Clothing, School Uniforms, and Zombie Survival

What do you normally wear for school? If your school is one of those archaic throwbacks which insists on some sort of school uniform, then you might conceivably have problems. The first problem is obviously that when clothing is fixed you do not have much leeway in adopting a more zombie resistant wardrobe (for those readers with a less than normally flexible mental lexicon, ‘wardrobe’ in this case does not mean a big wooden thing that you hide in, or even something you use as a mysterious gateway to a zombie-free fantasy land with decidedly implausible talking lions, but is in fact referring to your collection of clothing). This lack of leeway, of course, is something we can work around. Unfortunately school uniforms are much more serious than that – they are actually an indication of a greater, much more sinister problem than the simple practical matter of what to wear. You see, school uniforms are in fact the outward manifestation/evidence of a gharstely* international conspiracy of breathtaking, stunning, and in all ways mind-boggling proportions, a conspiracy designed to dehumanise and oppress all people of pre-age-of-majority status! But more of that later.

If your school does not have a fixed uniform it still probably has guidelines or regulations for what kind of clothing is acceptable in your particular institution. Try not to think of these regulations as the manifestation of a casually autocratic and contemptuous disregard for human rights (the right to self expression through personal attire), instead, think of it as the benevolent intervention of people who know better than you do, who altruistically decide what is good for you, and who have spent a lot of their very valuable time working out a dress code which simultaneously enriches your daily life experiences and reduces the insidious moral and physical dangers of inappropriate clothes or, of less-than-sensible footwear.

In one sense, the school dress code probably works somewhat in your favour. For example, the one thing that almost every dress code consistently agrees upon is a disapproval of things like flip-flops, high heels, or serious body piercing. As you already know, flip-flops and high heels are notoriously bad for running away in (and let’s face it, running away is a basic part of survival in the average zombie pandemic situation). Also, as you will probably prefer not to imagine, having chains and rings and other excitingly rebellious indications of affiliation to some sort of anti-authoritarian sub-culture attached directly to a variety of soft and sensitive parts of your physiology (I’m particularly thinking ears, lips, noses and navels, but please don’t allow me limit your self-expressive creativity in any way) can also be unpleasant, if not actually fatal should they get caught in something (such as a zombie fingertip) and you have the misfortune to pause for that crucial split-second before deciding that a ripped up ear lobe is a far better thing than a ripped out liver. So, all in all, the dull practicality of school dress codes does, to a certain extent, tend towards the more justifiable practicality of the zombie survival wardrobe (the clothing, not the closet).

But, and here comes the cruncher, practical though it may be in some ways, a school dress code does extraordinarily little to protect you from the delicate attentions of the ambulant dead, (after all, it is not selected on any kind of protective criteria at all, just that rather airy-fairy, mamby-pamby, ephemeral concept of ‘sensible’), and has the added but major downer of being terminally uncool (which is, as far as I can see is an evil which, whenever easily avoidable, is worth easily avoiding).

So, what are the options?

If your school has a dress code, should you:

  1. A) ignore it completely,
  2. B) pay lip-service to the general form of the code but still dress to survive, or
  3. C) follow the code to the letter?

If your answer is ‘C’, you are without a doubt a rule bound blindly conformist idiot destined either to join the ranks of the groaning dead or at the very least, to provide them with a handy source of their most basic dietary/nutritional requirements. (There, that was fun, wasn’t it? Answer ‘C’ doubled as a simple personality check as well as useful zombie survival information!)

What if your answer is ‘A’? Well done! In making this choice you will have significantly raised your overall levels of physical safety. Unfortunately you are also likely to get into a teensy weensy bit of trouble for those irritating periods when there is not yet an actual on-going zombie apocalypse. Now, you may say, yeah, but who cares if the teachers are a little peeved just now, I am fully prepared for Z day, and when the day comes they can be peeved on the other side of their idiotic little, small minded, wilfully stupid, ugly little faces! Nice attitude. It shows a strength of mind that is both admirable, brave, and refreshingly impervious to the normal everyday pressures of social conformity. Of course, until the actual day doescome you will probably find you have a little trouble attracting anyone to be your significant other, you will be teased and ridiculed by your classmates (I know, they’ll understand their mistake on the day of rising, but I’m talking now, not later), you will have a notably unconventional but depressingly limited group of close friends, oh, and you also run the risk of embarrassing interviews with the school councillor/psychiatrist/general dogsbody, and may even, in the most exciting cases, be invited to attend a slightly different kind of institution (for comments on the relative merits and demerits of treatment centres for the cognitively impaired, see the section on ………p ). The point of all this discussion being (apart from another handy little do-it-yourself personality check) that the advent of a zombie apocalypse is not predictable with an exceptionally fine temporal exactitude – or, in other words, you don’t actually know when it’s going to kick in. Could be today, could be tomorrow, but it could, shockingly, not happen for quite a long time. (Think of all those people in Pompeii predicting the end of civilisation as we know it! OK, maybe that was not such a good example, but, think of people predicting something terrible that embarrassingly keeps on just not happening. Because that’s what you will look like to other people). So, all things considered, I’d recommend option ‘B’ (though, as I said earlier, feel free to exercise your inalienable, but unfortunately, alienating, right to freedom of personal expression).

Sorry, I just dang forgot to explain why option ‘B’ was such a darn good idea! What a dummy! Well, here goes . . . Because you can dramatically improve your physical safely levels without looking a twat, without building up unnecessary levels of teacher antagonism, without ever seeing the inside of either a loony bin or a whacko-wagon, and you can live your life without the soul crushing embarrassment of being a pathetic, rule-bound, intimidated crawler, and, amazingly, you significantly reduce the risk of alienating all future significant others (though this last part is not in any way a guaranteed result). As far as I can tell, all these check out in the plus column, so, duuh.

So, we go for option ‘B’, lip-service to the rules and as much safely as we can pile inside that rather flexible set of parameters that are called a ‘dress code’ (note that ‘dress’ in this context does not mean a specific and gender-biased clothing choice, but actually, against all the odds, means ‘what you wear’, even if you don’t).

Here are a few questions to set the scene:

 

* ‘gharstely’ is not a spelling mistake, it is a literary reference, so put that in yer pipe and smoke it!