Blazing Clouds of Mediocrity: This end.

I graduated.

Against all odds I graduated.

Normally you take general requirement classes in the BEGINNING years of school so that at the end you're free to focus on your major.

But I didn't know how all that worked when I started.

Advanced writing, Physical science, and Statistics: the bane of human existence. The only thing standing between me and a degree. I just got the grades back and by some miracle I passed them all with C's. I got an A on my interpretive essay with comments, which means I must have totally bombed that final paper.

Most people wouldn't be very happy with that.

I'm ecstatic.

The enthusiasm meter was at an all time low as this semester started. I'd planned on finishing these classes in the Fall to make room for a capstone film project this semester, but the car accident, doctor's appointments, and recovery usurped the classes, and sianara to los capstone. This was the unfinished business semester. The last burning hoop to jump through for my bachelor's degree.As the semester progressed I struggled to find time for my classes in the slew of writing, photography, and film work I was planning. I'd started this new thing on my net book...The Nag List. A text document subdivided into categories like school, work, freelance, photography, writing, makeup, film and so on. I used to write lists on the backs of envelopes and the margins of notebooks to remember stuff when it got to be too much.

This was the same thing but in digital form with more categories to help me remember projects that slid to the back burner and beyond. I was excited. I'd never lose a great idea again. Whenever I had one, I'd jot it down for future development. The list grew. So did my confidence. But my grades didn't. I couldn't find time in the day for all my homework. Each unit test would bring lower scores. My ship was sinking. I was going to fail.

Faced with this strong probability, I halted everything else I was doing.

The nag list was all still there, but my focus fell on only the top two categories, School crap, and Urgent School Crap(the one marked in red). I stopped going to work, stopped writing. The mountain of photos I'd taken last Christmas would have to wait. I stopped everything to focus brain, body and mind all day every day on minutia. Nothing else existed for me.

...Loved it.

I remember the feeling I had walking out of the testing center following my Science and Stats finals. I was sure with both of them that I'd ride out with a high F. I'd already flunked Stats last winter so I found no comfort in knowing some of the answers. The bulk of it was incomprehensible to me.

I walked out to the scan-tron machine feeling like a firing squad victim. It'd be nice if I they missed, but hitting their target is what they do and these tests weren't designed to help anybody. The kid at the machine took my test and slid it into the machine.

He said, “Thanks.”

I moved to the monitor displaying scores with a ten second refresh rate and random placement in the line up to protect your privacy. 

“Cmon sixty!” I plead to myself. 

I'd done the What-if calculator thing they provide online and felt that if I could just get a solid 60 or maybe even a 59, I could ride the curve and pass the class.

 I scanned for my student number I neglect to list here for fear of privacy violation. 

There it was.

 0505. 

And just to the right of it-

My jaw dropped.

I checked the student number again.

Seventy WHAT! 

I'm naturally bad with numbers, but after a three hour bout with that garbage I'd be hard pressed to spell kat correktley. I turned around and went back just to make sure I'd read it right.

Oh five oh five. Seven and another number! (note: bad with numbers. I don't remember nor does it matter with scores in the low end of mediocrity) I'd done it! I'd more than done it! I did that both days!

Most people would feel pretty jipped about that, but I was happy.

It was finally over.

The last couple of days have been sort of blurry as I regain my equilibrium and catch up with stuff at work. I've felt broken. I haven't been able to write or draw or do anything. My desire was just kinda dead. I worried that school killed me. But today I felt it again. I still feel rusty as I type this, but my light's coming back.

I deleted the School category from my nag list.

Now I can start looking at what I left behind. Turn a few burners back on. I feel my life coming back.

I've got to get back up.

Good things are coming.

-Stay tuned

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.

Hot Lunch

didn't matter what they were serving... always smelled the same.

Once upon a time in Idaho

Here's a little diddy from when I went to school in Idaho. I was a 3D Studio Arts major hoping to one day go to film school. I loved making stuff and this project for my children's literature class was an opportunity to put my skills to work at a time when I felt like I didn't make anything ever. Now I've been in film school for a couple years and I make even less. So here's something I watch now wishing I was still that creative. Hopefully things will change soon.

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.

The long Awaited Answer to Your Love Questions

Dear Freaky in Florida,

I know exactly what you're going through. This kind of thing happens all the time to people your age. But because you're young the rules are a little different.

First of all James- were you the one that asked to be anonymous? Well, its okay, nobody'll know your last name is Badia-Suarez anyway. Why the hyphenation though? You aren't married yet. We're going to fix that. First off can I say you're very lucky to write in when you did. If you hadn't you would have missed the opportunity of a life-time.

Let's start with puberty. The girl in your story judging by her height is well into the throes of womanhood. You however are what, 4 feet or so? The day will come when that changes for you. You must avoid the most common "kick-yourself-later" problem ever, the problem of ruining a good relationship before puberty because you thought you weren't interested.

All guys have a beautiful woman they've lost because they didn't do anything when they had the chance. She flirted, he ran away. Now post-puberty, that means after, she won't have anything to do with him because he branded himself a coward before things first started rolling. Now the poor guy's stuck with whatever ugly undesirable girls are left over.

My advice: Get while the gettin's good.

The best way to prove yourself to this girl is to do exactly what you don't think you should do. So I'd say, wright her a song and perform it in public. Make sure lots of people are around, that way she'll know you mean it. Instruments are optional although they do pump up your romanticness by about a thousand points so if you can't find a guitar or a clarinet, at least bring a pair of spoons or something. As for lyrics and tune be original. Don't just do that song from The Little Mermaid, I Want More, or whatever it is. Every other guy does that.

For best results use this as a template, or just copy it exactly since its worked on thousands of girls:

and bring a bouquet of flowers: poppies, carnations, ferns, anything works.

So there you go James. You might think its weird right now, but believe me, in a couple more years unless you're a really late bloomer, you'll be thanking me. And maybe that hyphenated name will get another hyphen.