Entries from December 2008 ↓

Ever had somebody walk in on you while you were sitting on the toilet? Isn’t that embarrassing? Doesn’t your face just turn bright red? I’ll bet you get really mad at the person don’t you? Well guess what. I got no sympathy for you, bub. You have obviously never taken the time to learn proper toilet privacy defenses. It’s your own fault that somebody saw you doing number two.

I grew up in a house where the only doors that locked were the main entrances. The bedrooms didn’t lock. Neither did the bathroom. In fact, the bathroom door didn’t even shut tight. All it took was a cat’s paw to push the thing open. I had a father and a younger sister who were not prone to knocking before entering a room. But in spite of all these perils working against me, not one person in almost thirty years of potty training has caught me making pee pees or poo poos.

The key to bathroom privacy is to develop bat-like radar senses. A keen ear allows one to assess threats and formulate a defense. I’ve never taken an official poll, but I daresay that in ninety-five percent of all toilet-walk-in-ons, the victim never even knew the violator was there. I always listened for footsteps as they came down the hallway, trying to judge by their speed and intensity if this was a parent rushing to relieve a full bladder or merely a sibling pretending to be a pony.

As soon as human sounds came within a certain perimeter (I used ten feet as my safe distance), the next phase, subterfuge, began. I had to let anybody within earshot know that I was in there without actually shouting, “I’m taking a crap!” I was trying to avoid embarrassment after all. Sniffling, clearing my throat, rattling the pages on my magazine were all valid diversionary tactics.

Still many came close to crossing the fence-line. But I never allowed them one foot across the threshold before turning them back. Those who ignored my more subtle warnings were routed by a direct and forceful “Hey!” as they opened the door.

These days I’m like a man who grew up in a bathroom on the Gaza Strip—always aware of my environment, anticipating attacks and cutting them off before they occur. No latch on a men’s room stall? No problem. As soon as somebody enters the room, I augment my magazine rattling by sticking out my right leg as a doorstop. An army with a battering ram couldn’t invade my private time.

My bathroom motto is, “If you’re not prepared, then you deserve to be invaded.” At the same time, I’m sensitive to the fact that we live in a relatively soft and danger-free society where people don’t generally have to worry about protecting themselves. That’s why when I walk into a men’s room, I always check for feet under the stall. Even if I don’t see any, I gingerly tap on the door as I slowly slowly slowly push it open. I’m like the British Army during the Revolution, wearing bright red and pounding on the drums as I march toward a secret fort.

And yet there have been times when the gate has opened, and I find myself looking some middle-aged guy right in the face. And he’s just looking back at me, surprised! I guess maybe he thought it was God on the other side of the door. Why else wouldn’t he have at least said, “Somebody in here”?

I of course instinctively say, “Oh, I’m sorry,” and shut the door. But then I get mad at myself. After all, why should I be sorry? That’s like one of the bulls in Madrid apologizing to the dope in the red hat. Did he not think the bull would run directly at him?

It’s a dangerous world out there, people and the sanctuary of your bathroom won’t shield you from it. So take it from me, be prepared, protect yourself, and for God’s sake, wash your hands.

Do they still assign reading groups in school? Personally, I think they were an invaluable part of the learning process. It allowed us to quickly and easily identify all of the “slow people” so that we wouldn’t cheat off them during geography tests. Because inevitably, every group had a mascot, a giveaway. It was either the kid who could already count to a thousand by kindergarten, or the kid who was still drooling because he hadn’t figured out how to keep his bottom lip tucked. By association, you were able to pigeonhole every other kid in that group.

Reading groups were always given cutesy animal names based on the textbook you were reading. Since my first grade book was called “Travelling the Trade Winds,” my group was The Trade Wind Tigers. Everyone knew that we were the smart group as much as they knew that The Getting Ready Rabbits (their book was “Getting Ready to Read”) was the “‘tard group.” Hey, we were mean little six-year-olds and they didn’t start teaching sensitivity until third grade. Fifth grade for the Rabbits.

While we Tigers were reading thoroughly stimulating stories about Pedro who had lost his pet snake at the market, the Rabbits were still busy learning their letters and phonetics. At first, we were content to just mind our own business and call them i’jits behind their backs. But then our teacher, Mrs. Alcott did something to incite revolution. It seemed that the Rabbits were having a hard time understanding what sound the letter G made. Mrs. Alcott just couldn’t make them grasp that it was pronounced “guh” not “juh.” After about a week of no progress, she got inspired and gave all the Rabbits a piece of GUH-um. Strawberry-flavored, Bubblicious, GUH-um. She let them chew it in class and everything. Big mistake, Mrs. Alcott. Big mistake.

A powder keg had been ignited under the Tigers. We knew what sound frickin’ G made. She never gave us any gum. We nodded to each other with a silent accord and made it our immediate mission to destroy the Getting Ready Rabbits. Recess was an exercise in genocide that day as we chased the Rabbits, tackled them to the ground and stole their gum. We reveled in our own scholastic aptitude as we threw their GUH-um on the GUH-round and stomped it in the GUH-rass.

It was probably because of kids like the Tigers that the Human Potential Movement started “homogenizing” classrooms and grouping kids of all intelligence levels together. Their reasoning was that it would somehow make the kids with “learning disorders” not feel inferior to those of us who weren’t going to have jobs with paper hats. Oh, but we still knew who they were. Hiding them among the Tigers only provided temporary camouflage. We hadn’t forgotten the gum incident, and we were as persistent as Elmer Fudd hunting our Rabbits. We just had to be more methodical, dangling carrots in the form of questions, like “What is the plural of Moose?” to see if we could entrap them in answers like “Mooses.” (The correct answer is “Meese” of course.)

Unfortunately, by high school, the evolutionary playing field had been leveled and most of these Rabbits evolved into big, scary, Monty Python, psycho man-eating Rabbits. They could tear us a new sphincter had we tried taking their gum again. Stupid Darwin.

What if they split us into reading groups in our adult lives? That’d be great wouldn’t it? Maybe, instead of questions about race and religion, the census could ask us what the square root of negative one is. They could give us cute little names and everything. The Associated Press would release a report stating that, “According to the latest census, Los Angeles is comprised of 6% Mensa Monkeys, 22% Adequate Alligators, and 70% Bricks.”

(In case you’re wondering, the correct answer was “i“, a mathematical concept called an “Imaginary Number” which is only used by über-intelligent former Trade Wind Tigers who now belong to the remaining 2% group called The Too Smart For Their Own Good Gophers.)

Reading groups would make things so much simpler. If we knew that a particular street was populated by Bricks, we’d know to never stop and ask for directions. We’d go one street over to where all the Alligators lived. A poetic thought, though probably too idealistic. Eventually, people would just start abusing the system. They’d rightly assume that many Bricks forget to lock their doors, then break into their houses to steal their gum.

Back when I first told people I was becoming a dad, I made plenty of jokes hinting that I wasn’t ready: “This kid is in big trouble. I can’t even keep myself clean! Lord knows I’ll screw him up somehow. Do you know how many times I forgot to feed my cat?” The truth is I knew I was going to be a great dad. I’m no child psychologist or family wellness professional, but I had discovered the key to being a good parent. It’s quite simple actually. All you have to do is realize that, like it or not, you are not cool.

And don’t try playing the whole, “I used to be cool,” thing. As soon as you become a parent, you just have to accept the fact that you are not now, nor have you ever been, cool. You know how hard it was after the scandals and the skin dyeing to remember how cool Michael Jackson used to be? Becoming a parent negates any and all coolness you ever once achieved.

The truth became so clear to me one day while Lauren and I were babysitting our friend’s kid, Lincoln. We took two-year-old Lincoln with us to a luncheon at Lauren’s aunt’s house. There were lots of people there he didn’t know and I figured he’d probably be scared, so I did my best to make him feel comfortable. Apparently I did a good job.

Lincoln started playing a game that he must have picked up at Mommy & Me. He ran around singing, “Let’s do THIS… today! Let’s do THIS… today! Let’s do THIS… today!” Every time he said, “THIS”, he bent over and slapped his hands on the floor. Every time he said, “Today!” he jumped back up and threw them in the air. At first I just encouraged Lincoln from the sidelines, but he kept poking me and saying, “Come on!” between choruses. Before you knew it, there I was, slapping my hands down and jumping up like a cheerleader. “Let’s do THIS… today!”

All my in-laws were there. They were eating quiche, discussing current events and watching me from the comforts of their chairs with faces that said, “Dude.”

It was probably a side-effect of the blood rushing to and from my head for three hours straight, but that day I had an epiphany: “I’m going to be a great dad for no other reason than I already know I’m not cool.” Anybody who beats their hands on the floor repeatedly while singing “Let’s do THIS… today!” is obviously not cool. It didn’t bother me. Not at all. Because in Lincoln’s eyes, I was John freakin’ Lennon.

Some people try to play both sides – model parent and social butterfly. It may work for a while, but eventually that restaurant scene from Mrs. Doubtfire happens, where both personalities have to be in the same place at the same time. Your old friends and your new child are vying for your attention and only one is going to win. In front of your cool little circle, Junior is going to say, “Daddy, be a fish.” And you will have to make a decision. Do you keep talking about how Quentin Tarrantino is still “the man”? (That’s what my cool friends used to talk about.) Or do you pucker up those lips, puff out the cheeks and say, “Blub blub”?

Me, I’m down on that floor making gurgling noises and trying to swim my way across the carpet. So is any good parent who has accepted the law of nature that their child has destroyed any chance they ever had of being cool.

And the great thing is that that realization doesn’t have to be met with a sense of resignation and loss. When you’re a good parent you become cool in a new and completely novel way. After all, what could be cooler than a guy who keeps it real, who isn’t putting on a show, and who knows exactly who he is and what’s important to him? That’s the kind of guy I’d buy a beer and shoot the breeze with on a Saturday night—except I know he promised his kid he’d read him a story before bedtime. Maybe next time, Walrus.

“Let’s do THIS… today!” Dude, I am so cool.

In the whole history of human discourse, I don’t think there has ever been a more decisive stalemate breaker than the word “Infinity.” I still remember the first time I was detoured by this powerful tactic. Lucas Murphy and I were no doubt arguing over some matter of great cosmic importance. I was probably trying to convince him that grass can turn your spit green. After about twenty rounds of “oh-no-it-CAN’T–oh-yes-it-CAN–oh-no-it-CAN’T–oh-yes-it-CAN,” my nemesis anted up and floored me. “Oh no it can’t, Infinity!”

“Oh yes it— what? That’s not even a word!” I shot back. “Oh-yes-it-IS–oh-no-it-ISN’T.” Then some meddling second-grader had to put in his two cents. “Infinity means forever.” I felt like the wind had been knocked out of me. How could I argue with Lucas after that? When your reading and writing vocabulary consists of, “See Spot run,” Infinity is a hardcore word. Obviously, Lucas was the smarter man. I conceded defeat with dignity, shouting, “Yeah, well you’re a ca-ca face!” I ran away, with Lucas close behind, yelling, “I know you are but what am I!”

Infinity changed the dynamics of every schoolyard dispute. As five-year-olds, we were content to shout, “Yeah huh! No sah! Yeah huh! No sah!” until the bell rang. Because whoever gave up first was obviously the one who was wrong. Infinity forced us out of our comfortable little paradigm. Unable to sidestep this particular landmine, we were left tongue-tied time and again. The best any of us could counter with was another round of “No sah!” The more aggressive kids simply used the F-word, but everybody recognized this as a sign of weakness. A six-year-old’s only hope was to make sure he said, “Infinity,” first. It was no longer our ace in the hole. It was our primary attack.

It took several months before some kid figured out a way to break through the Infinity conundrum. I don’t remember who it was, but the kid was ahead of his time—probably learning long division already. He had somehow discovered that Infinity is actually a mathematical concept in which numbers increase indefinitely, such that no value, no matter how great, can be considered the highest. Basically, if you think twenty-gazillion is big, just add one to it. So when faced with the now notorious Infinity assault—probably at the hands of Lucas Murphy himself—this brilliant strategist countered with, “Infinity plus one!”

Whether he was aware of the fact that he was employing this concept in direct contrast to its very connotation, I just don’t know. But, whoa. It was like watching Superman exposed to kryptonite as the impenetrable Infinity argument was finally breached. Lucas, his trump card now trumped, stood there stammering, knowing we were all looking to him for a comeback. All he could muster was, “You can’t do that. Infinity means forever. You can’t add one to forever.” Even though we all knew he was probably right, it was still a hollow defense. And our new hero had banked on it. “You can SO!” he spat. “You can NOT!” said a desperate Lucas. “Yes you CAN. Infinity!” With nothing to fall back on, Lucas was forced to abandon the conviction he had just seconds ago professed. “You can not…! Two-infinity!”

As the two sparred back and forth, raising the stakes until they were into the infinity-infinity-infinity-infinity-infinity to the infinity power range, all who were looking on knew that no argument would ever be resolved the same way again. From here on out, we knew that we were going to have to actually validate our arguments with facts and data, and that no amount of yeah huh-ing or Infinity-ing were going to make a lick of difference in the ongoing drama of “I’m right and you’re wrong.”

I was not what one would call a “star” ball player in high school. On the other hand, I never made up lame excuses to get out of gym class either. I did have a jump-shot that I could sink from pretty much any spot on the floor provided nobody was guarding me. Let’s put it this way, I was enough of an athlete to feel justified in refusing “pity time.”

For those of you who a) never played sports or b) went All-State four years in a row, pity time is given during the final seconds of a game when your team is either way ahead or way behind. The coach figures no matter how incompetent you are, there is no way your presence on the court could possibly affect the outcome of the game, so he points a finger your way and yells, “Get in there!” You drag your feet onto the court, wondering which looks less pathetic; putting up six seconds of meaningless effort, or standing completely still as the ball drives past you. Personally I was always an advocate of setting a new record for fouling out.

Pity time is about the cruelest thing a coach can do to an already insecure kid. At least if a kid sits the bench the entire game, everyone will just kind of forget he’s there. But sending him in for no other reason than to say, “Hey, at least you got to play,” is like hanging a big neon YOU SUCK sign over his head.

Our JV coach began every season with the idealistic declaration, “Everybody on my team will play.” He apparently forgot that at a school of three hundred kids, only about thirty guys tried out for the team. The top fifteen went varsity, meaning it was pretty much, what-you-see-is-what-you-get for the JV squad. The coach quickly realized that putting some of these kids in for longer than six consecutive seconds would mean certain team suicide. So, to avoid being a hypocrite, he’d wait for an inconsequential moment, then say, “Go be aggressive!”

We had a teammate, Donnie Hubbard who, I kid you not, was still coming to grips with the concept of dribbling. It took over half the season to convince him that he could not run the ball like a quarterback. Donnie was just happy that people were finally allowing him to handle blunt objects in a group setting. So whenever the coach sent Donnie in for his pity time, you better believe he jumped right up and sprinted onto the court just in time to turn around and sprint right back. A banner effort, even if it was only three seconds. “Hey, at least he got to play.”

But, as I said, I felt competent enough to refuse the pity. So when I first heard, “Hodges, get in there!” during a 70–15 game, I had the backbone to say, “Screw you and your pity time too!”

To be completely honest, my backbone was of a far more soft and squishy material than all that. The conversation probably went more like:

“Hodges, get in there!”

“Um… now?”

“Yeah, and make sure you box out number twelve on the rebounds.”

“Um… I’d really rather not… if that’s okay with you.”

I seem to remember running a lot of extra laps that next practice. And still my coach tried to pity me. By about my tenth pitiful call to arms (we got slaughtered a lot that year), all that running had weakened my will to resist and I finally shuffled onto the court, tail between my legs, determined to make the best of it. Unfortunately, the blind-as-a-bat referee was looking the other way when I fouled number twelve right through the parquet floor.

That next season, in the interest of anger management, I decided it was probably best to hang up my high-tops, join the school newspaper and write scathing articles about my former coach.

I haven’t done real library research since high school. Has anybody? Of course, even in high school, a pubescent boy’s idea of research was pulling out the “B” volume from the medical texts and ogling the pictures of naked ladies with your friends. I feel lost just walking into a library now. Did you know that they don’t use card catalogues anymore? There are a lot of books in there. How does anybody get anything done?

Two factors contributed to my loss of library skills. First, my graduation from high school coincided perfectly with the great internet explosion. Second, I was a Film/Television major at a college for “Communications and the Performing Arts.” My final exam was “go make a movie.” Typical homework consisted of, “Watch Independence Day and write a critique.” Any research I ever needed was found on countless web pages from the comfort of my dorm room. Some of them were even nice enough to list book references so I didn’t need to open them. I’d make up a bibliography, turn in my “Comparison of A Weekend at Bernie’s and Hamlet” then go watch X-Files.

I suppose I’m being a bit facetious. I used real books for research too. My roommate had like seven editions of Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader, a wellspring of information about everything from the Big Bang Theory to Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. It was the perfect source for… well, another source.

Of course, I wasn’t studying law or medicine or anything like that. I look at these gigantic, lead-heavy medical texts that my poor wife had to lug around in grad school, and think, “Better her than me.” I mean you can’t even type search phrases in!

Even though I rarely use them for any practical purposes anymore, libraries still fascinate me in the way steam trains or ghost towns fascinate others. Especially older libraries like in New York or Boston where the architecture is just a little bit mystifying, with at least a dozen stairwells, all leading to different places. All over the building you find little nooks and hallways that don’t go anywhere, and rooms that, apparently, nobody has entered for several years.

These rooms are always the places where people seem to discover original manuscripts and sketches from really famous historical people, then selling them on E-bay for a million dollars. I always imagine opening up some really old dusty book and having the second Mona Lisa fall into my lap.

That’s what I’m going to do. After I become a famous writer, I’m going to stick a bunch of short stories and humor columns inside an old book for somebody to find a hundred years later. A really boring book that nobody would ever pull off the shelf like, “The Economic and Social Effects of 16^th Century Prussian Rocking Chairs on the 17^th Century English Middle Class.” Anybody who’s forced to write a term paper about that, deserves a laugh and a million bucks.

I’m sure historians from NYU will hotly debate the stories’ authenticity. They’ll carefully examine each line, analyzing the subtle Hewlett Packard printer strokes, circa 2007. Noting the misuses of, commas, the lack of grammar, incomplete sentences. “Yes!” they will declare to the world, “We have found the lost Hodges anthology, including such inspired works as, Why Do I Get Hangnails; The Funny Thing About Spoons; and Making Friends with Boogersnot Johnson.”

One day, maybe students will avoid the library while researching me from the comfort of the internet.

It’s been awhile since our country’s last school shooting and I fear that the clock is ticking down to yet another Ritalin-saturated kid going berserk and blowing away his teacher or principal. Before that happens, I make this plea to every student in America. “Please stop blowing away your teachers or principals!” Honestly, what has society come to when a kid brings a gun to school and…

Okay, in the interest of journalistic integrity, I’m afraid I must step down from this particular soapbox. That little bout of self-righteousness was actually nothing more than thinly veiled jealousy. The fact is there were plenty of teachers at my high school who I wished somebody would shoot, but nobody ever did! It didn’t seem like such an impossible dream considering the fact that everybody in my town owned a gun. Of course, this was rural Maine and most of those guns were hunting rifles—which I suppose were harder to conceal under a varsity jacket.

Hindsight being 20/20 and all, I am glad that nobody ever busted the proverbial cap on some of our more detestable teachers. First of all, I was in a lot of those mean old codgers’ classes, and I mean, hello… ricochet. Second, it took our janitor months to clean up vomit. And third, in the midst of a generation fixated on instant gratification, I was taught a valuable lesson. In situations like these, prolonged torture was often far better revenge than instant death. Pushing a teacher to the edge of sanity by undermining their authority was more priceless than a canister full of bullets.

Subtlety was the key. Subtlety and teamwork (another good lesson). Spitballs and outbursts were fun and all, but all they gained you was detention—which only served to strengthen the teacher’s perceived dominance. No, if any subversiveness was to be accomplished, it had to be done a little at a time over the course of an entire year. And every kid in the class had to be in on it. Divided we fell. United, we said, “They can’t send us all to the principal’s office.”

In Mr. Guinness’s Life Science class, we started simply. Many of us wore those digital watches that beeped on the hour. Before class one day, we spent ten minutes synchronizing them exactly two seconds apart. At precisely ten o’clock, Mr. Guinness’s lesson was interrupted by a chain symphony of hourly reminders: beep-beep…boop-boop…tweet-tweet…chirp-chirp…honk-honk…yuk-yuk… When he turned sternly from the blackboard, we were all diligently taking notes, innocently unaware that anything unusual had occurred.

While discussing the reproductive system, we took sadistic pleasure in getting Mr. Guinness to say words like Sperm and Testes over and over again. “Uh, Mr. Bailey, what bone did you say this was…? Oh, the pubic bone!”

By the end of the year, Mr. Guinness’s hair had started to thin and turn gray. The confident air he’d projected on that first day of class was a faint shadow of the rattled fear that now emanated from deep within his tortured soul. His breaking point finally came during our study of the digestive system and a lesson on Peristalsis, which Mr. Guinness described as the process by which the intestines move food through the body using “wave motions.”

To illustrate the point, the whole class spontaneously broke into “the wave”, moving from left to right and back again. Our favorite game became to see how many times we could “peristalsize” while Mr. Guinness’s back was turned. I think the record was something like fifteen. When Mr. Guinness eventually caught us in the act, we erupted in laughter, telling him that we were just trying really really hard to study Peristalsis.

Something finally popped. He slammed his pointer on the desk so hard that everybody jumped. His head turning purple and his voice reaching an inhuman pitch, Mr. Guinness bellowed at us to “SHUUUUT UUUUUUP!!!” With pure satisfaction at his complete and total loss of control, the smug look on everyone’s face said the same thing; “You can’t send us all to the principal’s office.”

So kids, take it from me. Shooting your teachers, although tempting, is never the right decision. There is far more fun to be had, messing with their heads. So be creative. Work together. And when you get suspended, don’t you dare tell you parents this was my idea!

The next person who tells me to “Ignore the bee,” is getting punched in the mouth. “Just sit still. If you leave it alone, it’ll go away. Swatting only makes it angry. Running, shrieking and whimpering will only get you stung.” I don’t care what any of you say. When a bee comes within a reasonable distance (read: when I can see or hear it), I am going to do everything in my power to keep it as far away from me as possible. I don’t care how ridiculous I look. I’ve done the sitting still thing. Believe me, I’ve done the sitting still thing.

I was probably no more than four at the time. My parents had taken us out for ice cream. Riding home in the back, contentedly licking my bubble-gum scoop and picking out the little pieces of gum for later, my perfect enjoyment was suddenly put on hold when I noticed a bee on my arm. Whether it had been attracted by the sugary smell or it just wanted to look tough by picking on a small child, I’ll never know. I could already feel the tears of horror welling up inside as I squeaked out, “Mom, there’s a bee on me.” Mom assured me to just sit still and it would fly away. So I did. I trusted her as only a child can. I trusted her as I watched the bee crawl up my arm. I trusted her as I watched the bee crawl inside my shirt. I trusted her as I felt the bee crawl around on my chest. I trusted her right up until the instant when the bee got stuck, freaked out and then stung me.

The ice cream melted down my hand and into my lap because I was too busy crying. So no, I will not sit still.

My in-laws make fun of how I deal with bugs these days. We’ll be sitting around having a nice quiet conversation when I suddenly sense that a mosquito is biting my-WHAM! Poor little bugger never saw it coming. Neither did my in-laws who are now nursing mild heart attacks in response to the gunshot sound of flesh striking flesh.

You know that scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark when Indiana Jones realizes he has spiders all over his back, so he calmly brushes them off with his whip? Yeah, I don’t do that. The nanosecond the nerves in my back register anything smaller than a chair, my whole body contorts into a corkscrew, my hands raining down blows like shock and awe on the compromised area. WHAPWHAPWHAPWHAPWHAP… This tripwire response, while effective, does generate a lot of false alarms. I have leaned back from the kitchen table only to fight off perceived attacks from grocery bags on the counter. After receiving numerous bruises to her fingers, my wife makes sure to caress my neck with her left hand, forcing me to draw blood on her diamond.

“Why do you have to be so spastic?” she and her family ask every time I defend myself against shoelaces, cats tails and curtain cords. But I know I’m right. My instincts may prove wrong ninety percent of the time, but I’m convinced that when a black widow spider finally perches itself on my neck, I’m going to be ready for him. Before his second leg even touches down-BAM! The in-laws, who used to poke fun, will, I’m sure, deal with their poisonous spiders calmly, reaching back, saying, “Hey what’s-” but too late, they’re already dead. It’s Us versus Them and you’re either quick or you’re dead.

I’m not afraid of bugs. Really I’m not. I dutifully perform my husbandly role of killing small things in our house. And I don’t do the wussy thing with the can of Raid either. I take the crunch under my shoe or between my fingers like a man. As long as I can see them, and they’re behaving rationally or dead, I’m just fine with bugs. It’s when they want to land on a living being ten-thousand times their size that I start to get suspicious. So don’t bother me with old wives tales. Don’t tell me to sit still and ignore them. A bee betrayed my trust once before and I will not be fooled again. And if I want to run, swat and scream like a little girl, I will.

Every year, the second grade in my school did a month-long project involving pen pals. They’d get a list of names from a neighboring school and have the kids write letters back and forth—learning about letter structure, the postal service and the taste of stamps along the way. The project culminated on a day when the pen pals finally met. As a final act of pen pal unity, everybody wrote one more letter, tied the letter to a balloon and released it. The balloons floated into the afternoon sky with the excitement of new pen pals just over the horizon.

I waited two long years to do the balloon thing. I was psyched to do the balloon thing. But when the day finally arrived, my second grade teacher Miss Lockjaw told us we were not doing the balloon thing this year. Something about fish choking to death. This was right around the time those tree-huggers at the EPA started making us feel guilty about all things rubber and plastic. They told us fish were mistaking grocery bags, six-pack fasteners and pen pal balloons for bait and trying to swallow them whole. They (the EPA, not the fish) had apparently never stopped to consider the theory of Natural Selection which states that, “Any animal who selects its food before verifying that it is in fact natural, does not deserve to reproduce.”

I blame them (the EPA and the fish) for my pen pal never writing back.

I was a very committed child. When I decided I wanted to do something, I didn’t let bleeding heart greenies stand in my way. If the second grade wasn’t going to help me send a balloon to a new pen pal, I was prepared to go it alone. Unfortunately, I had no idea how the whole process was supposed to work.

The letter part was easy.

Dear Pen Pal,
How are you? I am fine. Do you like to go sledding? I do. I have a cat and a dog. Do you have dogs? They are fun. Aren’t fish stupid? Write back soon.
Love,
Brian

Perfect letter structure. Thanks Miss Lockjaw. But with nobody around to teach me the mechanics of this particular mailing method, I had to learn by trial and error. The first important rule I learned is that you must tie the letter to the balloon and release it on the day the balloon is inflated. I got sidetracked after tying my letter to a leftover birthday balloon. It’s tough getting anything done when your bedtime is seven o’clock. So the balloon just floated in my room for a few days. I woke up one morning to discover it was no longer floating, but simply… hovering. When I finally released the balloon, it immediately sank to the ground under the weight of the letter.

But I learned my lesson, and when the next opportunity (and balloon) presented itself, I tied that letter on and let it fly right away. Up and up it went, off to find me a new pen pal. I watched until it cleared the horizon, excited but perplexed. How on earth was my pen pal ever going to write back to me? The odds of their balloon finding me by sheer chance seemed astronomical. But I figured, others have done it, it must just work out somehow. Had the fish and the EPA not discouraged Miss Lockjaw from doing the balloon thing, maybe somebody could have explained to me that I actually had to put my return address on the letter! How the heck could I have known that? How could I have known that after the initial balloon was sent, everything from that point on was supposed to take place via the Post Office?

I waited and waited for my balloon to come back. But it never did. Realization didn’t dawn on me until several years later and by then it was too late. So if anybody reading this column found a letter attached to a balloon in rural Maine around 1986 that mentioned something about sledding and dogs, please contact me through this website.

And to all the fish and employees of the EPA, I hope you choke on a plastic bag.

The cooks in our elementary school didn’t take kindly to criticism. They yelled and made us spend recess inside with our heads down whenever we complained about the burnt pizza, hairs in our yogurt or rubbery meat in the spaghetti sauce. It had gotten so bad that by Christmas of fifth grade, our teacher forced me and my trouble-maker friends to write the cooks a formal apology. We drew happy pictures of ourselves eating cafeteria food under inscriptions like, “I’m sorry I said your meatloaf tasted like Play-doh… From now on I’ll just pick around the brown lettuce… My mom told me it was just a stomach flu.”

We choked down our spongy carrots and freezer-burned fishsticks without a word for a while after that, but a constant sense of impending vomit can only be kept silent for so long. By May that year, the cooks and lunch monitors had resorted to all out ignoring us, saying, “Just go!” whenever we so much as asked for a shaker of salt. We took it begrudgingly. It was spring and none of us wanted to risk any more recesses inside.

Everything came to a head the day our gang got to the cafeteria late. Our teacher had undoubtedly held us back to yell about something trivial, and by the time we got to the cafeteria, everything was gone. Not the food of course. There were always sufficient economy-sized, re-thawed, re-heated food-like products on hand to survive the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. No, on this particular day they had run out of silverware. Not a clean knife or spork to be found.

This time we felt perfectly justified in raising our concerns, but the lunch monitor cut us off, “Just go!” The cooks turned a reflexive deaf ear to us saying, “I don’t want to hear it boys!” And when that spatula slammed down on our tray, plopping the day’s nutrition into one of five pre-portioned slots, we knew they meant business.

On any other day, I think we would have continued pushing our point, even if it meant risking yet another recess inside. But the group of us, in a rare moment of psychic harmony, all decided to let it go when we saw what was on the menu: Sloppy Joes and blueberry cobbler. The latter was a relative term of course—pie filling and Cool Whip really—but it was certainly a meal that one would not want to eat with one’s hands… unless, of course one, was a smartass eleven-year-old with an axe to grind.

Oh the fun we had that day, devouring our government sanctioned Hot Lunch (again, a relative term) with bare hands and the ravenousness of starving children. We shoved Sloppy Joes into the general vicinity of our mouths. Some hit its mark. The rest slid down our faces. We closed our fists around handfuls of blueberries, squishing half of it into our mouths and letting the rest ooze down our forearms.

Did I mention that they had run out of napkins that day as well?

The lunch monitors yelled of course. But what else could we say through smiling mouthfuls of ground beef and fruit product as we wiped our hands on the fold-out tables? “They didn’t have silverware.” And then the most amazing thing happened. Not only didn’t they make us spend recess inside with our heads down, but the lunch monitor actually ran to get us the silverware we had been asking for.

We were baffled. Somehow, we had won. We had subverted the entire cafeteria system, and the teachers and cooks had been powerless to stop us. We’d acted like bratty inconsiderate snots and gotten away with it! We should have been relishing our victory and making plans for new and exciting ways to make mischief. If only we had realized the truth.

Fortunately for all our future teachers—and okay, for us too—our parents had instilled a healthy fear of adults as unshakeable bastions of authority. Had we pushed forward, the sixth grade academic and nutritional world could have been ours to manipulate and control. Instead, afraid that retribution was just over the horizon, we eased off on the cooks, giving them time to regroup. By the time we came back to school that next year, they were ready for us. Any further attempts at rebellion were dealt with swift and harshly. We had no choice but to deal with another year’s worth of bad food… and recesses spent inside with our heads down.