Tee Hee! Look What I Did!!
Have you ever found yourself in some irreversible chain-reaction situation, thinking, “I really don’t like this.”? If not, I’ll tell you a story so you can have at least experienced it in your mind, not like it’s the most pleasant thing to experience or anything. If you’ve already been through it, or something similar to it, you may read on anyway to kill time while you wait for your outdated dial-up connection to load a 2-minute video of your niece following your older sister’s dog around with a Super Soaker water gun and a maniacal and genuinely amused look on her face. It’s fine by me. Whatever makes you happy. Well, here it goes . . .
This all started on a typical, almost surreally so, day. I was 5 years old - young, naïve, immature, conscious of doing “the right thing,” no sense of identity - a completely different person from who I am today, thirteen years later. On this painfully mundane day, we (me and my fellow classmates, none of whom I regularly associated with), had some sickeningly average peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch. “Sickeningly” was used literally in that past sentence. Apparently, those sickeningly average sandwiches were made with fantastically past-their-expiration-date something. How this got by everybody, I have no clue. Maybe the authoritative figures of the school felt like punishing us that day for getting too rowdy all the time during recess and figured that if we were sick, we would just kind of take a nap and not bother them or something. Who knows?
After a while, as you can imagine, us contaminated children began to feel sick and incompliant. We just wanted to lie down and not do anything except fall asleep to ignore the pain. It felt as though a really hateful and upset creature was living inside of me and was physically expressing its hatred on my body’s digestive system. Like if I was carrying the spawn of Satan in my unwilling and unprepared womb. Yeah, this sandwich was pretty brutal. More brutal than sacrificial fetuses. Or goats, whichever you prefer. You get it, right? Brutal. Now back to the point, - if there ever was one, I’d assume it to be this, at least - so now all of us are lying on the ground, moaning, tossing, and turning. Occasionally, someone would run to the bathroom, but that didn’t happen often enough to be called the “normal” thing to do in this situation. I would give it a 1:13 probability of happening. Oh right, the chain-reaction situation. Don’t worry, that part’s coming up. “Coming up” . . . funny that I should say that, actually.
Maybe after about fifteen minutes of us pathetically rolling and groaning like ancient floorboards under E. Honda (of Street Fighter II, in case you didn’t know), one girl casually gets up, seeming to be in a daze. I remember her being the most disliked kid in class. Believe it or not, I wasn’t the least liked in class since I just sort of kept to myself most of the time and was generally ignored. Well this girl, whose name I forget (it was something like Alison or Ashley), continues to stumble around and eventually disposes the contents of her stomach all over a runty child squirming on the floor. On top of already experiencing the wrath of peanut butter and jelly in his own stomach, Runty couldn’t handle somebody else’s problems too. So he does the same as that possible Alison/Ashley girl; you know, the one nobody likes.
Emesis, a word that I didn’t know at the time - not like it would have made any difference whether I did or not - is just a grown-up word for the acts that were being committed in rapid succession in that kindergarten class full of sick children, me included, of course. So I’m sure you can imagine the scenario: one sick child pukes, the next one closest to that one follows suit, then the next, until you have a class full of vomiting children. Emesis. It’s a horribly disturbing scene to imagine, correct? Kids, vomit, shocked teachers, emetophiliacs, upset parents. Not anybody’s best day ever, unless of course if you spend everyday caring for your armless, war veteran grandfather, listening to the same “heroic” war stories while cleaning up the messes he makes with his bowels that show less control than an average teenage boy does around an attractive girl, and on top of that, your parents are alcoholics on a low-wage salary and are unfulfilled by their marriage with each other (those sorts of things usually don’t go too well). In that case, it just might possibly have been your best day ever. Not for most people though, it’s not a great day. But definitely a day to remember and learn from. Hence, my perennial dislike for school-prepared meals, or school-organized anything. And I haven’t puked once since that moment in my life.
Yes, and now we know the reason that I shouldn't be allowed to write stories. They always seem to take a turn for the worse, for some reason. Forgive me if the words are a little quirky. This was my final essay for photography class. Ms. Regalado told us to write about our first school memory. I wanted to entertain her because she's so fuXXing amazing, so I kinda lied a little, or maybe a lot. None of it's true. Except maybe the last couple of lines.
This all started on a typical, almost surreally so, day. I was 5 years old - young, naïve, immature, conscious of doing “the right thing,” no sense of identity - a completely different person from who I am today, thirteen years later. On this painfully mundane day, we (me and my fellow classmates, none of whom I regularly associated with), had some sickeningly average peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch. “Sickeningly” was used literally in that past sentence. Apparently, those sickeningly average sandwiches were made with fantastically past-their-expiration-date something. How this got by everybody, I have no clue. Maybe the authoritative figures of the school felt like punishing us that day for getting too rowdy all the time during recess and figured that if we were sick, we would just kind of take a nap and not bother them or something. Who knows?
After a while, as you can imagine, us contaminated children began to feel sick and incompliant. We just wanted to lie down and not do anything except fall asleep to ignore the pain. It felt as though a really hateful and upset creature was living inside of me and was physically expressing its hatred on my body’s digestive system. Like if I was carrying the spawn of Satan in my unwilling and unprepared womb. Yeah, this sandwich was pretty brutal. More brutal than sacrificial fetuses. Or goats, whichever you prefer. You get it, right? Brutal. Now back to the point, - if there ever was one, I’d assume it to be this, at least - so now all of us are lying on the ground, moaning, tossing, and turning. Occasionally, someone would run to the bathroom, but that didn’t happen often enough to be called the “normal” thing to do in this situation. I would give it a 1:13 probability of happening. Oh right, the chain-reaction situation. Don’t worry, that part’s coming up. “Coming up” . . . funny that I should say that, actually.
Maybe after about fifteen minutes of us pathetically rolling and groaning like ancient floorboards under E. Honda (of Street Fighter II, in case you didn’t know), one girl casually gets up, seeming to be in a daze. I remember her being the most disliked kid in class. Believe it or not, I wasn’t the least liked in class since I just sort of kept to myself most of the time and was generally ignored. Well this girl, whose name I forget (it was something like Alison or Ashley), continues to stumble around and eventually disposes the contents of her stomach all over a runty child squirming on the floor. On top of already experiencing the wrath of peanut butter and jelly in his own stomach, Runty couldn’t handle somebody else’s problems too. So he does the same as that possible Alison/Ashley girl; you know, the one nobody likes.
Emesis, a word that I didn’t know at the time - not like it would have made any difference whether I did or not - is just a grown-up word for the acts that were being committed in rapid succession in that kindergarten class full of sick children, me included, of course. So I’m sure you can imagine the scenario: one sick child pukes, the next one closest to that one follows suit, then the next, until you have a class full of vomiting children. Emesis. It’s a horribly disturbing scene to imagine, correct? Kids, vomit, shocked teachers, emetophiliacs, upset parents. Not anybody’s best day ever, unless of course if you spend everyday caring for your armless, war veteran grandfather, listening to the same “heroic” war stories while cleaning up the messes he makes with his bowels that show less control than an average teenage boy does around an attractive girl, and on top of that, your parents are alcoholics on a low-wage salary and are unfulfilled by their marriage with each other (those sorts of things usually don’t go too well). In that case, it just might possibly have been your best day ever. Not for most people though, it’s not a great day. But definitely a day to remember and learn from. Hence, my perennial dislike for school-prepared meals, or school-organized anything. And I haven’t puked once since that moment in my life.
Yes, and now we know the reason that I shouldn't be allowed to write stories. They always seem to take a turn for the worse, for some reason. Forgive me if the words are a little quirky. This was my final essay for photography class. Ms. Regalado told us to write about our first school memory. I wanted to entertain her because she's so fuXXing amazing, so I kinda lied a little, or maybe a lot. None of it's true. Except maybe the last couple of lines.