The Gym

Often times older people come to the gym. for whatever reason they always say yes when they sign up and get asked if they want to pay extra for a trainer. 

The trainer leads them over to the ellipticals and explains to them, "This is an elliptical. You get on it by putting your feet on those foot shaped pedals and you hold on to those ski pole things with your hands." 

The person climbs on uneasily and tries to make it go. It's awkward- like newborn calf awkward. The trainer smiles, "Good! See? Just like walking. do that for an hour. " They go back to the desk. 

Well this fella comes to the gym in his stone washed jeans and rugged outback sneaker/boots. He's got the same shaggy brown haircut he got after he saw the Beatles back in 65. He's wearing really thick glasses, the kind you can't see through from this side. so his eyes are kinda magnified wich makes his confused expression more pronounced. 

They stick him on the machine a few down from me and leave him there. 

Now the nice thing about the gym is that all the ellipticals and treadmills have a TV attached with a little headphone jack so you can plug in and channel surf your hour away. The controls are fairly simple to figure out. There's a power button, a hole for the headphone cord, and two arrows for channel and volume. They're pretty prominent too since they're on a separate box bolted to the control panel on the machine. 

I'm watching my own screen with my headphones in, not really paying attention, but I start noticing this guy's leaning over weird trying to see around his screen and messing with the buttons on the machine. After a minute or two more of this "wrestling match"- reminds me of the old Nature programs when the cheetah finally catches up to the antelope and has to kind of jump on/start eating, except he  doesn't do it so gracefully. I guess he was pretty exasperated. He shouts out to the trainer at the desk, "Hey How do you get some television on this thing!!!" the trainer comes over and I guess decides he'll be safer sitting on a recumbent stationary bike. As he staggers off toward the bikes, I notice The big white T-shirt he's wearing. Looks like it has a marijuana leaf on it. I wondered though because I'm going off illustrations on the bathroom walls in  junior high. And the guy's at least 47. You don't really expect that from this age group. Then I saw the slogan. In big green letters it stated, "Don't step on the grass!!!" 

Good outfit for the gym. 

The Worst Restaurant EVER

I like trying new things

...with food anyway.

 Probably because last Christmas was my first experience with Sushi and I love it. I need to include that fact since what I'm about to tell you would be negative no matter how good the food was if I distrusted unfamiliar foods. I don't. So what I'm going to tell you is doubly disgusting if you do.

And now the story of how I found the worst restaurant I've ever been to in my life.

My cousin told me about this little Sushi place downtown with half off Tuesdays and Thursdays. Most people don't trust half price sushi in a landlocked state 700 miles from the beach, but Sharlene and I were feeling adventurous so we went looking for it.

We found a window along the street with a few flags I didn't recognize and somewhere must've been the words “sushi” or “Asian” or something like that so we parked the car and went in. The withered hostess seemed to be from somewhere else since her answer to, “Do you have sushi?” was to lead us back past the buffet and Mongolian barbeque to a table with some little teal plates wrapped in cellophane..

Lest you picture this wrong let me describe. The entire place from the carpet to the upholstery was a seafoam greenish blue so it felt like climbing into the behind-the-seat area of an old station wagon. And the place was completely empty except for the hostess and a fat man wedged behind a table gulping down noodles. The Mongolian barbeque wasn't on. And, I'm not sure why, but at that moment the raw meat sitting out buffet-style in front of it didn't make me worry. “It's a restaurant.” I thought. “Surely the food is safe.”

It was $8.99 for “allyoucaneebuffet” so like an idiot I said, “Sure.”

The hostess motioned to the back wall smiling and nodding her head. We looked. It was an old stand up freezer filled with dented old chunk encrusted freezer-burned ice cream.

“Oh. Ice cream.” I smiled.

She nodded profusely and went to get our Sprites.

They came free with the buffet. Meanwhile Sharlene and I grabbed plates and started our search for anything sort-of-fresh looking. Our first plates were the most exotic with selections of pork and I think chicken and some fried green bean things. Sharlene took advantage of the sushi table taking three or four little plates. It looked like salmon on mine. As I passed the Mongolian barbeque I chanced a closer look at the meats sitting out in the open.

They didn't look healthy.

Imagine opening a fresh frozen Styrofoam bottomed package of boneless chicken. You unwrap it, turn it upside down, and dump it on your kitchen floor, turn up your heat, and go on vacation. What you see when you get back is what was laying there. It needed buried.

As I got back to the table Sharlene had already pushed aside most of what she had on her plate and was cautiously unwrapping one of her sushis.

She didn't eat it.

I tried some of mine- makes me gag now.

I still remember the smell when I unwrapped it. It was like opening the fridge after a fishing trip and your trout are laying there on a plate with a little bit of trout blood surrounding them, and they're all staring wide-eyed at you like they still can't believe you did this to them.

It was that.

Not like real sushi. Not with tasty spices or whatever it is they roll in there that makes it taste good. This was half an ounce of white rice with my dead goldfish laying on it.

I didn't eat the other piece. The hostess came back out to check on us. Like an idiot, I nodded and smiled, not wanting to hurt her feelings.

I think there's something wrong with me.

Sharlene snuck her unopened sushi back to the buffet while the hostess wasn't looking. I figured as long as it was all-you-can-eat I should get my money's worth. So I searched the buffet again for anything I could safely eat. As I found some shrimp on ice I thought, “Hey! Something refrigerated!” Then I noticed someone hacking out a lung in the kitchen. How appetizing. But maybe whoever it was wasn't working when they made the food yesterday or the day before so I took the shrimp. 

But it smelled like a dumpster.

Sharlene sat across from me with that look.

“What?”

“You shouldn't pay.”

“But we took food... And Sprite!”

“I just don't think you should pay.” She sipped at her sprite.

I looked down at my two unfinished plates. “We could try the ice cream.”

She didn't smile.

“If we hadn't eaten yet, it'd be different, but-”

“We haven't.” She gestured to the unfinished plates.

“So just tell her... I'm not paying?”

I sat uncomfortably for another five minutes fighting my conscience over how to put it tactfully. The hostess finally came out to see if we wanted anything else.

“No. We're done.”

Have you ever realized mid-story that you should have done something differently, but you can't now because you already did what you did?

Well I looked at the lady and then at the food and said, “I'm sorry, but this isn't edible. We thought you served food here... but this is garbage. Have you obtained the proper licensing to serve food publicly? Because this is unacceptable.”

I stood up and took Sharlene by the hand. She beamed back at me with all the love and admiration a woman can beam with. The old lady started apologizing and offering gift certificates for free dinners. We passed them to a starving homeless man sitting just outside on the sidewalk. He grinned toothlessly and lept to his feet to hug me. A reporter for the nightly news was out doing an interview with the mayor but stopped when she saw us helping the poor stranger. The entire camera crew rushed across four lanes of heavy traffic as the music swelled-

I signed the dang receipt vowing never to try miscellaneous “Asian” buffets ever again.

The door swung open and four smiling men came in sniffing the air hungrily. Apparently they'd been here before because the host remembered what each of them wanted to drink. One of them hoped loudly that they still had that sweet and sour pork he loved so much.

We staggered out. I felt a little green. Tossing and turning that night, I was sure I'd be waking up around 3am with that awful churning stagnant garbage-in-your-stomach feeling of food poisonings gone by. But I didn't. I was fine.

Amazing.

So there you go. That's how I found the worst restaurant I've ever been to in my life... and PAID for it.

It even topped the Dollar Wok In next to my first summer job at a jet ski rental shop.

That's pretty bad because that was in Tillicum. 

But that's a story for another day.

Here's my impression of the sushi there. If you want to make things like this from pictures you find with google images like these: 
Then get photoshop.

Bed Wetting

It's interesting that as a child you think you're the loan freak when in fact the truth is that most of the kids at school only knew what it was because they did it.


You're really only one step up from diapers. I'm pretty sure a few kids in my kindergarten class still wore them.
Imagine you didn't know what it was.
Imagine the shock of first finding out that it even happened; that people actually went to the bathroom while still laying in bed... all over themselves.


Imagine that reaction.
Then compare it with how they all acted when somebody actually got accused of doing it.


Not even close.
They knew very well that feeling of relief; the growing warmth; the unstoppable dread as you realized that you weren't in a bathroom at all! It was a dream! This was a bed! Your bed! You tried to stop but it was impossible. So then you'd have to lay there covered in a gallon of your own urine at 1:13 in the morning wondering what to do next.


They were guilty; every last one of them.


Accusing the ugly kid made everybody feel better though.

How I Won The Crayon War

Thought I'd better explain the header on this blog.

For those of you to which numbers have a great deal of meaning and happen to know my age, the label at the top of the blog might have you a bit confused. 1987 doesn't seem to be a significant year in my life.

The answer is to be found in just how many years after my birthday on the first of July 1982 the September of 1987 had me.

Five.

I was five and it was school that became a part of my life that year like a relative moving into your attic with no plans to vacate the premises for a good long while.

You see, my mother was an artist and so i guess it never occurred to her to correct us in our artistic endeavors at home because art is art and children are apt to do whatever they like including coloring outside lines.

But when school became a welcome guest in my life, it soon became unwelcomed and loathsome because of the idea in my teachers' heads that there is a right and wrong to crayons.

Now I'm an adult I can see that crayons have very little application in grown up society and if any of the A grade receiving children of days past moved on to jobs coloring maps in map shops because of the precision with which they first outlined each country, then filled in the body while keeping painstakingly within the lines, I'll swim to Bangladesh with the next herd of reindeer going that way.

Not that keeping within lines ever concerned me. I didn't much care how teachers "liked" or didn't like my work. My first memory of really being frustrated with teachers using art as a vehicle for societal conformity happened because it was a requirement for leaving the classroom at the end of the day.

My kindergarten single-wide trailer sat in a swamp in South Carolina. My teacher, Ms. Bailey, decided this particular day to reinforce the idea that we were prisoners she ought to make it harder to leave. Our assignment was to color a self portrait and bring it to her to be ridiculed before returning home for afternoon cartoons. I felt confident I could do this and so soon had my paper in hand, my bag on my back, and myself in the line forming to head out to freedom.

She stopped me when she saw the hair.

In my childhood I had very light blonde hair. Being light blonde and five I assumed in my ignorance that a white crayon might work since other children sometimes called my hair white.

I had eight crayons. It didn't take long to see I was deficient in "light blonde."

She frowned at me and explained why I was confused and that "your hair isn't white Benjamin."

I turned back to the table. Only the five or six really mentally retarded kids in my class remained.

I tried to erase the white and found out that doesn't do anything but smear the white with a lot of black from the outline.

Yellow.

Add yellow to white and you should get blonde. Right? It was worth a try. But the yellow just sort of smeared over the top. It looked really crappy.

She looked angry this time. I wasn't sure what she expected me to do, but this obviously wasn't it.

"Your hair is not yellow Benjamin." You may start to understand why I go by Ben.

This went on for about a half hour.

Me being told what color my hair wasn't, going back, and continuing to see how inadequately equipped my stupid kindergarten crayons were at recreating realistic lifelike colors.

I think the paper finally ripped as I tried unsuccessfully to mix brown and gold into the mess my head had become. Ms. Bailey, its a wonder the kind soul never married, finally let me go home because the afternoon kids were filing in and an eight year old returning for his third try wanted the seat I was in.

Another pleasant experience in coloring came what seemed like years later because we moved to Florida in between, but was really just the next year in first grade.

We were in my math class.

I guess I should elaborate. For some strange reason the entire school besides the office and the library consisted of trailers connected by covered walkways patrolled constantly by power hungry fifth graders in orange road construction vests. Many of them I believe are  still wearing one.

It was this math class where for a number of weeks our time was spent numbering graph paper. We sat busily filling in each square of graph paper with numbers. I think the teacher called this "counting exercize".

I apologize for the lack of detail on the teacher but I had seven. I think my goal in school at this point was filling my folder as thick as I could before the end of the year. This was accomplished by never turning anything in. Every paper I got whether homework assignment, permission slip, or note to my parents about my lack of drive was added to the two inch thick collection I proudly carried with me.

I also remember spending much of my class time pushing my eyelids from the sides to make the room go sideways so the teacher seemed to stand on the wall. It was a productive year.

Counting exercizes lost their intrigue when I reached a hundred and realized the numbers just started over again like the double digits. There were no new numbers. 
1-9 was all there ever would be. This really disappointed me. I remember thinking adults were a lot dumber than I'd imagined if the only things really  separating us were this and height .

Some of the more eager students at my table got all the way into the four and five hundreds.

One day, as a result of a parent teacher conference or threats of firing my math teacher gave us something else to do.

Worksheets.

All I noticed was the picture of the turtle smiling back at me. I heard the word crayons and so put two and two together- MATH- and got mine out to begin coloring. Here was an assignment I could sink my teeth into. As the other children at my table began solving the addition problems at the top of the page to unlock which colors went with which number in the picture, I gathered up every ounce of observable reference material in my head and began.

My brother had two turtles at home. I was familiar with the complexity of colors making up the shell and skin of the North American Terrapin. I pulled out a brown crayon and started on the rim of the shell. Whoever drew this hadn't looked at real turtles much. It was way too curvy and I'd never seen a real turtle smile.

Gasps of horror suddenly exploded from the ignoramuses I was forced to share table space with. "What are you doing?"

"You're not even in the lines!"

"I'm telling!"

A hand shot up followed by the other arm rested horizontally across the head to help hold up the signal arm. She would wait however long it took to ensure my demise.

I'm not sure if the teacher ever got around to helping my dismayed table-mate or not. I guess if counting was really considered challenging, then addition was bound to stump a few in the audience. I apologize for the lack of detail here but I honestly don't recall any response to my work.

I was proud of what I'd accomplished with some white and yellow here, and some greens, browns, and oranges there. It really resembled Tom. That was my brother's turtle, the browner of the two. I was really pleased with my work and who cared what a bunch of kids with boring green turtles thought of it. I was sure my teacher would appreciate my creativity if she'd seen it, but of course, if she didn't come over to answer the raised hand, then she missed her chance.

Like everything else, It went in my folder.

Hence the blog undertitle, Coloring outside the lines since 87.

Its kind of funny. From my failed experiences coloring as a child, you'd think I'd never qualify for a coloring job. But I did.

I'm a colorist.

That means I'm in charge of the color balance, saturation, and contrast of footage in the TV shows, commercials, and movies I work on.

So I guess if you or someone you know is struggling with school, I'm a bad example. But I'm happy because its much better than filling graph paper with numbers for a living.

Brooksby Color Demo Reel from Ben Brooksby on Vimeo.

The Great Escape

Once upon a time I ripped my pants in the sixth grade.
 I don't know how it happened, or when it happened, only that it did.

The horrifying realization that at least six inches of inseam, 
the most important six inches-
 that up to this point you've trusted completely to remain tightly and securely sewn together are now completely unsewn and open as the parted red sea for the children of Israel to walk through, happened to me about four hours into the day during a German folk dancing assembly.


 This was due to the helpful sitting position employed in my elementary school assemblies because of the belief that the best way to improve circulation in a child's extremities and compress space was to have us squeeze into rows via Indian style on a cold gym floor.

I was sitting there happily enjoying the numbing sensation when I happened to glance down and relive a nightmares of recurrent nature where I discovered halfway into a school day that in my haste to arrive and learn I'd failed to put on pants. I squeezed my elbows down into my lap as far as possible hunching myself in a ball hoping a stupid fifth grader wouldn't feel the need to glance back and notice. That's all it would take to sound the alarm and my life would be over. Things like this spread like wildfire in a bored assembly.

Just as I felt I'd successfully folded myself into complete and relative safety, the professional folk dancers, not exactly sure how you aspire to this, but they decided a good way to keep our attention on the front of the room would be to jump and skip through the audience with jaunty grins pulling random children into the polka. I felt semi safe for a millisecond as I comforted myself with thoughts of safety in back rows. But the fear soon gripped me again as a guy in lederhosen and a few ladies in fluffy dresses came skipping back to our section. I stared at the floor and by the quirky enthusiasm of certain kids in my class was spared going forward to parade my problem to the entire student body. It was the worst assembly I think I ever attended, including the frequent ones where we had to sing in unison, "Peacemakers talk about it. They don't fight about it. They want to make up and be friends." I think this is the reason so many kids from my elementary school got beat up in Junior High and High School.

The rest of the day was agonizing. Every time I would relax a little, the teacher sensing someone in the room was dreading being called on would begin pointing fingers and having students tramp up to the board to try and write on it, something that  would inevitably scrawl up and down without lined paper to guide it and inevitably would be to small to be read from more than three feet away, but no matter. My teacher smelled fear and so was compelled to point. I avoided detection again till afternoon recess.

Lucky for me, I had no friends in elementary school. The situation would have been ten times worse with friends since no friend at that age can ever be trusted to keep such a hilariously juicy morsel a secret for long. I chose to play wall ball, an unusual choice any day since most children play this game with two or more people, but it was the location I fancied. The wall ball wall was the farthest north wall of the school right next to the little alley we'd walk through in the morning to get there.

I stood there, thighs clenched, idly bouncing the ball every few minutes to avoid looking conspicuous. My eyes flitted from duty to duty. For those of you that are unfamiliar let me explain:

A duty is the only adult on the playground during recess. The duty's job is to stop little boys from doing anything interesting. The school usually hires from the parents of the loudest and most annoying little girls in the school in order to increase her effectiveness on the grounds. They wore dark glasses for the same reason they did in high school during the early 60's, so it was impossible to tell where they were really looking and when they yelled in your face all you were greeted with was the cowering reflection of your own tear stained face. They carried whistles which they blew constantly while pointing thus sentencing kids to "the wall". Not my wall, but one of the middle ones where they could be derided and ridiculed by all grades at once.

And so it was the duties I now had my eyes on, but not too much when they were turned my direction for nothing irks a duty more than to be watched. I pretended interest in my little game knowing that if I looked like I wasn't doing anything, I'd probably end up on the wall as had happened once in fourth grade when I didn't feel like playing with anybody and decided to sit on a bench. First mistake. Never sit down during recess.

So I waited, amazed at the audacity of my own resolve. Was I actually going to do it? I had to. I had no choice. Nearly every member of my class had been called on. I could feel it. I would be next. The teacher would point. What excuse could I give? Nothing. Once the teacher calls for you to stand, there is no way out. My life would be over. I had to. Just as I reached my decision the most incredible miracle since the parting of the red sea happened.

I looked at the chubby duty to my left guarding the jump ropers. Her back was turned. With lightning quickness my eyes flashed right, to the skinny one with the ugly hair by the kickball field. She was blowing her whistle and pointing... at a kid on the other side of the field! Somehow the stars had aligned and both duties were turned the same direction at the same time!

No time to celebrate. I turned and ran as fast as I could toward the end of the wall. I should have been closer to it. I should have been faster. It was like running slow motion in a dream. As I rounded the corner I glanced behind me searching the horizon for the dark silhouettes of the duties. Surely they'd seen me. Nothing like this had ever happened. Two hours before school had ended I was running through the funny pedestrian only gate on the side of the school, designed I guess in the hopes that children would be forced into single file from the very beginning of the day. I ran suddenly aware as I rounded out in front that I was visible to every classroom window on the front side of the school. But two angry duties might also be on my tail. I ran with all my might which was faster than normal no doubt aided in my flight by the absence of inhibiting fabric between my legs.

It was then that I realized the real problem with my escape route. Waller Road Elementary sat right on its namesake, a long, straight, and flat two lane affair frequented by local traffic. So I ran, ignoring the confused expressions of passers by, intent only on one thing: living to see tomorrow. The duties might be right behind me in their cars. Whole classrooms might be in an uproar over the "escaped student" that just flew by their window. The cops might be getting the call right now from some old lady neighboring the school that a kid just ran by two hours before class let out and that they'd better bring the dogs. I couldn't tell.

 Too exhausted to look back and to scared to stop running I pounded on down the shoulder longer than any fat kid has ever run.

Finally after what seemed like eternity I rounded the corner onto the safety of my street. I slowed my pace and began to relax. Surely they'd have trouble finding me now that I'd turned. They'd probably just stay on Waller wondering where I'd disappeared to.

 I squeezed through a barbed wire fence into an empty pasture below the hill my house was on. I sat down in the soft grass and removed my shoes basking in my new-found freedom. I dipped my toes in the cold stream and caught little frogs for what seemed like hours. Actually it was.

Two hours later I heard the familiar growl of my bus climbing the hill.

 I wasn't on it.

How superior I felt as I watched the bus make its way up the hill. I could hear the trapped voices of my schoolmates aboard its rickety chassis. As the air brake squeeshed at the top of the hill I had the sudden realization that I didn't know what to say when my mother asked why I wasn't on the bus.

 Realizing that your parents are going to ask questions you don't want to answer is one of the key problems with childhood.

I ran up the hill.

Luckily Mom was busy doing some kind of Mom thing like dishes or canning or something so I just passed off some story about the bus taking so long to get there at the end of the day that I decided to race it home on foot.

 Almost had it too. Hill just slowed me down.

 I made sure to breath really hard and move around a lot so she wouldn't notice I was missing a backpack. 

It worked.

The next day as I walked through the pedestrian only gate I realized another problem. My teacher was going to notice I wasn't there. 

He was going to ask.

 What would I say? 

Bathroom? Two hours? 

No. 

Wouldn't work. 

Nurse's office? Don't they tell the teacher when you go there? 

There was a line and I had to wait. 

Yeah... maybe yeah.

As we filed into the classroom I sat down nervously and began arranging my things on my desk, ready at any moment to provide my excuse.

 But no questions came. 

Not even from my fellow students.

 It turned out that nobody'd even noticed I'd left...

The worst part is that now that I look back on it, I wonder why I didn't go play in the creek more often.

What a colossal waste.

note: Ben Brooksby does not condone or  endorse the skipping of school 

public or otherwise in any degree as it reveals a lack of character and

leads to juvenile delinquency or the improper use of otherwise 

and misspelling and otherwise.

Kidnapped by Pirates

I post this from the floor of the Chicago Airport Southwest Airlines ticketing... what do you call this? Ticketing area?

I've never been to Chicago nor did I plan on visiting it tonight. That may strike you as a bit unusual. How often do you not mean to be sitting on a cold floor on the other side of the country only to find yourself twelve hours later doing just that?

-Unless you've been kidnapped, you might not expect it. But I guess I've been kidnapped today by Southwest. How jovial.

On with the post.

Here's what I wrote joyfully today on the plane to Denver, before all the trouble happened. It is now 3:04AM and I am still in Chicago. Rock on.

HOW I BECAME NOT A SCIENTIST

Why are Children expected to be scientists? Honestly, the ratio of scientists to not scientists in the real world is staggeringly disproportionate to the ratio in public schools. I'm not sure they're aware of this. As important as scientists are in our world, why was I expected to be one? More specifically why did I have to come back to the school on a Thursday night after already being there all day? And of course, What was I supposed to do my project on?

I don't know why Science fairs are such an established tradition. I suppose many a top scientist found his (or her. We do need to be politically correct afterall. This is my public school experience we're talking about.)

Anyway I'm sure many got their first taste of the fame and glory to be had in scientific inquiry from gatherings like these. The road to Nobel prizedom begins in elementary school.

Mine however did not.

I don't remember how this became my project, but I ended up with one of those stupid tri-fold poster boards, a rubber band, a chicken bone, and a penny.

The only marker in our whole house at the time was an old dried out whiteboard marker. It was brown. Scratched in what looked like disappearing ink at the top of my board was the word "acid".

We were supposed to come up with an experiment to test our hypothesis, which happened to be a big word for "what you think will happen." I think we spent three days learning what it meant. There was a test. I wouldn't be surprised if the entire science fair was really just a ploy to make sure we didn't go through life not knowing what a hypothesis was. How glad I am to know its definition now.

I decided a good experiment would be to soak each of the items minus the tri-fold in a cup of vinegar for a week. My hypothesis, scribbled in pencil because the marker didn't work anymore so I put it back in the junk drawer, was something like, the bone will be rubbery because that's what someone said would happen. The penny was supposed to corrode and the stupid rubber band was supposed to get brittle. That's pretty much what happened but a lot less of it than I'd expected.

I had each item sitting out on my table in front of the dumb tri-fold board . By the time things got going, the bone had dried out and wasn't really that bendy anymore.

I stood there feeling like an idiot while trembling grandparents and civic minded citizens came around to pretend interest in my presentation and tell me I should try the same thing with coke.

I was actually quite surprised and somewhat disturbed to discover how many adult members of my community had taken to this unusual activity apparently effected by some mania in decades past. All I could imagine were pre-TV age children running around splashing coke on things and then waiting in stunned silence to see what happened. I thanked them each for the advise, but began to wonder if I looked like the kind of kid that did this sort of thing for fun.

"You do realize I'm at school right now." I wanted to say. "You don't seem to understand. It's 7:30! I was here all day. And in exactly twelve hours I'll have to be here again. I have to because someone decided to make it against the law for me not to..."

At the end of the night they handed out ribbons.

I didn't get one.

My teacher did come around and snap a Polaroid of me. She handed me the photo and walked away. As I watched it develop I realized how stupid I looked standing in front of a presentation on how to break rubber bands over the course of a week.

Isn't science a glorious thing.