A Tale of Two Instructional Narrators

Overly Cheerful Instructional

Yay! Did you hear that? It’s time for lunch!!! Race your buddy to the lunchroom. Oh no, he beat you! Ha ha. Boy oh boy, what a great day today! What’s for lunch? Tater tot hot dish? Sweet! You love tater tot hot dish!
Okay. Now you should sit over there, with all the cool kids. They are so cool they don’t even drink their milk, and leave it on the table unopened, like some sort of super cool protest or something. You should sit next to Jenny, she’s as cool as you are, and look at those cute purple berets! What a doll! Now, drink your milk real fast, to show everybody you’re cool, too, but in a different, milk chugging sort of way. Look, don’t they seem, like, totally impressed? Now drink Jenny’s milk, just to show them it wasn’t an accident.
She smiled at you! Fabulous! Drink a third milk, that will really impress her. Wow, you can really slug those back! Everybody’s watching you now. You should tell everyone you’ll drink as many milks as possible, just to make sure you’ve cemented their approval. No pain, no gain, right?
Look! Now they’re going all over the lunchroom, collecting unopened milks for you to chug. You’ve really impressed them now. Today is going to go down in lunchroom history. You’re going to be a god, I tell you. A god among badly dehydrated mortals!
Chug!
Chug!
Chug!
You are totally awesome!

Morbidly Nihilistic Instructional

It doesn’t really matter, but you will go to lunch. You will be in third grade, and you’ll still have no idea that an endless, grueling march towards your own oblivion awaits you in the future. Tater tot hot dish and the limited gastronomical rewards such hollow, lunchroom fare provides will be about as far as your thoughts are capable of reaching. This is just as well, because if you actually saw beyond the material bounds of your present situation you’d most likely run out of the lunchroom, screaming with rage and loneliness, and scamper into heavy traffic.
After you get your “food” you will sit at a table with your “friends”, people who would actually turn on you if you had so much as a stream of snot running from your nose (such is the transitory nature of human friendships). Do you see the girl named Jenny, sitting next to you with the cheap, gaudy purple berets in her hair? In about twenty years she will be a fourth rate hooker working for a fifth rate pimp, and she will eventually be found in a dumpster behind a children’s toy store.
Anyhow, you do not yet know this, and you will begin to drink milk as if it could somehow fill the cavernous void in your third grade soul. You will drink milk after milk, like some sort of industrial wet vac, until the whole lunchroom is chanting for you, is cheering every drop of cow juice that slips between your lips. You will grow full and bloated with all this consumption, yet deep in your heart you will still feel nothing, their approval as meaningless as the dead bird you saw on the sidewalk on your way to school this morning, the one with ants and worms crawling over its carcass, never to fly again.
Yes, you will go to lunch, and in many ways, lunch will eat you.