when I was in high school my AP english teacher told us we weren’t allowed to eat in class so I took that as a personal challenge to see what the most ridiculous thing I could eat in class without getting caught was so I started bringing soup to class and as soon as I’d crack the lid of my thermos the tiniest bit this football player that sat like 3 rows in front of me would going “I SMELL MEAT SOMEONE HAS SOUP” and no one ever believed him
The only valid response
My AP English teacher once stopped class for fifteen minutes to hunt a wasp, but if she’d banned food I would have understood, based on what happened in our class sophomore year.
(#also the football player in my class had a +2 to sleeping in class #so there’s that #am i truly fishing for someone to ask about the kool aid story #yes probably)
OK, I’ll bite. Please do tell, now I’m curious.
My sophomore year american lit teacher was two things: new to teaching and bad at thinking things through. We read The Scarlet Letter over the summer, had to turn it in 2 weeks before the semester started, and for some reason known only to herself and possibly god, she decided not only to make our seating assignment by the grade we got on it, but to actually say so to the class.
Naturally, from this moment forth, we hated her.
Under this seating assignment, which lasted all year due to block scheduling, I was grouped with the student council secretary, who had never done anything remotely sneaky in her entire life, and the aforementioned football player, who I had known since birth (his) and with whom I had spent most of august having an in-depth discussion of the summer reading (mine) due to disappointments about frankenstein the year before.
At the other end of the classroom was group B-, a pissed off cluster of orchestra students who were about to turn analyzing the american dream into a blood sport and take all of us with them. We’ll get back to them in a moment.
Somewhat importantly, the three of us sat where the teacher’s back was constantly to us. This would have been fine, except for the amount of adolescent resentment simmering in that classroom. Our first semester was short stories, and football season, which lead to Football Player suffering a torn rotator cuff. Somewhat by accident, we discovered that the teacher would not notice him sleeping off his painkillers if Student Council or I pinched his good arm when she finally turned around: He’d bolt upright and mutter something about it being symbolic of the american dream. It’s due to this that the class as a whole worked out that if he was still getting an A+ while on lots of codeine, and group B- had not seen significant increases in their grades, that there wasn’t any actual grading going on.
When our mid-semester project was announced to be an in-depth analysis of a specific character or theme for The Scarlet Letter, and that extra credit would be given for anyone who brought in an appropriately symbolic food, group B- decided to kill two birds with one stone.
They brought in cookies - snickerdoodles with shiny red sugar sprinkles - and explained how they were symbolic of something to do with Dimmesdale… then waited until we bit into them.
The sugar sprinkles were salt, dyed red with food coloring. The symbolism was about deception. They got extra credit, we yelled at them, the cookies were thrown out.
Enter the end of semester project, which was on the Great Gatsby, except people did an in depth creative analysis of a chapter, and my group got the one where Gatsby’s body is discovered, took one look at each other, and decided to go all out.
We met at Student Council Secretary’s house with half a plan, and spent a Saturday afternoon going bananas. We had a game board where each group would play a trivia game about the chapter using a car symbolic of the character they were playing as (several vintage hot wheels were donated to the cause: Football and I had very angry younger brothers, later.) We had an expressionist/Dadaist/give the football player scissors poster depicting the scene of Gatsby’s death, complete with “money growing on trees” because it was faster to chop up rectangles of green construction paper in the paper cutter than to put extra work into it. We had everything… except an appropriately symbolic food.
“We should make them toast to the american dream and the trivia game winner at the end,” said Student Council.
“With red koolaid,” said Football, who in addition to having slept through the first half of the semester has an unfortunate sense of humor, “To symbolize the characters’ gullibility as well as Gatsby’s blood.”
I’m not going to take credit or blame for what happened next, except to say that when you’ve known someone since birth, then been separated for the length of middle school due to districting, and then spent the last year and change rediscovering that you’re both fairly bright teenage idiots with no faith in authority while simultaneously making the worst puking noises you can manage when people mistakenly assume you’re dating, you fuel each other’s bad ideas until they become a california wildfire.
Student Council is relatively blameless, and in fact, tried to talk us out of it.
We waited. We presented. We played a trivia game and waxed rhapsodic about impressionism and did a lot of bullshitting about symbolism, and we passed out a stack of red solo cups half full of red koolaid, which NO ONE was to drink until the toast. Who won the race for the american dream? Doesn’t matter.
“A Toast!” declared Football, “To Achieving the American Dream!” and everyone drank but us.
There was an immediate storm of spitting and yelling from the class, who had drank the kool-aid responsibly, only to discover that it had been made with many, many cups of salt instead of sugar. Group B the second (formerly group B-) was particularly loud, but not louder than our teacher, who had drank her koolaid like a shot, and was gagging enthusiastically into the classroom trashcan. Student Council was ready to die of embarassment, but Football was nothing but thorough when he decided to piss people off.
“And that kool aid is symbolic of Jay Gatsby’s blood!” he shouted, as the bell rang and I shoved him out the door before the second hour honors american english class could commit a homicide.
A mark on your forehead identifies the god you must worship to stay alive, usually by joining its local church or temple. Your mark is unknown, meaning an old, forgotten god sponsored you. To survive, you must either find an old temple to worship at, or do the arduous task of building a new one
Nobody in your small coastal village has ever seen the Godmark that you were born with. It’s a dark russet sequence of criss-crossing lines, with a vertical arrowhead on the left and a circle on the right, just over where your brow meets your temple. Some of the traders who come down from the mountain say it looks like one of the scripts used in the hinterlands, but not a language that any of them recognize.
“If she’s got the temperament for it, she should try her luck inland,” they advise. “No point her starting a temple here if she’d find her people elsewhere, with a little searching.”
At first, your parents are reluctant to send you away. Though you’re well-behaved and diligent in your chores, you’re a sickly child with no God to worship. And besides, you’ve always been the dreamy type–inclined to lose track of time watching the path of rain droplets chasing down the window, or the fronds of an anemone as it sways in a rock pool.
Instead, they send you to the temple of the Storm to learn all you’ll need for your own God. You are happy there, for a time: making up beds and serving food to the castaways who pass through, keeping vigil at the lighthouse, burning incense and praying with the loyal widows and orphans of the drowned.
One such widow, an old, old lady, touches the mark on your forehead. “I recognise those letters. We wrote this way in the town where I grew up, way off past the mountains.”
Your heartbeat quickens. “What does it say!?”
She squints, eyes engulfed by wrinkles and hidden behind smudged glass. “A… Ar… Oh, I can’t remember how to speak it. I left before I learnt my letters properly. There was a war, you know. But I remember,” she says, mistily, “the most beautiful pink and white flowers used to grow, on the borders of the wheat fields…”
You try to ask more questions, but remembering the war distresses her, and so you speak of other things. When she’s drifted off to sleep, you get to your feet, go home and tell your parents: you are leaving in search of your God.
Tumblr already has a personalization algorithm it’s called my beloved mutuals who have great taste and only wish to psychologically damage me sometimes
life becomes so beautiful when you start cooking rice in liquids other than water
put that basmati rice in the cooker with coconut cream and chicken stock and an entire onion that you’ve diced and sauteed with garlic until transparent. and some salt and pepper. Trust me
“Uncle Benadryl’s one minute rice” one minute what? awake? left to live?
