As you may be aware I enjoyed annoying my art teacher in high school. One thing that anyone who has taken an art class has had to do is to draw a still life scene. In our class the teacher loaded a table in the middle of the room with fake fruit, plants, random junk and bovine skeletons. She had spotlights shining onto the subjects. We were told to select three items from the scene to draw. As you might guess this was my selection:
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Many people freak out when someone famous gets near them. I have never envied the famous when it came to privacy or the ability to do things in public. For this reason I am pretty sure that I will never meet anyone famous.
At a church youth activity when I was in high school we had a stick pull competition. The two contestants sit on the ground with their feet together and pull on a stick between them, with the goal of pulling the other person out of their place or having them let go of the stick.
A house exploded next to the office for the job I just got laid off from. I went in to move some stuff out and had to clean up some glass. A local news lady came by and asked me a couple of questions and then they filmed me sweeping. I checked their news story about it and was amazed to see my television debut. I was actually on TV once as a kid singing a song at school but all the other kids were there and you couldn’t really see me. In this one I am clearly visible. Enjoy:
One simmering summer day a friend of mine decided we should go see what all the ‘wonder’ was about at the local “Water Wonderland”. I had never been to this mystical oasis and decided it might be fun. Upon entering the park it didn’t seem to look as enticing as the commercials led me to believe through my entire childhood. But, I figured as long as they had water I would enjoy it.
I really miss quite a few things about Christmas in Midland Texas:
Re-posting from a year ago.
One Thanksgiving, when I was in my early teens, one of my Grandfathers neighbors told him that he and his family had named a turkey and started treating it like a pet. As a result they did not have the heart to kill it for their Thanksgiving dinner. He offered it to my Grandpa. My Grandpa saw this as a great opportunity to teach us grandkids about how it used to be.
In a college class that I was required to take called “Developing Multimedia for Accessibility”, I had a teacher that really got under my skin. He had no plan for the class at all and he would just ask us what we wanted to do for the class. The first 5 weeks of class was an endless repeat of the teacher asking us what we wanted to do for the final, which was apparently going to be our entire grade. I decided to stop going to class and come back near the end of the semester when things were solidified. I popped in for one class in the middle of the semester and was amazed at what I heard.
Looking back, I was either a very good student and my teacher loved me or I was a loudmouthed nightmare. I am not sure what makes me behave differently in different situations but I am sure that I really bothered my high school art teacher. She was much too patient with me for how obnoxious I was. I wasn’t mean or anything I was just a super smart alec and maybe sometimes I reached a mean level. For example, We did a calligraphy section and I turned in this masterpiece:
One day when I was in the ninth grade, I was eating food from the school cafeteria. It was a tray of school nachos. It didn’t taste too horrible, just as bad as you would expect from stale chips covered with questionable beef and ultra-processed cheese product. As I progressed to the bottom of the tray I noticed something that looked a little like an olive. At first I thought, “That’s strange. It’s an olive. I have never seen an olive in a school nacho tray before.” After further inspection I came to find it was the back shell of a cockroach. At that moment I seriously considered bulimia. Needless to say, I never ate a school lunch after that again in my life.
