It's Kind of a Funny Story

by Ned Vizzini

“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’s what you needed to get), which meant I wasn’t going to get into a Good College, which meant I wasn’t going to have a Good Job, which meant I wasn’t going to have health insurance, which meant I’d have to pay tremendous amounts of money for the shrinks and drugs my brain needed, which meant I wasn’t going to have enough money to pay for a Good Lifestyle, which meant I’d feel ashamed, which meant I’d get depressed, and that was the big one because I knew what that did to me: it made it so I

wouldn’t get out of bed, which led to the ultimate thing—homelessness. If you can’t get out of bed for long enough, people come and take your bed away.

“There are a lot of Tentacles,” I admit. “But I should be able to handle them. The problem is that I’m so lazy.” “How are you lazy, Craig?” “I waste at least an hour every day lying in bed. Then I waste time pacing. I waste time thinking. I waste time being quiet and not saying anything because I’m afraid I’ll stutter.” “Do you have a problem with stuttering?” “When I’m depressed, it won’t come out right. I’ll trail off in midsentence.”

But most of all I feel my brain, up there taking in blood and looking out on the world and noticing humor and light and smells and dogs and every other thing in the world—everything in my life is all in my brain, really, so it would be natural that when my brain was screwed up, everything in my life would be.