Days 18-21
Sorry, I know I still need to get to a few comments from the last one.
Can you guess today's theme, kids?
18. Middle School
( The elusive candelabrum. )
Can you guess today's theme, kids?
18. Middle School
( The elusive candelabrum. )
In fifth grade I was working on a project with my friend K. For some reason, the project called for the use of a clip art picture of a traffic light. When I printed it out, K expressed annoyance that the picture was "wrong." I asked what she meant and she said the picture wasn't right because the red light was on the top and the green light was on the bottom. I thought that was how it was supposed to be but it's my nature to doubt myself so we brought the picture to Daddy and asked him. He confirmed what I thought but there was no convincing K.
One day when we were in eighth grade we were driving somewhere with my parents. Daddy, remembering the debate about traffic lights years earlier, pointed out an actual traffic light to K. Indeed, the red light was on the top and the green light was on the bottom. She insisted we called the government and had the lights in the area changed.
19. Spelling bees
The only spelling bee I've ever been in was one in my second grade class. The prize was a stuffed T Rex, a package of pencils with dinosaurs on them and a package of dinosaur stickers. I looooooved dinosaurs and I collected all three of those things, so I wanted that prize so much I could practically taste it. And I rocked at spelling so I was really excited and confident that I could win. The "word bank" was the entire dinosaur unit we'd just finished in our science book. I recall spelling everything from "cousin" and "because" to "Brachiosaurus" and "Pterodactyl" correctly. The word that made me lose? SALAD. I have no fucking idea how I tried to spell it... Or how the teacher thought I tried to spell it because I recall thinking I shouldn't have been out yet.
20. Surprise! I r smrt!
It's fairly well-documented in my journal that when I was little Daddy and I used to play all kinds of games that dealt with puzzles and riddles, spelling, memory tricks, observation skills, etc. Anything that might make me even smarter! One day when I was probably about seven or eight, we were sitting in the car waiting for my mother to finish in ... some store. (She was doing some knd of arts/crafts shopping, which Daddy and I don't particularly enjoy doing with her.) To kill time, he was quizzing me on spelling. Since we were sitting in a parking lot, most of the words he was giving me were car makes and models. "These are too easy!" I complained. "Give me a hard one!" So he gave me "Hyundai." Which I promptly spelled correctly without much thought at all. He was surprised because I was about fourteen before I started paying attention to cars. How did I know how to spell that?! It was from seeing it on TV commercials. Nobody can ever say TV never taught me anything.
21. Educational video games
Oregon Trail. That is all.
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Once, in college, L. and I had a discussion over the phone about a My Little Pony episode we remembered where the ponies stepped on something and their wishes came true, and there was a drought, etc. I said they were magic coins; he insisted that they were horse shoes. So of course I had to go and look it up, and it turned out the title of the episode was "The Magic Coins."
19. Nooo! Nobody should be cheated of dinosaur toys. And what the heck was "salad" doing in a unit about dinosaurs? Were you being taught that the herbivores ate it?
I had a t-rex pen I used to adore that I think we got from Dinosaur State Park in Connecticut. It was yellow, with a twisty tip to make the pen part come out or retract, and at the top was one of those clear windows with a landscape backdrop and a thin cutout of a t-rex that would float to the top or the bottom depending on how you held the pen. I'd make it go up and then down and then up for minutes at a time.
21. Sometimes I would say The hell with the mission! and spend all my money on bullets and just go shoot buffalo and rabbits.
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