The Principal’s Office

Three weeks into kindergarten, I found myself sitting in the principal’s office.  Early that day, I had found myself on the bus.  A friend, a Korean kid struggling to speak English, and the French-Canadian kid who lived down the street were also on the bus with me. ( Feel free to set up your own “…walk into a bar” joke here.)  For some reason, it was mutually agreed to be a good idea to make a giant, collective, puddle of spit in the aisle.  So, for the 10-15 minute bus ride, the four of us spit, and spit, and spit, at a focal point on the floor.  Every so often the French-Canadian and the Korean took turns dancing in it spontaneously, as if making a puddle of spit wasn’t a sufficiently ridiculous thing to do on the bus already.  No, imaginary tap and clog dancing lessons had to be put to good use as well.  As we pulled up to the school, the bus driver stood up immediately and growled, “Who did this?”  I, content to pretend nothing happened sat still.  That is, until my friend succumbed to the prisoner’s dilemma and pointed to me.  At which time I pointed right back at him, and eventually the four of us were pointing at each other.  Later on in the morning, we were called down to the principal’s office.  In a great injustice, the Korean kid’s inability to quite comprehend English left him crying in the classroom, excused from further reprimand.  Fortunately, when the principal asked if we wanted our parents (read: mothers) to be called we replied “no” and somehow he let our judgment stand.  Who knew it was that easy?

In third grade I was buying lunch from the school cafeteria.  My friend and I were walking through the line and when we got to the choice of fruit/vegetable options, I pointed out that all of the apple turnovers (think more along the lines of McDonalds’ apple pies and less something you’d eat) had finger indentations in them and who would want to buy something that had clearly had someone’s finger in it?  While I was pointing (literally) this out and laughing at it, the cashier noticed and demanded we pay for all of them, assuming we had done it.  After arguing and taking our names down, we were eventually called down to the principal’s office where we explained what happened.  A meeting of the entire third grade was called to discuss the issue and see if anyone would confess, which nobody did.  Many  years later, I noticed that when cafeteria workers put out food in those plastic bowls they put their fingers underneath and their thumb over top, resting on the food.  This frequently results in finger indentations in softer foods.  And they tried to blame children!

In 8th grade I was, along with a group of friends, corralled into the assistant principal’s office (which in middle school is essentially the principal, he was in charge of our grade).  Having just come from lunch and with free time before class, the time had apparently seemed good for singing in the halls.  Apparently this can be disruptive.  Once in the closet of an office, we were given a lengthy speech about how we would never succeed, no good hoodlums that we were.  “Do you know there are kids here that are on the honor roll?  There are kids taking honors classes and enrolled in Algebra or even Algebra II as early as 8th grade.  There are kids getting good grades and who will go to college and get good jobs.  You are wasting your time when you should be looking to your future, but it is absolutely unacceptable for you to be going about disturbing people who are actually doing well and trying to make the most out of their education!”  Throughout this speech, muffled snickering was accompanied by frequent glances in my direction.  As it turns out, I was on the honor roll, I was taking Algebra a year early in 8th grade, I was getting good grades, and I went to a prestigious college.  It was a good thing I sat through that lecture otherwise my life may have never been retrospectively put on track.

Girls Crying

I was thinking back on times when I’ve been involved in some fashion in people crying recently, focusing on elementary school.  What got me started thinking about it was reading about Chincoteague Island in the paper recently.  When I was in second grade or so a classmate of mine gave a presentation on the island, having just visited it on vacation.  Most of us were unfamiliar with the island, despite it’s proximity relatively speaking, and the teacher wrote it on the board for us.  We read it off the board in our heads before my classmate began her speech.  The various pronunciations expected by myself and the two others at my table did not include what my classmate proceeded to say.  After listening to her say “Chinkatink” several times our muffled giggles became increasingly less muffled.  Commence crying.  Now when I read about it all these years later, I thought, being the big man I am, that maybe it had a pronunciation that was strange and I/we had made her cry out of our own ignorance.  This troubled me, so I looked it up.  Turns out the correct pronunciation is either “shing-kuh-teeg” or, alternatively, “ching-kuh-teeg” and she had, indeed, pronounced it incorrectly and humorously.  I don’t feel as bad anymore.

While studying the American Revolution, also in elementary school, maybe around fourth grade, we had a reenactor of sorts come in and talk about life back in the day.  Part of this was the showcasing of various items that a man of the times would have had.  Among these items were various animal skins.  As he was talking about trapping and killing animals for their fur, one of my classmates conveyed that she was sympathetic towards animals and uttered something akin to “That’s awful!”  Several people took note and when the skins were passed around she was repeatedly reminded about how the animals were dead and skinned and then the skins were thrown at her.  Commence crying.

Oddly enough, I can recall an entirely separate instance of making the same girl cry.  “Oddly” because I don’t recall bearing her any malice, really these were just circumstantial cruelties, acts of opportunistic bastards.  Anyways, one of my male classmates brought in a whoopee cushion and was showing it off.  She happened to sit in the middle of a circle of guys and was not at her seat.  Whoopee cushion placed on her seat, she started to come back and we all began encouraging her to have a seat.  “Please, have a seat!”  “Go on, sit down.”  “No really, we just want you to sit down.”  “Just sit at your desk, that’s all we’re asking.”  Confused, she sat down.  Pbbbblllllttttttttt.   We cracked up like a Humpty Dumpty convention.  Commence crying.  She dashed off to the teacher, who had roughly seen what went down.  “What’s wrong?”  “TheyarealllaughingatmebecausetheythinkIfartedbutIdidn’tsobsniffle.”

Things I had Coming: Bees et al.

When I was in about first grade, my mom was always rather busy and, though she worked at home, she with some frequency had to drop me off at a friend’s or a neighbor’s for the afternoon in order to go visit clients.  One of her friends lived just down the road and had a son my age.  Our mothers would drop us off at their convenience with brash disregard to anything he or I might have to say in the matter and to the fact that our times together often ended with the two of us in trouble or injured.  Such was the case on a sunny summer’s afternoon when we were outside with nothing to do.  He lived on a large property and there was a spacious grassland.  Sitting in the grass, I noticed a lot of bees going from weed to weed, as they do.  I had played games where the object was to stomp on a flower with a bee and hope you killed it since if you missed or there was a depression in the ground that protected the bee from being squashed you risked getting stung.  However, winning was a bit easy.  At this point I had a stroke of genius that wows me to this day.  I knew that bees placed in water lost their ability to fly for the duration of their stay in the water.  Following me?  Probably not, because this one is truly brilliant.  I had my host go grab me an empty jar and lid and we filled it within half an inch of the top.  We then played what amounted to a game of Russian Roulette with bees.  One held the jar while the other caught a bee in his hands and transferred it into the jar.  The jar holder quickly put the lid on and got the bee wet, keeping it in the jar.  At this point you have put two and two together and gathered from the title that I probably got stung.  And you are correct.  What you probably didn’t figure is the length of time we spent doing this: about 20 minutes.  Think about that.  We spent 20 minutes catching bees with our bare hands before I got stung.  Additionally, he did not get stung.  We had a large collection of what I’m loosely calling “bees:” wasps, yellow jackets, hornets, bumble bees, honey bees, if you can name it and it is local to me, we probably had one.  I think we actually had to carefully pour some water out because the jar was so full that the captured bees were blocking new comers from the water.  Needless to say, as I came up to his mom crying she, upon learning how I got stung, expressed little sympathy.

What was probably later that year found me once again making bad decisions involving bees.  My neighbor and I were playing some modified version of golf in the front yard, conceivably with a branch and a golf ball that I had despite nobody I know playing golf and not living near a golf course.  At the bottom of the front hill and off to the side there was a yellow jacket’s nest in a hole in the side of the hill.  I knew of this hole and donned my sage cap and suggested we hit the ball in a direction that would keep us away from it.  This worked for awhile, but eventually the ball hit the front walkway funny and ended up about a foot from the opening of the nest.  This was an issue, as it was our only golf ball.  Fortunately, once again my wisdom shone through and I said that we needed to take precautions in order to avoid getting stung.  Here my perspicacity failed me and I suggested that we take “precautions” by filling the hole up with sticks to make sure the yellow jackets couldn’t get out to sting us.  To be on the extra safe side, I suggested we take turns and only put one stick in at a time and run away afterwards and wait for them to settle again.  Unfortunately, my logic and notion of self-preservation failed to find any discrepancy in unnecessarily placing my hands/face directly in front of the hole in order to avoid preventing myself from getting stung when I went to grab the golf ball which was significantly further away from the hole than I was placing myself.  When at last we felt the hole was sufficiently stuffed with sticks, I (likely voluntarily) went to retrieve the ball.  As I crept up to it and reached down to grab it, I looked at the nest in time to see a large swarm of yellow jackets exiting.  Apparently they had finally noticed the sticks.  Without even picking up the golf ball I ran.  Ran about 15 feet.  At the 15 foot mark, my prior knowledge kicked in.  Out loud, I suggested that, “Hey, maybe bees are like bears and if you stand still they won’t notice you…”  My friend was already quite a few feet ahead of me, but he paused and looked back to see how my strategy worked out.  My strategy did not work out.  Bees are not bears.  I was enveloped in an enraged cloud of yellow jackets stinging me in the face, arms, legs, and even getting under my shirt.  I decided to revert back to my original strategy of running and we both went inside, me crying.  As my mom applied ointment to my numerous stings, my unstung friend related out adventure, laughing at my suffering.  My mom also found it funny and was once again unsympathetic.  At this point my friend gave a shout and slapped his ankle.  A yellow jacket had crawled inside his sock and sacrificed his life to the perfect ironic punchline.

Later on in my elementary school days, my other neighbors and I discovered a massive, basketball sized hornets’ nest in one of their trees.  The tree was off to the side of the yard and well away from anywhere we might be playing.  Consequentially, we determined to get rid of it.  Having learned many lessons, I put all my faculties to work.  Rather than risk close contact and make easy targets of ourselves, we opted not to treat it as a pinata, but instead stood a distance away and through rocks and sticks at the hive, interspersing this with sprays from the hose when they started getting too swarmy.  We spent a good amount of time at this, though we were not particularly effective in doing much damage to the hive.  About 20 minutes into this adventure I went to scratch my shoulder and unveiled a massive, swollen, red area the diameter of a baseball with a bump in the center.  I had been stung, but somehow managed to not even notice.  Somehow the largest bee and the most striking sting were the least painful, and I, for once, did not go home crying.  I did, however, decide that maybe it was a good time to call it quits, in case the next one hurt.

Chick Flicks

I know this has been a lot of drugs and violence so far.  And that’s not really accurate in terms of what my life is or what I value.  Sure, as a kid I had a wild streak and in some ways I still do.  But there plenty of other aspects to explore and that I will explore.  There’s not really an order of importance to these, it’s just as they come to me.  Psychoanalyze all you want, though.

I have never been what you would consider a Casanova.  I am not the kind of dapper manly man that woos women with a strong chin and bronzed pectorals beneath a smart suit.  However, I did manage to secure a girlfriend while I was in graduate school and she was an undergrad.  During our year and a half of dating we did a lot of traveling.  We kept a map in our shared apartment with pins color coded for places I’d been, she’d been, and we’d been.  We kind of lived the streotypical love life, you’ve seen the movies dozens of times, that’s what we were in for.  Well, we went to Paris and had a blast.  The Louvre and all that jazz.  Near the end of our two week stay we had an elaborate dinner of fine French cuisine at the restaurant at the top of the Eiffel Tower, as you do.  It was there that I proposed.  Sure, her friends made some cracks about being cliche and “oh, so very original lolz.”  And maybe her annoucing to all her friends via text message that we were engaged wasn’t too much more personal than letting them find out on facebook (the texts were sent to avoid that issue), but when it all comes down to it we were happy.  This was what and how we wanted it.  It suited us.  Besides, nobody can really criticize two people in love.  Despite all the bogus holidays (Valentine’s) and hackneyed expressions (Paris), everyone feels a little warmer, a little jealous, and a little happy at the end of the day.

I dated my boyfriend for 10 years and we have one child.  At this point you’re probably wondering at the “dated” bit.  I have never felt that a piece of official stationary was required for me to know whom I love.  The child came well into the relationship, we were both adults, we planned it, nothing was forced.  The only ties were that of love.  Eventually, these ties unwound, unfortunately.  Things hit a rough spot and I ended the relationship and eventually left him and moved out, as soon as I could reasonably do so.  We share the child, there is still that bound.  Sure, I loved him.  But marriage wouldn’t have changed things.  Just made things more difficult.  People can’t always stay together, people don’t always stay the same.  I bear no ill will, no regrets.  C’est la vie.

On a school trip to France when I was not quite 18, I had what has always been to me a powerful moment.  I am not going to sit here and tell you it changed my life, though perhaps it did.  I am not going to pretend it made me a better person, though perhaps it did (but then again perhaps it doesn’t take much to become “better” given the rest of the posts).  However, the moment remains dear to me, inexpressably so.  Our group was walking out of the subway, up the stairs to some tourist trap or another.  There were not many steps, maybe six or eight, and there was a lot of flat ground above and below the steps.  As I took the first step up I heard a woman quietly call out from behind me.  “Monsieur.”  I turned around to face a woman with a baby-filled stroller.  “S’il vous plaît.”  I did not (and do not) speak French.  I knew a few words and recognized “sir” and “please.”  However, she did not have to say anything else, as some how I knew what she wanted.  I could see something in her face (humility? downtroddenness? fatigue? need? something) that suggested she needed help.  I, a generally unaware and dense teenager, grasped her meaning and helped her carry the stroller up the stairs, one of us on each end.  The task was a trifle, the pram weighed little even with the child inside and I was walking up the stairs anyways.  But something of the humanity in the “Merci” that followed has left echoes in me and I suspect it was one of the better moments of my life.

By request: More brotherly injuries

I was reading LauBrau’s latest post when midway through she requested I write this.  Naturally, I dropped everything and came right over to post this.

My cousin had a trampoline, one of those 10ft in diameter circle ones, about 4-5 feet off the ground.  He is a little more than a year older than me and my brother is not quite three years younger than me.  We were between the ages of roughly 7-11 when this story took place.  I should like to preface this by stating that, though I lived in the middle of nowhere, my cousin lived IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE.  You were more likely to see gophers than kids.  As such, there wasn’t much to do and most of the activities were loosely designed to potentially injure someone.  For example, my cousin and his friend and I once had a rock fight, them vs. me, in which we sat in a flat, open space about 15ft from each other and picked up rocks and threw them at each other.  Generally they were small rocks, except for the fist sized one that hit me in the face and sent me bleeding and crying inside.  Game over.

Activities on the trampoline were no different.  If the game didn’t risk personal injury, it nearly certainly risked injury for someone else.  Gotta keep things exciting, yeah?  Well so we were doing one such game, perhaps mock martial arts which involved jumping up and “pretending” to drop kick the other person and “accidentally” making full contact, and sooner or later my brother is upset and crying, which generally was not unusual.  Well my cousin and I were still having fun and chided him for being such a wuss as he attempted to get off the trampoline while we were still jumping on it and talking.  He gets to the edge and a bounce causes him to miss the edge of the trampoline, putting one foot through the gap between the springs that attached the tarp to the support structure and one foot on the other side of the support structure, a round pole.  Well, we might have been more sympathetic if he wasn’t already crying and had merely sacked himself on the pole.  However, he was crying, and when he went down he fell over the poll to the outside.  This caused his leg on the inside to get caught up under the tarp and left him crying and dangling off the side of the trampoline in a highly (sadistically) comic fashion, since he couldn’t quite get to the ground.  Rather than help him, my cousin and I lost control at the site of him dangling goofy over the side and just laughed.  Laughed right up until our moms yelled at us for being such bastards to their precious baby.

One winter I made the perfect snowball.  Perfectly round, a flawless sphere, just the right size for throwing.  Rather than use it, I saved my work of art, putting it in a plastic container in the freezer.  For months it sat in their forgotten until summer rolled round and I wanted a popsicle.  I went in to the freezer and found my lost treasure.  I then had the brilliant idea to take it outside and throw it, surely that would be a good summer time activity.  I took the container outside and as I walked out the door I saw my brother just down the hill.  Putting two and two together, I threw the snowball at my brother.  As some of you may have realized at this point, putting snowballs in the freezer does not give you snowballs back months later.  What was once a soft, powdery ball was now a frozen solid rock of ice.  This fact seemed irrelevant to me, until it hit my brother in the back, opened up the tear ducts, and closed me in my room to think about what I’d done.

But let’s not give the idea that my brother was always innocent in these acts.  Once we were playing in the snow and he threw a snowball at me from a close range.  So I threw one back.  At this point several things happened.  One: my mom turned around and looked out the window right as I pulled back.  Two: my brother got hit and started crying.  Three: my brother jumped on me and started clawing at me screaming “I hate you” (a common motif).  Four: my mother came outside and pulled me out from under my brother’s wrath.  Five: She screamed at me for abusing her precious and grounded me mercilessly despite my claims to him having thrown the first snowball.  Six: condemned to my room, I looked out the window and watched my brother playing by himself, smiling and unharmed.

When I was little my parents had several policies which did not work out in my favor.  1.  If I hit my brother (or some such activity), I would get grounded for hitting my brother.  2.  If I was hit by my brother and hit him back, I would get grounded for retaliation.  After several years of being grounded, I caught on to their game.  By and by, my brother ended up clawing me enough to draw blood (he always had nails and was not hesitant to use them).  Not a lot of blood, but that didn’t matter.  Being the newly intelligent kid that I was, I went, without retaliating and told my parents.  “Mom, Dad, look Adam made me bleed!”  “What did you do to him?”  “What?  Nothing…” “I’m sure you did something to him, you probably deserved it.”  “What!  Even if I did do something, the rules are if you retaliate you are at fault, he should be grounded!”  At which point I learned policy 3.  You are bigger than him and older than him and frankly we are only interested in grounding you.  Having called their bluff and uncovered the latent hypocrisy, I was now self-justified in doing whatever I felt like because it didn’t matter anyways, there is no justice in the world and I was bound to end up grounded one way or another.

My brother goes to the hospital

Sadly, I don’t expect this to be a complete list.  I’m sure there are other times where my brother has ended up in the hospital that I am forgetting, even though I may have contributed to them.

My best friend in elementary school lived across the street from me and frequently came over to play.  Soccer (‘football’) was all the rage–I grew up in the era where Soccer Mom was coined–and we used the side of the garage as a goal, much to the detriment of the siding.  One on one, we’d just take shots and switch out being goalie, or require that you be X distance from the goal before shooting.  On one of these occasions my brother turned up (unsurprising, considering he lived there) and, well, three’s a crowd.  One thing led to something and we ended up chasing my brother around.  This was, in all likelihood, largely unprovoked.  I didn’t do much chasing, just blocked off escape into the house, and my friend and brother went round the yard for about 30 seconds before my brother broke his collar bone.  He had decided that the best way to end the chase was to pull a tornado drill and duck and cover.  He did so abruptly, with my friend right on his heels.  My friend tripped and fell over my brother, who turned out to be rather brittle, as my friend was not all that big nor the fall all that hard.  Thus began summer vacation that year.

On another occasion, my mother had the poor judgement to take the two of us out shopping.  I was being obnoxious in the back seat and likely my brother was being obnoxious in the front seat.  We arrived in a parking lot, I got out, slammed my door shut, and listened to the screams of agony coming from my brother who had somehow managed to get his fingers in the way of the door closing.  Always a caring mother, towards her youngest at least, mom quickly started yelling and berating me for being so heartless as to close the door on his fingers.  Clearly I had done it intentionally.  Indeed, I must have held his fingers there with one hand and slammed the door with the other as it was my fault the incident occurred and certainly not his stupidity for placing his hand in an area that was not only dangerous but entirely unnecessary.

My brother has a scar above his left eye that my dad gave him as a gift one evening.  After a game of checkers that had lasted well into the evening, my dad told my brother it was time for bed.  My brother had been getting good at checkers and I’m pretty sure he had won something like best two out of three.  As a token of good sportsmanship, my dad retained his seated posture with his legs outstretched and allowed my brother to attempt to walk past, trip over said legs, and gash his eye on the end of the coffee table.

Substance Abuse

I am the proud owner of two D.A.R.E. shirts (For those of you who don’t know, D.A.R.E. is an anti-drug program targeted at children; I don’t have any idea what it stands for).  One is an oval that says D.A.R.E. over top of the American flag, the other utilizes the Andy Warhol effect with each letter in a different square and brightly colored.  If I thought I was being ironic by wearing shirts advertising public policies that I find ridiculous and ineffective (not to get too specific in my complaints here, but they go well beyond the “I likes the marijuana” defense), surely D.A.R.E. has one upped me mimicking the style of an artist who helped to make the Velvet Underground such a sensation.  The Velvet Underground, as in heroin proponent Lou Reed’s band, as in the band who sang “Heroin” with the line “Heroin, it’s my wife and it’s my life” and “Sister Ray” with the line “I’m searching for my mainline, I couldn’t hit it sideways.”  Nevermind the use of bright, pseudo-psychedelic colors.

D.A.R.E. and other such programs hold a special place in my heart.  I’m not sure if I received “D.A.R.E. training” as a child, but we definitely got the “Just Say No” drill.  I had a ruler that had “12 ways to say NO” which included such helpfulhints as “say NO again” and “broken record” whereby you repeat NO over and over.  I remember watching a program on inhalents as a 6th grader that made the whole thing so ludicrous that I spent arts and crafts time picking up markers and glues etc… and putting them up to my nose and mercilessly mocking the notion to comedic effect.  Comedic effect, that is, until I got home and was laid up for hours in the dark with a crippling headache and sensitivity to light and a lingering doubt that maybe the joke wasn’t really that funny and that I just thought it was because I had accidentally gotten high off inhalents.

In middle school, the program was given by our chain smoking assistant principal.  He gave a lengthy, grumbling, angry lecture about the dangers of alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs.  He shouted the horrible consequences of drugs, most of which were not inherent to the drugs themselves but were rather imposed by the school and government.  For example, he attempted to scare us with such claims as “Alcohol is bad for you, if you drink it you will be expelled from school and your future will be ruined.”  Fortunately, once you turn 21 alcohol loses this effect and is perfectly safe.  At the end of this lengthy diatribe, he opened the floor to questions.  Nearly every hand in the room shot up.  Taken aback by the sudden enthusiasm, he tentatively called one some student.  “I noticed that you have a pack of cigarettes hanging out of your breast pocket.  Are you going to be expelled or die a horrible death from lung cancer first?”  After a furious “I’m an adult and you and I and adult and I would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for you meddling kids” our session ended, as there were no more questions.

Fast forward to last November, 2007.  I receive a call from my mom informing me that one of the teachers from my elementary school (not one I had) had been arrested for growing marijuana in his closet.  At this point he was no longer a teacher, but an assistant principal at another elementary school.  At 50, his career has likely been terminated and his wife was charged with misdemeanor possession.  There is no indication that he was selling marijuana, let alone to students; he was caught based on a tip given to police.  Here is a man who has been trusted with taking care of children and well respected in the community for more than a decade and who faced felony charges for growing pot for personal use.  50% of teachers quit teaching within five years of starting.  When the baby boomers hit retirement age, something like 1/3-2/3 of the teaching work force will retire.  Male teachers comprise something like 12-28% of all teachers.  Thank goodness that tipster deprived students of an educator; clearly we’re overstocked.

Counseling

I was a troublesome child.  Most of my 1st grade recesses were spent on “the wall.”  The Wall was the side of the school facing the playground, specifically the basketball court, where disruptive children were sat as punishment.  This was particularly cruel, as you had a very clear view of the fun everyone else was up to.

To be fair, I didn’t deserve all of the punishments I received.  Sometimes, I was a victim of chance events.  Once, I set out to eat an entire Nutty Buddy in one bite.  Well, technically it was closer to two bites, because I had to eat the nuts and frozen chocolate off the top as a safety precaution against choking (I have a knack for sensibly carrying out bad ideas).  Well sure enough, I shoved the full cone into my mouth, much to the amusement of all my friends who were watching.  Unfortunately, as soon as the cone disappeared into my mouth, the lights went out, signaling that the lunch lady demanded silence.  Well, everyone had a great difficulty containing their laughter and we got stuck sitting against the wall.  Additionally, said lunch lady was a bit sexist or perhaps bought into the “boys are trouble” mode of thinking.  Eitherway, frequently “all of the boys in the class” were written up as the root of the problem, and “all the boys in the class” got to sit against the wall.  This was especially true if a girl was to blame, as it surely took all of the boys in the class to convince her to stray from the path of proper behavior.  Or something.

But other times I was in some way complicit in my ending up against the wall.

However, all of that is just preface.  I just want you to know that things did not usually turn up in my favor, at least not early on in my schooling career.  Despite all this, I somehow started achieving academically, at first in theory and later on in practice.

I have never fully grasped what kind of enrichment programs I participated in in elementary school.  I have the impression that perhaps they were not well funded, as I don’t remember them being consistent nor lasting for very long.  Regardless of this, in some pull out session or another, I was presented with the following prompt:

“Answer the following question and draw a picture illustrating your response:  If I could be anywhere in the world, I would go ________________”

Most of the kids responded to this with safaris in Africa or the Eiffel Tower or any other variation on typical vacation destinations.  Never one to be cliche and always on the look out for a good joke, I approached the task from a different angle and responded thus:

“If I could be anywhere in the world, I would go down in France where the naked ladies dance there’s a hole in the wall where I can see it all.”

My depiction included a wall with a hole in it, a person on their knees looking into said hole, and an open space filled with dancing naked ladies.  I was well into my third lady when the instructor walked by and noticed what I was up to.  Somewhere along the line my mom received a phone call informing her of the picture.  Somewhere further down the line, I found out that it was all she could do to keep from laughing when they told her and showed her the picture.

I ended up having to meet with the guidance counselor once or twice to discuss what happened, I think I chalked it up to “just a joke” and it eventually went away, I don’t really remember the details.  However, the best part of this story is that not only did I draw the picture and write the limerick, but the kid sitting next to me COPIED me and also had to go to counseling and had his mom called.  Though for some reason copying the picture didn’t seem so distressing to them and when it came out that “it was all my idea” he only had a brief, unrepeated encounter with the guidance counselor.  As far as I am concerned they should have expelled him for plagiarism.  There’s just no justice in this world.

15 November 2008: Drinking

In the summer of 2007 I studied abroad in Galway, Republic of Ireland.  This made last night possible, in several ways.  First, I learned the joys of alcohol at the encouragement of monsieur Guinness.  Second, I made a good number of friends and acquaintences.  Particularly, I met Lauren, with whom I frequently hang out, even though she commutes to school only twice a week from an hour away.

Last night we organized something of a reunion party.  I am using “organized” loosely.  Lauren started pushing the idea and got Bridget on board and then somehow I was required to make a facebook event for it.  Fortunately, I am well versed in the internet and fully aware that logic holds no sway here.

So people were invited, people agreed to come, etc…  The time was arbitrarily set for 7pm to 2am; the former was the default time provided by facebook, the latter is last call.  A local bar/pub or, as is the lingo round here, “deli” was chosen.

The day rolls round and about 3pm I post on the wall a querie as to “what time are people actually planning to show?”  Commence disorder, if not already commenced.

Key to the disorder lies Lauren.  Lauren, as stated, lives about an hour away.  Working till 6, she suggests that after eating and what not she could be here by 8.30.  I state as much on the event and suggest between 9 and 10.  At about 9.55 Lauren shows up.

By this time I’ve been eating pizza and having two beers and two whiskey teas.  Though I have taken to calling them “gasoline and tea” due to the nature of the whiskey involved.  Unsurprisingly, they don’t tend to have much whiskey to them as the tea becomes unable to kill the fumes and the burning sensation is rather awful.

Lauren brings a bottle of wine and starts pregaming as I finish up my teaoline.  We sit up in my room watching Peep Show and youtube videos as she downs about half the (somewhat thin) bottle of wine.  At this point it is worth mentioning that Lauren is a lightweight.  Which makes the redwine spilled on my desk and nearly on my keyboard a bit expected.  We start walking to the deli at about 10.30 and get there at some point.  I am very good with particulars.

Along the way we pass the time singing out “Everybody on the movie forum is a wanker” and punctuating it with a falsetto “wanker!”  This is to become the theme tune of the adventure; it was sung at all points and picked up again when I woke up with it in my head.

Once at the deli, we were the only ones from our group there, so we ordered a pitcher of Smithicks to be festive and took a seat.  I would surely disappoint any friends who might happen upon this page if I didn’t bemoan the quality disparity between Irish beer in Ireland and in America.  Guinness in Ireland was delicious and something I always looked forward to and did not go out without getting at least one pint of.  Guinness in America (as with Smithicks) tastes metallic and watery by comparison.

After the Smithicks we got a pitcher of Newcastle and Emma stopped by with a group of friends and we chatted for a few and that was essentially the last we saw of her.  A note about the pitchers: I would once more like to draw your attention to Lauren being a lightweight and having consumed half a bottle of wine, no matter that it was somewhat thin in terms of wine bottles.  As such, “we drank two pitchers” roughly equates to “Lauren drank a little over a pint per pitcher and I drank the rest.”  Shockingly, at somepoint this caught up with me; unshockingly, I don’t remember at what point.

Nonetheless, it was Lightweight Lauren who was the first to look a bit foolish by emptying the contents of her purse onto the table item by item.  The catalyst for this was the discovery that a bottle of vitamins was weighing her bag down.  Among the items put on the table was a little black book.  This became the focus of the evening.  The book was actually rather mundane, yet I would not be surprised if we went through it twice.  The bulk of it consisted of class notes, grocery lists, to do lists, and the remains of pages that had been torn out in order to facilitate the disposal of chewing gum.  I am pretty sure I killed off the brain cells that derived meaning and fascination from the perusal of this book.

To be fair, the emptying of the purse was not the first incident of note, as it were.  In a stroke of verbal agility, Lauren initiated the following conversation:

“Question: Being drunk makes me sneeze.  Achoo.”

“That’s not a question…”

“No, no, no, you don’t get it.  Question: Being drunk makes me sneeze.  Achoo.  QUESTION MARK.”

Bridget and Roxanne arrived as we drained the last of the pitcher and the four of us commenced the reunion.  We had a round of shots (I didn’t buy them and apparently did not ask what they were, so excuse the omission of that information) and talked.  At somepont Roxanne disappeared and a good bit of the night was spent repeating “where’d Rox go?” to each other.

Probably the highlight of the evening came when Lauren and I were talking and standing next to a table.  Lauren did them the courtesy of knocking over a stack of glasses which shattered on the table and somehow or another cut open my right pinky.  So I stood there applying pressure and assumed it wasn’t that big a deal, just a little cut, it’s only about a centimeter long.  But when I looked down a second time, I realized my hands were rather covered in blood and someone (perhaps Rox, if she was still around at this point) got me a wad of paper towels from the bar tender and I went about the rest of the evening with my hand wrapped up in paper towels.  This proved convenient for wiping off my mouth, as well.

Lauren crashed at my place on the floor.  She would have had an airmattress except when I opened the batteries they were already corroded, despite being brand new less than a year ago.  We woke up the next morning and she, notorious for being badly hung over, said, “Wow, I feel great considering how much I drank!”  An hour later she was throwing up in the toilet.

15 November 2008: Testing

My alarm went off at 6.45AM on a Saturday morning.  I was 22.  A college student.  AM.  Saturday.  Rewind.

c. 1 November 2008 I received notification that in order to receive my secondary degree in elementary education I would have to take and pass the Praxis II Elementary Education: Content Knowledge exam.  Oh, and by the way, the last testing opportunity before you graduate is 15 November and emergency registration ends 7 Nov and will cost you 75$ in addition to the regular $80 fee for the test and $50 once yearly charge for paper based exams.  Education is big money, just not for teachers.

14 November 2008 after completing my goal of finishing No. 44, the Mysterious Stranger by Mark Twain, I now felt obligated to make an attempt to study for the test so crucial to my future aims.  The exam essentially seeks to determine whether you have a grasp on all the knowledge taught in grades K-8, in addition to possessing the knowledge of how students (‘regular’ and exceptional) learn.  Conceived in those terms, my arrogance provided an enormous hurtle to studying.  Had I not received high marks in elementary and middle school?  Indeed, was not I identified for the gifted programs and did not I attend pull out enrichment classes until I was kicked out and given counseling for inappropriate drawings (another time dearies)?  Beyond that, had I not graduated from high school?  Did I not overachieve?  Am I not doing extremely well in an allegedly prestigious college?  Surely the test would be a breeze.  Please god let the test be a breeze, as this overconfidence is looking to be expensive monetarily and career wise, and I do loathe listening to my parents nag.

Morning of as I neared the parking garage pleased as punch that I was nearly 10 minutes early when historically I am very untimely I stopped at a crosswalk and allowed presumably a fellow test-taker to cross.  I noticed them carrying a bag and thought how clever I was to travel so lightly with admission ticket in one pocket and my oh jesus christ I forgot to grab the pencils I left sitting out and have no way of taking this exam.  Cue a u-turn and I am flying back to my fortunately nearby apartment at a rate of 5mph over the speed limit which is as fast as I can conscionably drive in the rain through a campus which tends to have pedestrians and cops ambling about.  Pencils retrieved, I park and make a dash for the building and reach the door to find that registration may start at 7.30 but the test does not start until 8, and my impression of an asthma attack which resulted from the 100ft I had run was entirely unnecessary.

Leaning against the wall, I put up the farce of not being severely winded and feigned nonchalance.  Then I did the only reasonable thing to do: I looked at girls.  Which is not to pretend I had much say in the matter; after all, I was there for tests that would allow me to teach and teaching is one those pesky professions where sexist women try to keep the menfolk out with such treacheries as pay that is lower than the rather elusive prestige.  As such, there was a ratio of about three men to sixty women, ranging in age from college students to upper-middle aged.  At least some of the older ones were changing careers.  I know this, because one such struck up a conversation as we were leaving the building after the test and told me so in the course of discussing how impressed she was that I finished so quickly and took the test without a calculator.  And they say testing isn’t a race and take  your time.  If it’s not a race, where did this admiration for speed and accompanying smug feeling come from?

Which, indirectly, leads me back to people watching.  When I watch people, I like to stereotype people in order to efficiently determine who I am most likely to be compatible and get along with in order to not waste time trying to get to know people I have nothing in common with and likely will not stay in touch with.  Not that there is any liklihood of me actually talking to the people I decide are kindred spirits, but it passes the time.  I noticed one girl in particular, mostly because she was wearing a pink CNU hoody that appeared to have been made by the same company that makes those daylight-lamps for nighttime construction.  Additionally, she was wearing sorority-chic rain boots and had blonde hair.  It is important to note that my system of categorization is not value laden.  I do not despise people simply because they don’t dress in a way that lends itself to my temperment.  Nonetheless, sororities tend to be antithetical to my antisocial existence, and I placed her in the “unlikely friend” category.

Through strange fate and a reshuffling of seats, I ended up seated next to her.  We had to have our licenses out as ID to make sure we weren’t taking tests to get others certified and hers caught the corner of my eye.  As it turns out, the gist of our license photo haircuts was the same: parted in the middle, nearly to the chin.  Additionally, our current hair cuts were also relatives, though my long straight hair was longer than hers.  This was a nice notion, but not quite enough to sway her into the potential friend category (hair’s breadth away, all said and done).  However, I learned something about myself and what I value that day.  She whipped through the test and finished first, a full 50 minutes before time expired.  Rather than look over her test, she gave it a passing glance, closed it up, and folded her arms across the table and lay down in them to sleep.  I have long held these to be the only respectable test taking practices and my esteem for her sky rocketed.  I believe that if you have time at the end you should look over your test and make sure you didn’t make any simple errors.  You are likely to find them, and indeed I frequently lose points here and there when I know the material quite well.  Taking your time and not whipping through a test probably helps too.  However, I stubbornly refuse to play by their rules.  I do not make mistakes, I either know it or I don’t.  There’s one question and four answers per test item, and with the exception of math, I firmly stand by the idea that you should be able to finish a question about as quickly as you can read it and the answers, or more quickly if you know what the answer is and simply need to find it.  I take it as a mark of intelligence and a signifier of reading prowess to finish early and never look back.  I lord my quick finish and cozy nap over the plebian masses taking their time and conceivably out performing me with their focus and slow determination.  Furthermore, face down on a table is a grand way to sleep and sleep is far more enjoyable than test taking.  So when her face disappeared in her hoody clothed arms, I was smitten.