It's Kind of a Funny Story

by Ned Vizzini

mentioned this before.” “Yeah. It’s simple.” “You like simple.” “Doesn’t everybody?” “Some people thrive on complexity, Craig.” “Well, not me. As I was walking over here, I was thinking…I have this fantasy of being a bike messenger.” “Ah.” “It would be so simple, and direct, and I would get paid for it. It would be an Anchor.” “What about school, Craig? You have school for an Anchor.” “School is too all over the place. It spirals out into a million different things.” “Your Tentacles.” I have to hand it to her; Dr. Minerva picked up on my lingo pretty quickly. Tentacles is my term—the Tentacles are the evil tasks that invade my life. Like, for example, my American History class last week, which necessitated me writing a paper on the weapons of the Revolutionary War, which necessitated me traveling to the Metropolitan Museum to check out some of the old guns, which necessitated me getting in the subway, which necessitated me being away from my cell phone and e-mail for 45 minutes, which meant that I didn’t get to respond to a mass mail sent out by my teacher asking who needed extra credit, which meant other kids snapped up the extra credit, which meant I wasn’t going to get a 98 in the class, which meant I wasn’t anywhere close to a 98.6 average (body temperature, that