Headmaster Brockert
September 07, 2016 1:32 PM
Fifth and Sixth Years by Headmaster Brockert
It was that time again when fifth and sixth year students would be picking who among their classmates would become Head Boy and Head Girl. Mortimer had always had doubts about this tradition, leaving it all in the hands of teenagers who didn't necessarily pick who was best for the job, though he was willing to grant that they did know their classmates better than he did.Doing so reduced this honor, one with a set of responsibilities, to nothing more than a popularity contest. Being popular had nothing to do with being capable. Often the most popular kids were the loudest kids, those who liked nothing better than to hear themselves speak while a quieter, more responsible student sat by ignored. It had been nothing more than a total shock to Mortimer at the beginning of this year when Serena Brockert who was the latter had won out over Liliana Bannister whom was the former. Or so he assumed based on their houses and quick perusals of the yearbook over the years.
Or people were popular because of their prowess in Quidditch. Never mind that athletic ability had nothing to do with whether or not you were a likable person or more relevantly qualities that made one a good head student.
At least though, who made the ballot was filtered through the staff before it reached the students. Not that Mortimer always agreed with the choices they made either. Plus, if there were only two people of a particular gender, both had to go on the ballot regardless of whether or not they deserved to. They couldn't just give it to someone. (Unless of course there was only one person of a particular gender. Or only one person in a house for prefect)
The fifth and sixth years filed in and Mortimer politely greeted them once they had assembled. "You are hear to vote for next year's Head Student. Please pick whom you would do the best job."
OOC-Ballot is available here- http://sonora.terragenaonline.net/Code/vote.php Voting is in character and if you have more than one character, you vote per character. Votes can remain as anonymous as you would like them to be and you do not have to reply to this message even though you may if you'd like to. You have until the day before the new term starts to get your votes in.
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Headmaster Brockert
Fifth and Sixth Years
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John Umland
September 07, 2016 9:41 PM
...This is far more difficult than I anticipated. by John Umland
There was a ballot on the table in front of him, but John wasn’t looking at it. His eyes were fixed on his pen, which he was turning in his hand, over and over and over again, until he blinked suddenly and glanced at his watch, hoping he had not been staring at the pen without seeing it for very long. His eyes drifted around the room, fuzzy and a touch confused, then back to the ballot. Oh, yes. That. He’d forgotten about it for a few seconds, but it was why he was inexplicably at the table without any tea.He wanted some more tea. He wanted more tea far more than he wanted to complete the ballot, and not at all due to his distaste for anything that even vaguely resembled a worksheet.
The first section had been easy. John had checked his best friend’s name without a moment’s hesitation. None of the other guys had ever done anything to him, Layne and Manger seemed decent enough, but there were exactly two people in this entire building John really, completely trusted to carry a bucket of water over carpet, much less to wield power in a way that might directly affect John. Choosing someone he’d trust with anything short of his Arrangement with Joanie was a no-brainer. The harder part was the next section.
Chaslyn Brockert. Lena Westley.
He knew he couldn’t really, in good conscience, vote for Chaslyn. He didn’t know her that well or anything, but he saw her around, had found her caffeine habit (girl seemed to throw back more coffee than he did tea. He had not known it was possible to do this and still have functioning kidneys) striking enough to notice her more often than he did some people, and had concluded she was the kind of person who gave the kind of education that suited him a bad reputation, the kind of person who didn’t really have the temperament to thrive under intense pressure but who was either being pushed or just kept pushing herself toward a nervous breakdown. Adding more to her plate would be both irresponsible and unkind, and while John knew he was occasionally both, he did try not to be when he thought about it first. Simple tribalism also pointed him toward Lena over Chaslyn – she was one of his own kind. They had something in common, some common traits or values, or she wouldn’t have been an Aladren at all. There was only one problem, though, and that was her relationship with his choice for Head Boy.
Lena was the choice who seemed…well, not already under huge amounts of pressure when they were about due for a crisis (it had been, what, two years since the last disaster? What if all the adults vanished again next fall?) at the very least, and since she was Clark's girl, she was less likely to claim pureblood superiority and demand to be allowed to make all the decisions, but suspecting that Clark already prioritized ‘make courtship displays for Lena’ right up there with ‘do science with John’ made it hard to check that box, it really did. If she was Head Girl, she’d have to spend even more time off somewhere with Clark, and John had read about how reproductive urges were. Books made it seem like humans completely lost their right minds when they were around people they lusted after, and it was supposed to be ten times worse for young adults than for everyone else. There was a chance, however small - he respected Clark too much to want to think it of him - that if they were thrown together even more, Clark would gradually lose interest in everything but her, or else begin to think that John was pathetic or a weirdo or even that there was something wrong with him because he didn't have a girlfriend of his own, and then John would have no-one but Joe and the laundry goblins and any gnomes he could find an excuse to experiment on to talk to, and none of them had a clue what he was talking about most of the time. Joe smiled and nodded, Obie moaned and griped about John Umland being a bad boy, the other prairie elves in the common room asked Mr. John to let them get on with their work and suggested that he go get a good night's sleep, and the gnomes usually didn’t say much at all, though their slurring could sound an awful lot like demands for freedom or curse words aimed at his person. None of them would make much of a substitute for the one real friend he had who he didn’t have to either lie to or spend hours ciphering to communicate with, but in novels for people his age he'd read, it seemed people always became obsessed, at least for a good long while, with the significant other over all else and had contempt for people without dates, even characters who were supposed to be intelligent pupils at prestigious schools.
What I want is not relevant. It might just not be relevant at all, none of it, too. We've shared okay so far, even with this ridiculous Ball in the works. And I know my thinking hasn't been clear since Donovan moved in - I could be completely off-base. And maybe if he spends more time with her, he'll get bored with her instead of obsessed with her - they say it never lasts at our age. But....
A lot of other people were moving. He had to mark something. He turned his pen the right way in his hand and lowered it to the paper.
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John Umland
...This is far more difficult than I anticipated.
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