HARTFORD, CT—Addressing a group of juniors assembled in the Calhoun High School student parking lot, area 16-year-old Kelly Jensen announced Monday that she hates her life, mom and hair “big-time.”
“My mom never lets me do anything. Life sucks,” said Jensen, leaning against the hood of her 1995 Volkswagen Jetta. “And my hair is so flat.”
According to inside Jensen sources, the teen first reported hating life in March 1993, when her mother refused to allow her to wear makeup to a school basketball game. Since then, she has repeatedly said that her life will be “complete shit” until she finally moves out of the house for good. She has also frequently expressed a desire to be 18.
“Kelly appears to have a high level of anxiety and frustration, which typically stem from an inability to cope with home and school environments that totally suck,” said noted therapist and child psychology expert Dr. Eli Wasserbaum.
Compounding her problems, Jensen suffers from a severe lack of privacy, sharing her home environment with younger brother Jeremy, a little dweeb, and parents Kenneth and Terri Jensen, who are on her back about every little thing constantly.
“No one ever leaves me alone, ever. God!” a teary-eyed Jensen said Tuesday, running upstairs to her bedroom. Minutes later, the sound of Stabbing Westward’s Wither, Blister, Burn + Peel could be heard reverberating through the floor from the 16-disc CD changer in her bedroom.
“Often, people are simply unable to cope with the mental pressures that come with the loss of free will associated with an heavily monitored living situation,” said Grant DeVries, a behavioral sociologist with the Connecticut Department of Corrections. “Kelly has expressed many times that living at home is totally like jail.”
Jensen’s hatred of her parents reached an all-time high last weekend, when she was forced to miss the 1997 MTV Video Music Awards to travel all the way to Aunt Jodie’s house in Providence, RI, for a family gathering. Jensen spent the entire two-hour car ride in silence, save for a single declaration of, “I’m sweating,” spoken through clenched teeth.
Jensen’s parents have attempted to address her various dislikes, which reportedly include church, her lame bicycle, 11 p.m. curfew, the family’s inadequate basic cable package, and all fish-based foods except for breaded fish sticks. Among Jensen’s parents’ conciliatory efforts was a promise to install a second phone line in her bedroom if she is able to maintain a C average in algebra, an offer she rejected as “total blackmail.”
In addition to an unsatisfactory home environment, Jensen faces extreme boredom at school. Guidance counselor Janet Lancy is confident the problem can be resolved. “Once Kelly finds an academic subject she enjoys, she will start to adopt a much more positive outlook,” Lancy said. “Now we just need to come up with a subject for Kelly other than math and science, which are totally pointless and a waste; English and social studies, which are gay; computer science, which is for weirdos; and home ec which is so 1964.”
Despite Lancy’s confidence, many question whether there is an easy solution to the teen’s boredom. “Kelly is a complex, deeply conflicted person,” said Calhoun High bus driver Hal O’Connor, who drove Jensen to school all of last year. “She would often say how she hated winter, but also expressed a dislike of the bright sun. She said her new Patagonia pullover was annoying to put on, but also said she couldn’t stand jackets that zip up all retarded. We’re talking about an extremely complicated individual here.”
For now, Jensen’s only means of coping with her “huge nightmare of a life” are the daily phone conversations she has with her best friend, Erica King. With King she is able to freely discuss her hatred of her way-big size-eight feet, Crossgates Mall’s annoying security guards, the family dog Shorty who hates her, geeks who ruin the curve, black-and-white movies, sharing a locker with one of the Dominic twins, mowing the lawn, and the swimming unit in gym class, which is “so gay” that Jensen “cannot even handle it.”
In a failed attempt to hearten Jensen, King pointed out that at least her parents “let her use the beach house whenever she wants.” Jensen sardonically replied, “Big whooptie,” and held her middle finger up to the phone.
