The Plastics

Yearning Reader-

I am doing fine. I know you were worrying that I'd been overtaken and eaten alive by the 5 year olds or that I'd accidentally wandered into the DMZ, as I am apt to drift gently into generally hazardous areas of this, our wide world. These are not the cases...

Wait. These are not the case? This is not the cases? This is not a case? I cannot fit into that case? This case is too small. This case is not tall...

I am now absolutely certain that, by the end of this year, I will no longer be able to speak English with careless abandon like in the olden days of my reckless, nonstop verbal diarrhea. No, petrified reader. I am sure that I will have no choice but to carefully select each and every phrase so that I don't end up spewing word salad. And for those who don't know what word salad is, it's the one salad you probably won't find at a major Mormon function.


THIS IS NOT WORD SALAD
(Come to think of it, what the hell is this?)

Okay, now down to what this post is actually about [shockingly, it is not about salad].

For a reference of who The Plastics are, please review the image below at your gentle leisure.



The above group of four girls appear in the film "Mean Girls". There, as you can see, are four girls. One of them is actually an infiltrator who conspires to bring the REAL Plastics down but becomes one of them along the way (kind of). The infiltrator, Kady, is actually quite a nice girl but becomes nasty as she starts to hang around with The Plastics more and more.

Now for the real life Plastics. It took me two weeks of teaching these girls before I understood just what was going on. There are four girls in the class. To protect the names of the actual girls, I will be using the names of the corelating characters from the film.

Regina -



Regina is the ring leader of the group. With a few well-chosen glances and muttered (I'm assuming) profanity, she can cut down a girl in the group and turn friend to enemy in seconds. In school terms, she's a frienemy: a person who pretends to be your best friend but who, in all actuality hates you just as much as you hate them. You just stay close so that you don't turn on each other because, hey, peace is like, a lot easier than having to wage an all-out social battle. She's cunning and smart, which makes calling her on the carpet extremely difficult.

The other problem is that she works her evils in Korean and behind my back. I can turn to the whiteboard, blissfully expounding on the benefits, nay the necessity, of actually putting an "ts" sound at the end of the word "pants", and when I turn back around, one of the girls will be in tears and Regina will look me straight in the eye and pronounce pants with a proper "ts".

Evil. Genius.

Evil genius.


Gretchen-



So Gretchen is just mean, really. She's very sweet when she's getting her way but you had better not cross her or...well...let's just say that Regina isn't the only one who can cause tears. She's a prodigy, speaking of tears, at fake crying and can really work herself up into a dither over someone touching her eraser.

Oh, by the way, if you come to Korea, don't touch other people's things. Seriously. Not even an eraser. 'Cause they may cry and then their evil best friend will come over and dry their tears while comforting them in a language you don't understand, saying things that probably mean "don't worry about that Humpty-Dumpty-lookin' palooka, I'll make sure he never touches your eraser with his pudgy, pasty, American sausage fingers again, see?". It's just a wild guess, but I'm sure that it's eerily accurate, even down to the 'Jersey accent.

PS Does the word "eerily" look really strange to you?

Karen-



Okay so Karen is actually a sweet girl and has been victimized by Regina and Gretchen in the past but does gang up against the fourth girl. She obviously sides with Regina and Gretchen so that they won't pick on her. And, get this, she brings them snacks. Snacks. Just for Gretchen and Regina. The two of them sit there eating the stuff like they invented gold and smugness all in one fell swoop. It makes me want to pull their hair out.

But I don't.

No, really. I don't.


Stop looking at me like that!


Kady-



Okay, well Kady is really sweet. She's a nice girl who spends the majority of her time trying to make the rest of The Plastics laugh, which disrupts class. I guess I'm getting my comeuppance. For years I spent class time making people laugh so they didn't kick my tubby action down a grassy knoll, or worse, a well-chosen stairwell. Usually, like Regina, if the teacher called on me whilst causing a mirth or a merriment, I could come up with the answer he or she was looking for while I was shimmying or doing a Carol Channing impersonation. Sadly, Kady does not have this ability (apparently, Carol impersonations don't translate very well). She is really not a bad student but she is so insecure about her own knowledge that she will actually change a correct answer if The Plastics whisper an incorrect answer in her ear. Intentionally. Which they do. All the time.

Ah, Kady. I wonder how she'd do in a normal class. Probably very well. I have seen her team up with the other Plastics against Karen from time to time, but only during really bad fights.

I see these girls every day.

They are 7 and 8 but I'm already having Middle School flashbacks.

They do EVERYTHING earlier over here.

Strangely enough, the one thing they don't do earlier over here is bedtime, which is sometime after 10 for these kids. This probably prepares them for a life filled with late meetings and even later drinking, riding the subway, puking on the stairs, wobbling into the elevator, tripping over their own stoop on the way into their apartment and knocking themselves unconscious until 5 am, which is most likely an hour late for their first meeting.

Yum.