How I Most Likely Got Brainwashed into Kylie Minogue

This afternoon I saw an old classmate from grade school. Her name, "E." She has a son, I didn't notice the kid since she still had the prettiest smile. We recognized one another and exchanged a smile with a partial nostalgic hand wave. I've seen her a couple of times in the past 2 or 3 years, though its the first time I've seen her son. Its weird because today E looks like a mom, like an adult woman walking her son home from school but when she smiles I see her at about her son's age back in first grade in 1988.

I had a few crushes in grade school, E was never one of them but I always thought she was pretty. In first grade we sat at the same table. One day I thought I'd cheat on my writing exercise, we were suppose to work on our letter Ts, so I figured to make things easier I'd write out a series of vertical lines, like a bunch of lower case Ls and then in one long stroke, I'd pass a horizontal line through all the lower case Ls to transform them into crossed Ts. Of course when Mr. Cohen made his rounds and came upon my desk he didn't find it as clever as I did, in fact, he said I had to do it over. E and the other girl at our table thought the humiliating correction to be hilarious. I wasn't too fond of either girl much after that.

I also remember that E had a thing for the Dirty Dancing soundtrack as well as Locomotion by Kylie Minogue. Everyday after recess, Mr. Cohen had us lay our heads down and he'd play music for ten to fifteen minutes, whenever E got to pick the playlist it was a sure bet, Hungry Eyes, Time of my Life, and/or Locomotion. E was a dark puerto rican girl with long dead black hair, she looked like a native american princess dressed like a mini Molly Ringwald.

Mr. Cohen by the way always reminded me of Tom Hanks.

Pirates of the Caribbean

O brave new world that has such people in't!

In Junior High School, my 7th grade social studies teacher was a diabetic and a rather large man who had a hard time getting around. He sat behind his desk in front of the class and dictated the lesson. The blank blackboard would stare at us students, jealously curious as to how the teacher's word would look in written form. In that class, I saw Last of the Mohicans, and obediently covered my eyes during Daniel Day-Lewis and Madeleine Crowe's sex scene (later I would discover it was only a steamy kiss). Earlier however, in October, my classmates and I took our seats and Mr. T (as he had asked us to call him as a mercy to his ears from potential mispronunciations) had started the lesson about Christopher Columbus. .

It was the first time I ever heard anyone refer to Columbus as a pirate. It was the first time anything I had been previously taught was challenged by an alternative, logical version. He was the first but not the last of my teachers who dropped gems when The Board wasn't looking. So every Columbus Day reminds me of that discovery. I call it Tabachnikov Day!

Confessions of a Crap Artist: A Punctual Failure

When I was in high school, I was an awful student. I do not mean that I was the rowdy, back-talking, antagonistic teen who threw erasers or batteries at teachers and stole homework from other students, etc. No, it was far simpler than that, I was just inattentive and genuinely disinterested in school. Unique? No. I was one of the many who felt exactly the same way about high school during the most unsure years of our lives.

To make matters worst, I was also very punctual. I held a nearly immaculate attendance and rarely was ever late to class. In class, however, I'd space. I'd travel in my mind and every 45 minutes of a period would be a vague hallucination, a mirage at my peripheral while I'd spend my daydreams on more relative matters such as, girls I had constant crushes on, what I'd do with superpowers, and becoming the best hip-hop lyricist before reaching eighteen years of age. I didn't cut class regularly until senior year (you'd think that'd be the year I start sharpening my act) and even then not as often as others, who, starting far earlier than myself had by that point dropped out or only made monthly appearances maybe out of boredom.

No, I'd appear every day to class to attend my failure. I was there for every step of the decline. I didn't care for homework or well prepared studying, eventually I didn't even feel embarrassed for not caring, I'd stare teachers in their disappointed faces a bit proudly and say, "no, I didn't do the assignment." What a stupid kid. It would've been nice to have been interested. Most of the teachers that really taught me anything were around for my elementary and middle school years but by the time of high school I was of the idea, 12 years of schooling is a bit much. Needless to say the thought of college horrified me, the idea of even more school after all this high school business is finally over. In fact after 4.5 years of high school (you didn't really think I graduated on time did you?) the only thing I was grateful for were a few friends, fewer free lunches, and my handwriting, which I stole from U.S. History's Mr. Garabidi, and that was in night school.

The ironic thing is, everything they taught in school that didn't interest me, I later read about or learned on my own through books, films, music and people; and so, I was fascinated by history, math, science, and literature at one point or another but all these points follow one another, only after high school.

It still amazes me that I sat in class day after day, writing rhymes or sketching while the teacher mumbled a lesson in the background. I'd be there for the only reason that I had nowhere else to go, nothing better to do. Retrospectively, its not something I'm too proud of. I should've had somewhere else to go, something else to do. If school was a waste I should've left it instead of wasting my time failing classes. Since then and possibly also because of "then" I have developed a hatred for time wasted. Yet I can't help to think that I'm starting to feel these current days are waste. I feel like I'm sitting through my current present life daydreaming while a lesson is being mumbled in the background and I'm punctual as fuck, I'm there for every second of the blasted thing yet I'm failing but I won't leave, I won't cut or skip out, I just sit there disinterested, inattentive and passing the time.