By: Elizabeth Klein

Everyone who has a class with Mr. Schweickert knows that there’s something special about being in his classroom.  The room itself offers a sort of feeling—an environment—that exists nowhere else in school.  Is it his forward-thinking teaching style?  No.  Is it the many quotes lining the green brick wall in the back?  Wrong again.  Is it his disturbingly tasteful NSYNC playlist?  No, it’s definitely not that.

It’s Sandy.

You might be asking yourself, who is Sandy?

This is Sandy:

She’s a fun-loving girl who enjoys turquoise dresses and playing with her cat, Mumbles.  Her favorite flowers are fake; she’s never without her trusty, tacky feather duster; and she thinks her eyes are her best feature.

She’s also the keeper of time, harbinger of death, and master of the universe.  Never has anyone better exemplified the term renaissance woman.  Where did she come from?

For starters, we live in a multiverse.  That means that, in addition to this universe, there exists an infinite number of others that comprise the possibilities of every alternate reality.  In other words, there are universes out there where you didn’t accidentally liked a picture 183 weeks into your crush’s Instagram account or call your teacher “mom” that one time.  To guard and maintain these universes, the “Sandy model” is put into place.  There is a Sandy for every universe, meaning that there are an infinite amount of wide-eyed, menacing looking dolls with disfigured cats out there in the multiverse.  What a comforting thought!  So why does she have to be that terrifying, porcelain monstrosity in charge of the universe?  Well, it didn’t have to be Sandy in particular.  It had to be something, but not necessarily her.  What most likely happened is that when the Big Bang took place, the multiverse rejected keeping her on the inside on account of her severe ugliness.  So she exists outside of each universe, peering over the shoulder of all creation like a toddler watching you play Piano Tiles on your phone.  The Sandy that we see in Newspaper is not the true Sandy.  Ours is just a set of eyes—a way for the real Sandy to look in on certain sections of the universe.  There are a relatively small number of Sandy spies in our universe, but some exist on Earth.  They radiate a particular feeling—one that makes Mr. Schweickert’s class so unique.  It’s one of knowledge mingled with power; a small portion of the extensive wisdom that Sandy herself possesses.  But it’s not just Sandy who has this power…

There are three main components of the Sandy model: the girl, the cat, the clock.  Sandy herself is the most important part of the trio.  She acts as the gatekeeper of the universe, making her the overlord of death.  When a person dies, it’s really just Sandy redirecting them.  If there’s a perfect universe somewhere, she might send you there.  If there’s an evil one, you might end up there, too.  She might even use the sinew of your soul as string for Mumbles to play with.  It really just depends.

Sandy is also entrusted with another important task: she holds the universe in her bonnet.  Everything that has ever happened in this universe has done so within the confines of Sandy’s head.  That means a couple things for science.  The most important is the denouncement of that whole “the universe is flat” theory.  It’s actually a giant, lumpy bonnet.  Additionally, Sandy is in charge of maintaining time.  This leads into the “clock” part of the model.  That giant grandfather clock which is so fascinating to Sandy and Mumbles holds great significance over the structure of the universe.  But unlike the one hanging on the wall of your fourth period classroom, you don’t really want to watch this clock.  When it strikes 12, all life within the universe will perish and be left as a clean slate without any inhabitants.  The clock has never reached 12 in this universe, but upon the completion of every hour, a great extinction of life takes place.  It happened with the dinosaurs, and it will happen again with us.  It might happen at 12, it might happen before.  Either way, we’ll all die.

The clock has a very particular meaning to Mumbles.  Humanity is the crown jewel of life in this universe.  Whether or not there are beings on other planets is irrelevant; we’ve proven ourselves the most dynamic life form so far.  Mumbles sprang into existence after we came to be.  He represents ourselves.  If you look closely at his picture in the Sandy spy model, you’ll notice that an arm sticks straight out of the place where his left eye should be.  This connection between arm and mind is emblematic of humanity’s connection between the inner mind and outer mind; our natural insatiability for wisdom.  Humans are naturally curious creatures; we explain the inexplicable, we quantify the unquantifiable, we answer the unanswerable.  We connect our minds to our bodies in our search for enlightenment, which is exemplified by Mumbles’s role as the physical representation of an out-of-body experience.  Many people, after waking up from a coma or feeling as if their souls left their body, claim to have seen a strange light.  This light is Mumbles; more specifically, it’s his remaining eye.  When our minds and bodies become linked in situations such as those, Mumbles is always involved.

But Mumbles’s arm is important in another way.  The direction of this outstretched arm describes much about humanity as a whole.  This clock, as you recall, is a timebomb counting down the termination of all humankind.  So why is Mumbles, the symbol of ourselves, reaching for it?  The answer is simple: we want to die.  Humanity has a tendency to self-destruct that has plagued us since our beginnings.  Our history, our daily lives, are riddled with examples of our self-imposed ruination.  We drink.  We smoke.  We do drugs.  We hurt each other, we shoot each other, we start war with each other, we hate each other, we hate ourselves.  Our souls silently yearn for death.  Just as Mumbles desperately grabs at that clock, we desperately wish for our demise.  One day, when the clock rings with the news of our extinction, we will attain what we desire most.  We want enlightenment, we want answers, we want death.  Mumbles shows us that.

So how do I, a mere mortal, know so much about Sandy?  Well, the only way someone can know about the Sandy model is through true enlightenment.  No human in the entirety of history expressed any knowledge of Sandy’s existence, meaning no human ever found this enlightenment.  Not Buddha, not Jesus, not RuPaul.  But I did.  And I reached enlightenment the only way there is: through Schweicon.  When, last year, I won enough “Articles of the Week” to ascend to this planet, my peers laughed.  They joked about the supposed knowledge I would obtain—about how achieving nirvana would change me.  But they didn’t know what I knew.  They didn’t know about Sandy.  They didn’t know the answers to life’s most unanswerable questions as I did, and I now know them as well as I know my own name.  In becoming enlightened, I passed through the confines of the bonnet to meet our keeper.  I now possess a direct link to our great turquoise overlord.  So, fellow classmates of Newspaper, think twice before using two hyphens in place of an em dash or forgetting the difference between “effect” and “affect.”  I can smite you.