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.
I had pretty low expectations for the day as I climbed into my friends beefed up mustang. It was red with a big spoiler and some ground effects panels. My friend Blake had a nice sound system in there and a very powerful engine. We were headed with a big group to Lake Colorado City in Texas to go water skiing, tubing and such. Just riding to the lake in Blake’s car was enough fun for me and could only be improved upon if he let me sit on his lap like a 4 year old and move the steering wheel back and forth while driving. We got to the lake and a group of friends loaded into the boat and went out water skiing. Those of us that rode in Blake’s car just stayed and waded out in the water a little, just hanging out.
I didn’t want to go. I had made it perfectly clear several times that I was not going to enjoy a family trip to Atlanta during spring break. In spite of my efforts I still had to go. The actual vacation was pretty uneventful. The only slightly enjoyable thing was going to Stone Mountain which apparently has a disturbing history.
Teen may be the ugliest of four letter words. We have teen angst, teen idols, teenie boppers, teen sensations, teen pregnancy and yes, even teenagers; all of which are stupid in one way or another. I know what you are thinking: “But you were a teenager once too.” Yes I was and I hated every minute of it. Let me take you on my journey of disgust for all things teen.
Since April fools I have been thinking about dumb things I have done to people. Some of them I must plea the 5th on and some are fairly harmless. I was talking with Brandon about this one that we pulled on one of our old roommates. We were really really bored and had some balloons, so we filled them up, put faces on them and placed them in strategic locations where our roommate would run across them at different times.
