(no subject)
Weird Science
I think when most people recall the science fairs of elementary school, they think of food coloring-dyed carnations and batteries hooked up to tiny light bulbs.
I think of erasers.
When I was in fifth grade, the science project presentation was the major focus in our one-hour, once-a-week “science” class, taught by Mr. Wells. He was tall, with a goofy, pedantic voice, and bald, with a preternaturally shiny head. I had it on good faith that he waxed it for good luck.
A self-described “naturalist,” he also headed the outdoor education program we’d be forced to attend the following year at Camp Bloomfield, nestled cozily in the mountains of Malibu, miles from civilization or working toilets. He was probably also the last person who should have been heading an actual science class. He wore safari vests and those mid-thigh Crocodile Hunter shorts with twenty pockets, which are not a degree in natural science. Also I’m pretty sure he actually lived at the camp, his private little reefer commune. Oops, I mean he grew maize and beets!
And next to me in his class sat a girl named Sarah. One could tell that Sarah probably had a troubled home life, or at least one would hope that was the reason for her erratic behavior. I know, everyone knew that one kid in elementary school that always smelled like cat pee or ate paste with their fingers, and Sarah wasn’t merely “that kid.”
I think she ate paper, but in her defense she said it was “apple paper” and I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt. But she was disturbed; always happy and pleasant, if but untidy and bedraggled. But then she would announce at recess that she wanted to eat her pet bunny sometimes, and go on pleasantly with her day. She collected pencils, usually pilfering them, even taking the red correction pen of the teacher which she was made to return one day with much ceremony. She had as many as fifty pencils in her desk, some with those glitter eraser tops that smelled like strawberries, which she loved. Sometimes she didn’t show up to class and homework was extremely sporadic. Her younger brother later tried to burn the school down but couldn’t get the stucco to catch fire.
Mr. Wells announced, at the beginning of the trimester, that each week we’d be working on our science presentation and tracking our efforts meticulously to make sure we were progressing along. I decided almost immediately to draw on my natural talents and do something with flowers. Yeah, pretty faggy, I know. Of course, my dad said that wasn’t science-y enough by itself and suggested I water them with varying amounts of sulfuric acid. That could pretty much make any science presentation a success!
I asked Sarah what she thought she’d do for her project.
“I’m going to eat candy and see what happens.” she exclaimed dimly. She ripped a strip of notebook paper from her Trapper Keeper and handed it to me. “Try it, it tastes like apples. Don’t call me a butt slut because it’s a bad name.”
I knew to leave well enough alone. I didn’t know what that meant then and I’m not even sure that I know now.
In any event, over the next few weeks, I remember working diligently, every day, on my science presentation: I’d come home from day camp, give my chrysanthemums an acid bath, and went to play Super Mario Brothers while the fetid smell of acid-burning plant matter permeated the downstairs rooms. Each week I wrote in a log made of construction paper and recorded descriptions of the plants - all the highly erudite conclusions one would expect from a fifth grader. In class, Mr. Wells would come around and discuss our projects with us. Sarah always seemed to have something to say to him, but I never asked again about her project - I didn’t want to be part of that interaction.
Eventually, after much work on my end, I was ready for presentation day - I had eleven tiny potted plants, all withered, some putrescent, and one verdant green one (my “control group”). I had a very fancy poster I made that showed my hypothesis (that the plants with acid would die) and results (that the plants with acid died). And, I had several note cards, in case I couldn’t talk for five minutes about how acid works to dissolve plants and, as I discovered, wood varnish on the utensil drawer.
I was convinced that my project was super lame. Of course, I thought that just growing the chrysanthemums would have been much cooler, so clearly my litmus test for “cool” was totally skewed. But I was sure that even with all the methodic labor that had gone into watering those plants daily with an eyedropper full of acid, my science project would be unacceptable. I was nervous when I went to the front of the class to present, and even though Mr. Wells rolled his eyes at what he later wrote on my project “prosaic but correct conclusions on the effects of acid on plants” (which I’m sure he knew more about than he could write on a fifth grader’s science presentation booklet), I fared no worse than other experiments thus far.
I looked at Sarah, who sat beside me, and I didn’t see her project.
And then she went up to present, holding her pencil in one hand. She stood there silently for a good twenty seconds, and then began.
“As many of you know,” she said matter-of-factly, “this is a pencil. But the question on all of your minds is, why does a pencil bounce?”
From the side of the classroom, watching this tragicomedy unfold, Mr. Wells’ jaw dropped nonplussedly. A few people giggled.
“Pencils have erasers on the end. Sometimes you can even buy smelly erasers that go over the regular ones.” She stopped to smell her eraser affectedly, and continued.
“Anyway, the reason a pencil bounces is because of the eraser.”
Sarah dropped her pencil to the desk, where it tumbled anticlimactically to the right. She picked the pencil up and tried a few more times, each time the pencil failing to bounce. But she pressed onward.
“The reason the pencil bounces is because the eraser is made of rubber. Rubber bounces, like in bouncy balls. Anyway that’s why your pencils bounce.” She then collected up her pencil and walked back to her desk, satisfied with her presentation.
She sat there, as Mr. Wells slowly rose to his feet, and exclaimed perturbedly, “Sarah, did you prepare for this presentation at all? What happened to the idea you had told me weeks ago?”
He waited for his answer. Her response? “Well what if I made it up, butt slut!”
In my opinion, and I think the opinion was mutually shared by everyone else in the class, this was the best science presentation of the day. Sarah got sent to the principal’s office, and was sent home for the rest of the afternoon. It was all the drama of the playground at recess, and that’s when the phrase butt slut became immortalized.
The next day, back in the regular classroom, my friends dared me to say something to her; in fact, I had to let Sarah know that her project was the best, even if we all knew that she failed miserably.
“Yeah,” she said in response to my compliment, “I didn’t do much work on it. But hey! If you let me borrow your acid from your project, I’ll make my science fair project with it! I wonder what happens to erasers in acid!”
Sometimes I wonder what happened to her, and my heart bounces with laughter, like erasers off a desk.
I think when most people recall the science fairs of elementary school, they think of food coloring-dyed carnations and batteries hooked up to tiny light bulbs.
I think of erasers.
When I was in fifth grade, the science project presentation was the major focus in our one-hour, once-a-week “science” class, taught by Mr. Wells. He was tall, with a goofy, pedantic voice, and bald, with a preternaturally shiny head. I had it on good faith that he waxed it for good luck.
A self-described “naturalist,” he also headed the outdoor education program we’d be forced to attend the following year at Camp Bloomfield, nestled cozily in the mountains of Malibu, miles from civilization or working toilets. He was probably also the last person who should have been heading an actual science class. He wore safari vests and those mid-thigh Crocodile Hunter shorts with twenty pockets, which are not a degree in natural science. Also I’m pretty sure he actually lived at the camp, his private little reefer commune. Oops, I mean he grew maize and beets!
And next to me in his class sat a girl named Sarah. One could tell that Sarah probably had a troubled home life, or at least one would hope that was the reason for her erratic behavior. I know, everyone knew that one kid in elementary school that always smelled like cat pee or ate paste with their fingers, and Sarah wasn’t merely “that kid.”
I think she ate paper, but in her defense she said it was “apple paper” and I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt. But she was disturbed; always happy and pleasant, if but untidy and bedraggled. But then she would announce at recess that she wanted to eat her pet bunny sometimes, and go on pleasantly with her day. She collected pencils, usually pilfering them, even taking the red correction pen of the teacher which she was made to return one day with much ceremony. She had as many as fifty pencils in her desk, some with those glitter eraser tops that smelled like strawberries, which she loved. Sometimes she didn’t show up to class and homework was extremely sporadic. Her younger brother later tried to burn the school down but couldn’t get the stucco to catch fire.
Mr. Wells announced, at the beginning of the trimester, that each week we’d be working on our science presentation and tracking our efforts meticulously to make sure we were progressing along. I decided almost immediately to draw on my natural talents and do something with flowers. Yeah, pretty faggy, I know. Of course, my dad said that wasn’t science-y enough by itself and suggested I water them with varying amounts of sulfuric acid. That could pretty much make any science presentation a success!
I asked Sarah what she thought she’d do for her project.
“I’m going to eat candy and see what happens.” she exclaimed dimly. She ripped a strip of notebook paper from her Trapper Keeper and handed it to me. “Try it, it tastes like apples. Don’t call me a butt slut because it’s a bad name.”
I knew to leave well enough alone. I didn’t know what that meant then and I’m not even sure that I know now.
In any event, over the next few weeks, I remember working diligently, every day, on my science presentation: I’d come home from day camp, give my chrysanthemums an acid bath, and went to play Super Mario Brothers while the fetid smell of acid-burning plant matter permeated the downstairs rooms. Each week I wrote in a log made of construction paper and recorded descriptions of the plants - all the highly erudite conclusions one would expect from a fifth grader. In class, Mr. Wells would come around and discuss our projects with us. Sarah always seemed to have something to say to him, but I never asked again about her project - I didn’t want to be part of that interaction.
Eventually, after much work on my end, I was ready for presentation day - I had eleven tiny potted plants, all withered, some putrescent, and one verdant green one (my “control group”). I had a very fancy poster I made that showed my hypothesis (that the plants with acid would die) and results (that the plants with acid died). And, I had several note cards, in case I couldn’t talk for five minutes about how acid works to dissolve plants and, as I discovered, wood varnish on the utensil drawer.
I was convinced that my project was super lame. Of course, I thought that just growing the chrysanthemums would have been much cooler, so clearly my litmus test for “cool” was totally skewed. But I was sure that even with all the methodic labor that had gone into watering those plants daily with an eyedropper full of acid, my science project would be unacceptable. I was nervous when I went to the front of the class to present, and even though Mr. Wells rolled his eyes at what he later wrote on my project “prosaic but correct conclusions on the effects of acid on plants” (which I’m sure he knew more about than he could write on a fifth grader’s science presentation booklet), I fared no worse than other experiments thus far.
I looked at Sarah, who sat beside me, and I didn’t see her project.
And then she went up to present, holding her pencil in one hand. She stood there silently for a good twenty seconds, and then began.
“As many of you know,” she said matter-of-factly, “this is a pencil. But the question on all of your minds is, why does a pencil bounce?”
From the side of the classroom, watching this tragicomedy unfold, Mr. Wells’ jaw dropped nonplussedly. A few people giggled.
“Pencils have erasers on the end. Sometimes you can even buy smelly erasers that go over the regular ones.” She stopped to smell her eraser affectedly, and continued.
“Anyway, the reason a pencil bounces is because of the eraser.”
Sarah dropped her pencil to the desk, where it tumbled anticlimactically to the right. She picked the pencil up and tried a few more times, each time the pencil failing to bounce. But she pressed onward.
“The reason the pencil bounces is because the eraser is made of rubber. Rubber bounces, like in bouncy balls. Anyway that’s why your pencils bounce.” She then collected up her pencil and walked back to her desk, satisfied with her presentation.
She sat there, as Mr. Wells slowly rose to his feet, and exclaimed perturbedly, “Sarah, did you prepare for this presentation at all? What happened to the idea you had told me weeks ago?”
He waited for his answer. Her response? “Well what if I made it up, butt slut!”
In my opinion, and I think the opinion was mutually shared by everyone else in the class, this was the best science presentation of the day. Sarah got sent to the principal’s office, and was sent home for the rest of the afternoon. It was all the drama of the playground at recess, and that’s when the phrase butt slut became immortalized.
The next day, back in the regular classroom, my friends dared me to say something to her; in fact, I had to let Sarah know that her project was the best, even if we all knew that she failed miserably.
“Yeah,” she said in response to my compliment, “I didn’t do much work on it. But hey! If you let me borrow your acid from your project, I’ll make my science fair project with it! I wonder what happens to erasers in acid!”
Sometimes I wonder what happened to her, and my heart bounces with laughter, like erasers off a desk.