has to see Twilight at school tomorrow.
~
>After Trixie makes it to school the next day, she has already repressed what she saw on the computer screen the night before.
>Whenever she gets close to seeing Twilight in the hallways or in the classrooms, she looks away. It’s moments like these when Trixie questions why she doesn’t stay away from computers more often. Given how much they tend to cloud her judgement with so much angst and envy.
>The teacher talking in class starts to become drowned out by Trixie’s imagination and short attention span. The girl scribbles tiny sketches onto the paper in her notebook instead of what she’s supposed to memorize.
>But that doesn’t mean that she’s not studying.
>Trixie still tries to think up a few clever things to say on the lines of the paper. She tries to put together rhymes to construct poems or possibly song lyrics. The girl thinks through her entire vocabulary as the whiteboard in the front of the classroom becomes crowded with more and more mathematical equations.
>But nothing the girl writes sounds like it’s deep enough in meaning.
>For some reason, Trixie jumps ahead of what she sees on the paper before her and imagines people reading her work. She imagines their reactions reflecting the feedback she had gotten in the past. The responses that insist to her that she did a… “great job”, but in the end, her work was really just mediocre to them.
>It isn’t hard to see the league in which Trixie’s work lies, at least through the girl’s overanalyzing eyes.
>But how she sees her writing is nowhere near as damaging as how she sees her drawings.
>The disgust only amplifies as Trixie can fill words of her own into the blank whenever she sees whatever it was she draws on paper. Mostly through how much, to put it lightly, different the physical result turns out to be in contrast to what Trixie imagined in her head.
>Once pencil hits paper, the fate of Trixie’s dream of becoming an artist mirrors the fate of the transition from imagination to marks of graphite on paper. Trixie watches that fate seal upon her over and over again until the end of class.
>Not a single note of the class’s subject has been taken.
>The paper itself is tossed straight into the hallway trash can by Trixie’s trembling hand. Of course, it takes a couple of throws to toss each ripped up piece one at a time.
>”Hey.” A voice startles Trixie as she walks away from the disposal of her failure.
>That voice couldn’t be anyone other than Twilight, and Trixie’s knuckles turn white and her cheeks turn red once more.
>Trixie almost starts off by making up an excuse not to talk as she goes along abruptly replying when Twilight continues.
>”Are you alright? You look a little tense.” Twilight wears a cheerful expression on her face that taunts Trixie as she turns to face the girl.
>The rest of the mane six standing behind Twilight examine Trixie’s nearly crouched stance, noticing how she had angrily chucked something into the trash can. Of they had seen it, then there’s no doubt that Twilight had as well.
>”T-Trixie is fine…” Trixie steps further away from the trash can to draw attention away from it. She gets ready to walk away.
>The mane six exchange a few glances.
>”Are you sure?” Twilight steps ahead of the rest of her friends, who apparently happened to be here at the same time as Twilight addressing Trixie.
>”I’m fine!” Trixie shouts into the opposite direction as she hastily walks away.
>The group of friends brushes the incident off as nothing without even taking a look at whatever it was that Trixie threw away. The school day drags on and nothing else happens.
>But the day itself must continue after Trixie makes it back home.
>And the first place she goes to is the computer. The girl sits down into her seat and watches the screen light up in front of her.
>She opens up Tumblr immediately and sifts through her newsfeed.
>It’s almost like an addiction, watching all of these posts appear on her screen one by one just to see if they’re anything else she can get mad at. There’s really no valid reason for Trixie to do it that way, as she’d rather stay in her own little world where she is the one at the top of the game.
>Where that first place trophy sits atop her palm.
>But she looks for the work by others that get more praise than her. She’s not exactly sure what part of her possesses her to do this. Perhaps it an urge screaming at her to take in what the more successful works of art — drawn or written — look like. And what the difference is between them and the things Trixie has made.
>But the problem is, Trixie already understand this difference, and she sees it over and over again as the images pop up in front of her.
>That shading… the line work, proportions, everything about it screams one thing: practice.
>Practice practice practice.
>And each time the word rings inside of Trixie’s head, the more upset she feels in her heart. Practicing is… that one thing that Trixie is vehemently not willing to do. And the girl isn’t even sure whether or not it’s her fault that this is the case.
>After finishing up her internet browsing for part one of the afternoon, Trixie turns to her backpack and pulls out her homework. The grim reminder of what it was that gave her the negative mindset towards practicing.
>School feels like a prison, almost. At least to someone like Trixie, who doesn’t really know what it’s like to live a life of physical torture or anything like that. And while that part isn’t really something she needs to consider given that everything is relative, the main issue that stems from this still remains.
>Trixie has developed a deep disdain towards learning.
>School had made learning a chore for the girl, giving her a schedule and obligations to complete dull but still difficult assignments in order to not “fall behind” everyone else. Trixie never chose to do any of this, and while she’s grateful for at least learning how to read and write along with basic things, all of these complicated math and science classes are becoming so painfully undesirable. And the fact that they’re mandatory only make the feeling towards it worse.
>Trixie wishes that there was a better way to live out her younger years, but the system itself already has how she spends her time planned out, apparently.
>And it sure as hell isn’t fun.
>To be honest, Trixie wants to become a magician when she grows up, or at least an illusionist. Along with being a poet, novelist and artist. It quite a stretch in terms of hopes and dreams, but after beginning to see all of her peers slowly let go of their childhood dreams, Trixie refused to change with them.
>A seed of fear for her own future was planted into Trixie’s heart whenever she heard about career choices and what OTHER people wanted her to do when she grew up, and how different those things were than what she wanted.
>And their excuse: “Too bad. It’s just the way life works. Get used to it.”
>That’s it. No reasonable explanation, no more of that “follow your dreams” bullshit they drowned her in when she was in elementary school. None of it.
>Now, it’s nothing more than a hideous message along the lines of “This is the list of dreams you’re allowed to reasonably have and nothing more. Follow one of them through working your youth away in college or you’ll end up poor and frowned upon by society. We won’t tell you this directly so you can’t call it out, but we’ll surely imply the living hell out of it.”
>Isn’t career day a load of bullshit?
>It’s the coalescence of all this angst that drove Trixie to grow such a deep despise towards learning. Too many connections between the idea of learning and the system she went through were made. It was eventually engraved into her mindset. Trixie would be a fool to assume that the resistance to practice wasn’t all in her head.
>It very well may be, as everyone does have their own opinions and ways of viewing things. So there’s no way any of this can be true, right?
>Of course, with Trixie being the type of girl to browse Tumblr most of the day, her world views are enriched in the eyes of some and bastardized in the eyes of others.
>Before she types another message in to the posting field, Trixie notices a new message in her inbox. The accompanying picture is something she immediately recognizes.
>It’s always right net to the work Trixie wishes had come from her mind instead of someone else.
>[Hey.] Twilight’s message reads only one word.